GFAR fully endorses the World Bank/European Union (WB/EU) concept note focusing on increasing and sustaining the productivity of African agriculture. There is consensus that African National Agricultural Research Systems (NARS) are in dire need of increased and stable funding support. Unfortunately even as African NARS are being urged to undergo major institutional and policy adjustments to more effectively and efficiently address the daunting challenges of fighting poverty, hunger and food insecurity, their budgets continue to be drastically slashed.

The creation of the new Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) represents an important step in the implementation of a shared Vision for African Agricultural Research. This vision evolved through a series of consultations among national agricultural research leaders, officials of sub-regional organizations, members of the Special Program for African Agricultural Research (SPAAR), international agricultural research partners, interested donors and research stakeholders.

The Sub-Saharan Africa Challenge Programme Workshop was indeed a ¿workshop¿. It was
characterised by intense roundtable debates and energetic breakout group discussions that were
well informed by briefings on the new paradigm for integrated natural resource management and its
key programmatic and institutional components.
The discussions were frank and did not avoid controversies. This demonstrated very clearly that the
SSA CP is proposing a new and different way of conducting agricultural research for Africa¿s

The two main objectives for the meeting were:
¿ To design a clear, transparent, practical and harmonised management system of competitive grants in the SROs, based on existing mechanisms at national, regional and/or global levels. In particular:

Prior to the plenary, the participants visited the Upper Awash Agricultural Enterprise in the Rift Valley, and attended a series of seminars covering important issues such as:
¿ Science and Technology for African Agriculture in the 21st Century which focused on impact assessment and sustainable financing of agricultural research and development
¿ Tackling the Challenges of HIV/AIDS
¿ Climate Change and Its Implication for Africa

The first joint SPAAR/FARA Plenary was held from April 12-14, 2000 in Conakry, at the invitation of the Government of the Republic of Guinea. The Plenary took place at the end of the African Agricultural Week, which drew a little over one hundred participants representing the various components of the SPAAR Coalition.

This paper, therefore, is a summary reaction of the FARA to the CDMT document. It builds on an earlier paper submitted to the CGIAR Chair, entitled, CGIAR and IARC Governance, Organisation and Structure: An African Perspective, FARA, October 2000. (Annex 1). The views, in this document were first developed at the FARA Executive Committee meeting held in Nairobi on 17-18 March 2001

Since the early 1990s, there has been an increasing concern on the impact of agricultural research systems in sustainably increasing agricultural productivity and production and thus contributing to economic growth and poverty eradication. Nowhere has this concern been more pronounced than in sub-Saharan Africa.