One thing that is clear to most analysts is that food production will have to come
from agricultural systems located in countries where the additional people will live in.
In these countries, farmers are not only resource poor with no access to credit,
technical assistance or markets, but their farming systems are complex and diversified
with mixes of annual crops, trees and livestock. Many of them (about 370 million rural
poor) are located in arid or semi-arid zones or in steep hill-slope areas that are

The general objective of the INTERDEV project can be defined as follows: to design and to test
a co-operative information service on Natural (environmental) Resources Management.
By doing so, it is assumed that new technologies for communication and information provide
technical possibilities to mix local information to global knowledge. Such a mix is not only a
matter of ¿technical tools¿ (softwares, interfaces, etc..), but also (and even more), a matter of
management (rules between members, share of responsibilities, common acceptance of norms,

The objective of AE/NRM R&D programs should be, in the first instance, to identify, encourage
and diffuse concrete innovations by farmers in managing natural resources.