The Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR) is a multi-stakeholder initiative that contributes to eradicating poverty, achieving food security, and conserving and managing natural resources. It enhances national capacities to generate, adapt and transfer knowledge. The seven GFAR stakeholders are: National Agricultural Research Systems (NARS), international agricultural research centres of the CGIAR, advanced research institutes, farmers' organisations, NGOs, private sector, and donors and development agencies.

The Second Triennial GFAR Conference took place in Dakar, Senegal from the 22nd to 24th of May, 2003, with the theme of Linking Research and Rural Innovation to Sustainable Development. The conference was attended by nearly 400 participants from all regions of the world and all GFAR stakeholder groups. It was held in conjunction with the Second Plenary of the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) - one of the regional fora of GFAR - thereby giving participants the opportunity to attend both sessions. It is particularly appropriate that this conference was held in Africa especially in view of the development of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) initiative and the need for attention to this region as highlighted at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, 2002.

The two overall goals of the GFAR 2003 Conference were:

• to review achievements and take stock of lessons learned since the last GFAR conference held in 2000 in Dresden, Germany in order to provide consultative input for the next business plan of GFAR
; and
• to identify new and emerging global issues, risks and opportunities of relevance to agricultural research for development for future consideration and further development
.

These objectives were achieved using a variety of approaches and tools: heterogeneous working group sessions, sub-plenary sessions on global and inter-regional partnership programmes, and stakeholder consultations. The working group sessions and the stakeholder consultations allowed participants the opportunity to discuss and identify new priority issues they would like to see incorporated into the next GFAR Business Plan, 2003-2006. Whereas the sub-plenary sessions were designed to strengthen existing alliances and build new innovative partnerships based common interests of stakeholders within the shifting paradigm of agricultural research for development.

In response to demands from all stakeholders, particular attention was given to facilitate the full and effective participation of the less-vocal stakeholder groups - farmers' organizations and NGOs. Consequently, a civil society organization workshop was held just prior to the main GFAR conference in order to allow them additional time to formulate distinct vision statements, structure better mechanisms for representation in decision-making bodies, as well as prioritize ARD issues of crucial importance for the new GFAR business plan.

Another unique feature of the GFAR 2003 Conference was the competitive poster session, whereby 30 poster proposals demonstrating successful partnerships among at least three stakeholder groups of GFAR were developed into posters for display during the conference. Two of these, deemed to be exemplary illustrations of partnership, were presented in a plenary session as case studies, followed by a discussion on the elements necessary for a successful partnership. The remaining 28 posters were judged by a panel of representatives from each stakeholder group and the top three were presented with a plaque.

For more information on GFAR activities, visit its website at: http://www.egfar.org/home.shtml or contact Lani Trenouth from at the GFAR Secretariat gfar-secretariat@fao.org