VII. NATURA PILOT SITES OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CENTERS WITHIN THE EIARD MEMBER STATES

1. Natural Resources Institute (NRInternational), Instituto de Investigacao Cientifica Tropical (IITC), Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Developpement (CIRAD), University of Hohenheim, University of Wagenigen, University of Florence

The EIRAD pilot sites have been chosen from six European countries in order to test and evaluate the questionnaires on institutional and research project profiles. All pilot sites responded to the inquiry. However, since several institutes of the pilot sites administer different departments, intensive research in the World Wide Web or requests by e-mail, phone or fax were necessary. In the end information about 52 departments was obtained from the EIARD pilot sites (Tab.1)

The main focus of the institutes is on the breeding and production of tropical and subtropical crops (e.g. rice, sorghum, maize, oil palm, coffee, coconut etc) or fruits (Fig. 19). But not only the enhancement of the crop and fruit productivity is mentioned by the responding institutes. Another major aspect that is emphasized is the economic aspect, e.g. agricultural marketing, small-scale production, sociological and ethnological aspects, resource economics, farming systems and rural financial markets. Research areas and activities not covered by the listed keywords fall into such fields as information technology, chemical analysis, geology and management of databases.

These areas are important tools or cross-cutting themes, respectively, for research projects and developmental activities in cooperation with developing countries.

Table 1: Pilot sites and the responding associated institutes

Fig.19: Clustering of research and development institutes according to their research orientation

Not all institutes listed partner organisations, cooperating NGOs or local partners. However, in the projects carried out by the different institutes, agreements of cooperation partners from developing countries were listed. As a representative example, the different partners (NARS, NGOs, industry, universities, etc) of the associated institutes of the University Hohenheim are listed in the following table (table 2).

Table 2: Partner organisations (international centres, national agricultural research systems, industry partners from industrialized and development countries, European R&D institutions and NGOs ) of institutes of the University Hohenheim as an example from one of the EIARD pilot points

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