eignty comes the responsibility of conserving those unique and irreplaceable natural resources, not only for the welfare and agricultural development of the country but also for humanity as a whole, which must rely on them to feed future generations.
     At the national level, this responsibility implies every government’s duty to invest in its national agricultural research institutions so they have the basic resources needed to compile, maintain, characterize, and utilize their genetic resources, both native and imported, to meet the needs of their people and confront the problems of national, regional, and global agriculture. At the regional and international level, it would be advisable for all countries to become affiliated with the multilateral system for accessing and sharing the benefits associated with vegetable resources through FAO’s 2004 International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.

2.4.3 Soils
AKST system advances regarding soils have gone through several historical and mutually interrelated stages in LAC that have made it possible to advance and systematize knowledge about edapho-biodiversity. Before the 1960s, regional research focused on aspects of taxonomy, fertility, and valuation for cadastral purposes. Then there was a
turn toward fertility, management, and conservation studies. During the 1980s, experts introduced research at the watershed level for land use management purposes, with the subsequent development of Landscape Ecology Theory (LET), leading to ecological-economic zoning. In the 1990s, research regarding plant nutrition moved toward the impact of applying fertilizers and pesticides to the soil, their effects on microbial biomass, and their dynamics. At present a great deal of work is being carried out in soil biology based on molecular techniques and working with DNA and RNA to inventory mezzo-organisms and microorganisms Another field of activity relates to ethnotaxonomies and traditional soil-management techniques, an outstanding example being the case of the Pacha Mama, or Mother Earth, ritual in the Andes.

2.4.4 The social variable
From the 1950s until the end of the 1970s, AKST systems directed their efforts at boosting agricultural productivity in response to the need to produce more food at a lower cost. This was accomplished through the development of technology packages that, due to their characteristics, achieved their best results in large landholdings but provided few benefits to poor farmers with lower levels of organization, or to Afro-American and indigenous communities (Piñeiro and Trigo, 1983).
     The need to respond effectively to local demands, mainly from farmers who benefited the least from the technology transfer models that characterized the agricultural modernization phase described in the previous section, led to the first attempts to regionalize AKST (Piñeiro and Florentino, 1977; Trigo et al., 1982). This reflects a changing perception of the role and effects of technology on the economic organization of society (Valdés et al., 1979; Gilbert et al., 1980; Norman, 1980; Trigo et al., 1981).
     Later, in the 1980s and especially from the nineties

onward, the social changes that occurred as a result of urban growth required the agricultural sector to develop new technologies associated with more advanced linkages of the production chain such as postharvest handling and storage, improving the quality of the final product and the strengthening the industrialization of agricultural producers. To respond to these new demands, AKST system institutes began to rethink their objectives. However, according to Lindarte (1997), NARIs and extension services have not achieved significant results in this respect, possibly due to constraints in the development model, the interests that govern institutional structures, or a lack of conceptual clarity regarding the direction and implementation of the necessary changes.
     Lindarte (1997) also emphasizes the importance of incorporating different stakeholders involved in the process of technology generation. This is evident in the growing involvement of private sector representatives and those from producers’ organizations, foundations, and NGOs in national research institutes, and also in the development of technology transfer programs such as Cambio Rural, implemented by INTA in Argentina, and other experiences carried out by EMBRAPA in Brazil and INIA in Chile (Cetrángolo, 1992). The limitations of this new approach are mostly due to the lack of new and appropriate forms of social and cultural integration (Lindarte, 1997).

2.4.5 Policies
The performance of AKST systems, the focus of research and, in particular, the incorporation of innovations, are conditioned by the general public policy context, and are not only limited to specific aspects of AKST. In most LAC countries, the relatively high contribution of agriculture to GNP and employment generation in the second half of the 20th century pushed production, rural development, and food self-sufficiency policies toward the top of the agendas of governments, cooperation programs and international development agencies. From the 1950s to the 1980s, these agendas contemplated a broad range of rural development policies and programs with active participation by governments in financing production and the physical infrastructure needed to support both production and marketing. Governments also implemented policies on land-use and irrigation, intervened in commodity and input markets, introduced measures to protect agricultural trade (through the application of tariffs and other quantitative limits on imports), and implemented initiatives to support research and development.
     During that period, public policies emphasized the generation and transfer of technology, strengthening the human and financial resources of specialized public institutions and paving the way for the creation of NARIs. In some countries, particularly the larger ones, the activities undertaken by these institutions and the favorable policy context played a significant role in boosting productivity and agricultural production in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. However, they
did not have a similar affect on reducing rural poverty, nor did they pay much attention to the conservation of natural resources and the environment.
     Ample evidence suggests that the sustained and sustainable
growth of agricultural production and, in consequence,