in national agricultural systems in CWANA. To achieve strong and reliable links among all agricultural stakeholders, the different AKST institutions must be strengthened. The following options are proposed to strengthen these institutions in the CWANA region.

Option 1: Develop institutional capacity. Throughout the priority-setting process that ICARDA provided in the CWANA region in 2003 (Belaid et al., 2003), it became clear that these institutions were not well equipped in resources, organization and representation to adequately address the priority needs of the region. It is therefore essential to strengthen these institutions to enable them to fully play their role in implementing, disseminating and diffusing information that can be used in practice. The acute lack of capacity in other key disciplines such as social sciences, combined with the shift in research focus towards relatively “new” issues such as alleviating poverty and managing natural resources requires capacity development to meet this gap of AKST to adequately implement the subregional research agenda.

Option 2: Develop agricultural extension. Agricultural extension is needed in the CWANA region to educate professional agriculturists (including farmers) who may further enlarge or refine this body of knowledge.

Option 3: Improving agricultural education. Agricultural universities and institutes need to adopt and reorient curricula for new requirements with special training programs in extension development and education and new technologies. Education and training should embrace new scientific achievements and innovations. A full comprehensive training cycle, integrated with science, can ensure that production systems adopt the outputs. New methods of delivering services and new schemes of organization of training that result from the revolutionary changes in information and telecommunication areas (distance and correspondence learning) will be able to cover all levels of rural society. Using a complex approach in education as a unified system should take into account the inputs at all levels in the education hierarchy, including higher (universities and institutes) and secondary vocational education (colleges and academic
lyceums) that contribute to development of agricultural education and human capacity as well as humanitarian and social capacity, and their role in renovating, reorganizing and reorienting agricultural production systems. Technical renovation of laboratory and experimental equipment, facilities and materials could be achieved by creating conditions suitable for research and experiments in the classroom and in the field. This could be achieved through providing specialized machinery, equipment and tools necessary for experimental activities. Private investment and funding affect the focus of the education; research and extension result in new subjects and specializations being added to the curriculum. Therefore, integrating such subjects as “international trade” and “agricultural products marketing” means finding staff with the necessary qualifications, knowledge and skills to teach these subjects or retraining staff to do so.

Higher education institutions must have their own production farms to give the students and farmers practical training and research sites for researchers. Creating this