identified as key actors in national research systems (Castells, 1993; Clark 1995; Edquist, 1997; Mowery and Sampat, 2004), but their contribution to agricultural research, real or potential, often has been neglected in cost-benefit analyses. Yet they have been and remain the major educators of agricultural scientists, professionals and technicians, a voice of reason (and sometimes partiality) in controversial debates about bioethics, transgenic seeds, IPR, food quality and safety issues, etc., and a source of factual information (Atchoarena and Gasperini, 2002). Robust indicators do not exist for the comparative assessment of the efficiency and effectiveness of universities in generating knowledge, science and technologies for sustainability and development. For example, in a survey of Argentine agricultural scientists (1996 to 1998), the number of journal publications was a proxy measure (Oesterheld et al., 2002), despite known limitations (Biggs, 1990; Gómez and Bordons, 1996; Garfield, 1998; Amin and Mabe, 2000; Bordons and Gómez, 2002). Output was found to be highly variable and on average, low but higher than in other institutions such as the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA), and the National Council for Science and Technology (CONICET) (Oesterheld et al., 2002).

     Higher-level agricultural education institutions can be subdivided into (1) agricultural colleges embedded in a comprehensive university, (2) land grant universities, patterned after the US land grant universities, and (3) tertiary level agrotechnological institutes that are not part of a university and depend on a ministry of education or of agriculture. They all have similar constraints to achieving the diversity of their roles and purposes (Table 2-4).

(1) Agricultural schools or college/faculties model embedded in a comprehensive university. This model is shaped after the German Humboldt tradition and has teaching, research and extension as central functions. It has diffused to other European countries as well as to other parts of the world, mainly the Americas.

     Until recently in many countries research universities were autonomous, with public funds provided as block grants by the Treasury to the Ministry of Education, which transferred them to the central university governing body; the agricultural colleges then had to compete against other interests. In Latin American countries, research budgets are often less that 0.5% of the total university budget (Gentili, 2001) and little of this has reached the agricultural departments, colleges and schools. However, in the last decades research has been financed by the use of competitive funds open to all public research institutions and in some cases to private universities. International donors, philanthropic foundations and increasingly also commercial enterprises also contribute to financing (Echeverría et al., 1996; Kampen, 1997; Gill and Carney, 1999). Their main asset is research and their internal system of reward and promotion is designed to protect standards in this core activity. The pressure to "publish or perish" favors acceptance of actors and types of AKST that is produced in conditions that support such performance and thus tends to increase the gap between developed and developing countries' national academic and research systems. It also further marginalizes scientists and academics in the latter countries where funds

for research, in particular for basic research, are scarce. The incentive system legitimated the dominant position of universities in colonial and later in OECD countries as the centers of basic and strategic research in a hierarchy of AKST providers. Students as well as trained agricultural scientists and professionals continue to leave employment in tropical countries wherever national governments have failed to invest in "catch up" institutional development at tertiary levels.

     In the United States policies were important in assisting the commercialization of research products and services. The US Bayh-Dole Act passed in 1980 gave universities and corporations the right to patent federally funded research and was buttressed by the Federal Technology Transfer Act of 1986 (Kennedy, 2001; Bok, 2003). These acts succeeded in their primary purpose but widened existing gaps with most developing countries. Incentive systems designed for the commercialization by universities of private good research appear to perform less well in promoting public goods research and its application in agriculture and food industries (Byerlee and Alex, 1998; Berdahl, 2000; Bok, 2003; Washburn, 2005).

     The most immediate challenges tertiary institutions face is how to respond to the often divergent interests of private and public actors, consumers and citizens as AKST systems become more demand-driven and hence also develop or strengthen their capacity to become engaged in problem solving in specific settings, and continue to provide generic potential for sustainable development.

(2) Land-grant colleges and state universities. These have been patterned after the land-grant model originating in the 19th century in the United States. Key components are the agricultural experiment station program (Hatch Act 1887) (Kerr, 1987; Mayberry, 1991; Christy and Williamson, 1992; BOA, 1995), and the link via extension programs to farmer advisory, leadership development and training activities in the community. The grant of land to finance research and education ensured in the original conception a high degree of accountability to the application of science to local, practical problem solving and entrepreneurship. These distinctive features tended to attenuate over time or progressively decline as the model spread to and then merged into different contexts. After World War II, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) played leading roles in the establishment of state agricultural universities in India modeled on the US land-grant universities. State agricultural universities of Pakistan and the Philippines also adopted the model as their guide. In sub-Saharan Africa, the research and extension missions of the land-grant model generally introduced under Ministries of Higher Education came into conflict with research and extension departments in ministries of agriculture. By the 1980s most of the land-grant universities in SSA had become comprehensive universities emphasizing training. Nevertheless, the model proved powerful; landgrant universities in the USA throughout the 20th century have been central to North America's farm modernization, dominance in commodity trade and preeminence in global food industries (Ferleger and Lazonick, 1994; Slaybaugh, 1996; Fitzgerald, 2003). The land-grant construct explicitly