The relative importance of private agricultural R&D in total agricultural R&D varies, however, between countries. For example, the private sector performed over 60% of all ag­ricultural research in the UK and more than 50% in the US and the Netherlands by the late 1990s (Alston et al., 1998) (Figure 4-5, Table 4-4).
     It has been suggested that the application-orientation of the private sector to some extent fills the gap between technology generation and extension that existed in the pub­lic research model. However, there is concern that the shift towards a higher proportion of privately funded agricultural R&D moves the focus too much away from public goods, equity and distributional issues (BANR, 2002). As the pri­vate sector can retain few financial returns in the short term from innovations that improve environmental benefits and food safety, the public sector remains the primary source for new technologies with these characteristics (Rubenstein and Heisey, 2005). In recent years, as environmental, food qual­ity and income pressures in agriculture increased, the private sector has started to take a more long-term view and fund R&D into more sustainable farming practices (Morris and Winter, 1999; Walker, 2001; Voluntary Initiative, 2007).

Shifts in R&D agendas
Public research and private sector research inevitably tend to focus on different areas of R&D. For example, approxi­mately 12% of private R&D focused on farm-level tech­nologies compared to around 80% of public R&D in 1993 (Alston et al., 1998). Chemical research accounted for more than 40% of private agricultural research in the US and the UK and for nearly three quarters of privately funded ag­ricultural research in Germany, while 58% of the private research in the Netherlands focused on food products. Par­ticular areas of private agricultural R&D tend to be concen­trated in particular countries. For example, Japan, the US and France account for 33, 27 and 8%, respectively, of all food processing research carried out by the private sector in OECD countries. Chemical research related to agriculture is even more concentrated with the US, Japan and Germany representing 41, 20 and 10% of all reported private-sector research (Alston et al., 1998). Data available for the US and the UK show a dramatic shift in private sector expen­ditures from farm machinery and post-harvest processing in the 1960s to agricultural chemicals, plant breeding, veteri­nary and pharmaceutical research by the end of the 1990s (USDA, 1995; Thirtle et al., 1997).
     Since the Second World War, the scope of agricultural R&D in NAE broadened considerably and increasingly in­cluded issues relating to post-harvest, food chain, nutrition, rural development, environment and sustainability (Huff­man and Evenson, 1993; OECD, 1999). Funding initiatives to increase integration of social and life sciences and eco­nomics have increased in NAE in recent years. Examples include the 6th framework program of the European Com­mission10 and the Rural Economy and Land Use Programme (RELU)11 in the UK. On the other hand, it has been sug­gested that AKST has made only a limited contribution to national policy making, that this has often been primarily by

10 http://ec.europa.eu/research/fp6/pdf/fp6-in-brief_en.pdf.

economic research and that contributions to public debate have been sporadic (OECD, 1999).

Funding and scope of extension
There has also been an increasing involvement of the pri­vate sector in agricultural extension (Umali and Schwartz, 1994). The last decade has seen increased demands on the expertise of agricultural advisors, particularly in respect to agri-environmental issues. Yet at the same time public funding for extension services has been reduced throughout much of NAE, which has weakened the links between sci­ence and application (Ingram and Morris, 2007; Lambert et al., 2007). Public extension systems have been substan­tially downsized or phased out altogether in some European countries (Read et al., 1988; OSI, 2006). In North America and Western Europe, technical support to farmers is now to a large extent provided by agricultural specialists who work for private sector firms, especially input supply com­panies. Some Eastern European countries, such as Poland and Hungary, still have large public agricultural extension systems.
     The focus of public sector extension services in parts of NAE has gradually changed from an agricultural pro­duction-centered advisory regime to an environmental re­gime (Winter et al., 2000). There has also been a switch of funding that support farmers' activities to control farming business and to address issues of negative externalities. The emphasis on control is to a large part a result of concerns about issues such as consumers' freedom of choice and crises like BSE, foot and mouth disease as well as avian influenza. Advisors remain an essential component of the agricultural knowledge system despite increased use of other mecha­nisms that increase farmers' learning, such as demonstration farms, farmer-farmer interaction and group learning. Farm visits by advisors still are the most effective of all methods of communication and the most valued by farmers (Ingram and Morris, 2007). In fact, advisors have become more im­portant as farming, markets and regulations become ever more complex. Their role is further amplified by farmers' increasing reluctance to share knowledge with their peers in order to retain a competitive advantage. However, the role played by different types of agricultural advisors in the tran­sition to more sustainable farming systems is still only partly understood (Ingram and Morris, 2007). Extension services seem also to face problems serving the increasing numbers of part-time farmers (Suvedi et al., 2000).

Recent developments
Governments of the OECD countries have in the 1990s been prepared to fund all or most higher education costs, depending on their general policy on tuition fees (OECD, 1999). However declining student numbers have increased the pressure to reduce public funding. They are prepared to fund also "basic" and "pre-competitive" sectoral research but economic sectors are increasingly encouraged to fund sector  specific research.  Responsibility for extension/de­velopment work has been increasingly shifted towards the clients. A number of countries have a strong commitment to fund public-good type extension, while most extension workers are nowadays involved in monitoring and imple-