to discourage use of environmentally harmful inputs and promotion of agricultural practices with low carbon emis­sions, watershed and landscape eco-management and car­bon sequestration through agroforestry.

26. Develop policy instruments to remove incentives for farm concentration and agribusiness concentra­tion. These include anti-trust measures, improved competi­tion policies, more stringent corporate social reporting and greater transparency in corporate transactions.

27. Implement more fully and further develop those treaties and conventions that promote development and sustainability goals. These include such areas as cli­mate change, biodiversity conservation, genetic resource conservation, toxics control, desertification, sanitary/phyto-sanitary, intellectual property and biopiracy.

28. Further consider and develop regimes that define rights of use and of property. The development of "com­mon property regimes" for scarce natural resources such as water that go beyond either public or private ownership could be further considered. Significant public policy discussions of the implications and nature of these proprietary regimes for the future are needed to explore the full implications.

29. Reshape intellectual property rights and associ­ated regulatory frameworks where necessary to facili­tate the generation, dissemination, access and use of AKST and recognize the need to improve equitability among regions in use of intellectual property rights. To achieve a better balance between public and private inter­ests and between rewards for innovation and accessibility, consideration could be given to patents that would be nar­rower, cross-licensing that would result in pooling of patents between universities and the private sector, compulsory or obligatory licensing when deemed necessary, broadening of exemptions of patents to facilitate research and open source technology that leads to collaborative invention.

30. Devise modes of governance at the local level that integrate a wider range of stakeholders' perspectives.
Examples such as food policy councils in the US and water management groups that implement the European Water Framework Directive (France, UK, Ireland) already exist to a limited extent in NAE and should be promoted.

AKST Options for Funding

31.  Multifunctionality calls for new, increased and more diverse funding and delivery mechanisms for agricultural research and development (R&D) and hu­man capital development. Depending on circumstances, these could include:
•     Public investment to serve the public good, addressing strategic, "nonmarket" issues that do not attract pri­vate funding, such as food security and safety, climate change and sustainability;
•     Public investment to strengthen human capital devel­opment and education programs, including multidisci-plinary research;

•     Private investments made by farming businesses and farmer associations as an important and growing source of new AKST;
•     Adequate incentives and rewards to encourage private in­vestors to invest in new R&D, including supporting com­mercial services such as market information and credit;
•     Public-private partnerships to provide technical assis­tance and joint funding of R&D investments, especially where risks are high and where research developments in the private sector can significantly enhance the public good;and
•     Nongovernmental organizations to act as an alternate channel for public and private funding of technical as­sistance, knowledge transfer and applied research at the local scale. Further support will be needed to facilitate this.

32. Establish effective procedures for funding rural and agricultural development by national and interna­tional agencies. This recognizes the strategic role of the agricultural and rural sectors in meeting develop­ment and sustainability goals within the NAE regions and globally, allocating funds and managing invest­ment programs for these purposes.

6.1 Paradigm Shift and Key Issues for AKST to Meet Development and Sustainability Goals

6.1.1 Why recognize a paradigm for research and action?
Advances in agricultural knowledge, science and technol­ogy (AKST) have been critical in making it possible to meet many of the needs for food and fiber in North America, Europe and other parts of the world. Agriculture is now be­ing required to be responsive to new priorities, expectations and changing circumstances. Many of these are stated in de­velopment and sustainability goals, namely: reduce hunger and poverty, improve rural livelihoods and health, increase incomes and facilitate equitable, environmentally, socially and economically sustainable development. Meeting these multiple objectives is made more complicated by a variety of foreseeable and unforeseeable changes. These challenges necessitate emphasis on a new way of considering research, technology  development,  education  and  knowledge  ex­change. The new way of thinking requires that those work­ing in the fields affecting AKST:
•     Recognize the importance of the multiple functions of agriculture not only in providing food and fiber but also in providing a range of environmental goods and ser­vices associated with land, water and living systems.
•     Engage the participation of all people concerned in the process of defining needs and solutions.
•     Be specific to local environmental, social and economic context.
•     Be adaptive to social and environmental change, includ­ing climate change.

     Although the "farming systems approach" and other research strategies in recent decades extended the bound­aries of consideration for AKST, research and develop­ment has remained largely focused on the farm economy