(Friday, 29 October 1999)

1. INRM follow-up

With the sponsorship of Switzerland and the Netherlands, a brief lunchtime meeting was held on Friday 29^th October to agree on follow-up to the CDC presentation at ICW’99 of the Bilderberg consensus on INRM research in IARCs. The meeting was chaired by Paul Egger, SDC and its Agenda is annexed. The following were some key outcomes:

• It was emphasised that INRM should not be seen as existing independently from commodity-based productivity-enhancing research. Instead, it should be "mainstreamed" throughout the CGIAR research agenda.
• It was therefore agreed that it was not desirable to create any formal structure or co-ordinating mechanism for INRM research within the CGIAR but rather to use the Web to facilitate sharing of information and better communications between INRM scientists. The latter would be encouraged to form informal self-organising groups to pursue specific INRM issues.
• The need to emphasise INRM approaches within the CGIAR derives in part from the fact that the emerging multi-national corporate sector plant breeders will not normally be concerned with the NR context in which the CGIAR’s clients (small-scale, resource poor farmers) operate. The CGIAR can help the benefits of biotechnology (broadly defined) to accrue to the poor by situating biotechnology in an INRM context.
• It was noted that the work supported by the Ecoregional Fund for Methodological Development would be yielding valuable results in the near future and that this should be a valuable resource for any further discussions of INRM matters in the CGIAR.
• The CDC should ensure that INRM considerations form an integral part of the forthcoming CG Consultative Council discussions on the CGIAR vision and restructuring.
• The meeting reaffirmed the view that the ecoregion is a highly appropriate scale for INRM research. The ecoregion has also proved to be an appropriate framework for developing institutional links with NARS partners.
• The CDC, through its Task Force on INRM (under the chairmanship of Jeff Sayer) should lead the CGIAR’s INRM process forward and ensure buy-in from all the Centers. The Task Force should:

• Promote electronic discussion on a series of key INRM topics, and encourage individual CGIAR scientists to take the lead in moderating/leading such discussions.
• Revamp, update and maintain the INRM web-site, developed by CIFOR to provide for web-based dialogues and exchange of information amongst CGIAR INRM scientists. Centres will be encouraged to post information on significant INRM research on the web-site and thus establish an inventory of what is going on within the CG system.
• Publish the Bilderberg report as a brochure, possibly attaching to it a bibliography of the documents that have been posted on the web-site and a summary of the web-based inventory.
• Provide inputs on INRM to the CGIAR Consultative Council discussions on CGIAR vision and restructuring.
• Organise a scientific meeting in year 2000 on INRM in the CGIAR. It was agreed to accept the offer from ICLARM to host the meeting in Penang, Malaysia, from 21-25 August 2000.

• The scientific meeting will be primarily for a small core group of CGIAR INRM specialists, preferably not more than one per Centre. However a limited number of specialists from selected NARS and ARIS will also be invited. The objective will be to:

• Exchange experiences on methodologies for INRM research.
• Strengthen conceptual frameworks for INRM research and develop performance and impact indicators. Examine issues relating to scaling up and generalisation of INRM findings. (It was recognised that individual CG centres may wish to work on INRM performance indicators in their own areas of specialisation).

• In preparation for the scientific meeting papers will be solicited on:

• Case studies of high impact INRM research in the CGIAR
• Methodological studies
• Reviews of issues of scaling-up.

• Papers will be circulated for review well in advance of the meeting and subject to such review and the discussions at the meeting they will be published either as a multi-authored book or as a special issue of a scientific journal.

2. IAEG report on the CGIAR and the environment

The meeting felt that the IAEG’s environmental impact report portrayed INRM research as dealing with externalities and as constituting an agenda independent of and subsidiary to the CGIAR productivity research agenda. It was agreed that it would be useful for the CDC task force to provide a response to the IAEG. Anne-Marie Izac (ICRAF) was requested to lead a group consisting of Eric Smaling, Joachim Voss and Richard Thomas to draft such a response. This draft would then be shared with Centre Directors before being communicated to IAEG and TAC.

1. Web site development
2. Inventory of significant INRM work in IARCs
3. Publication of Bilderberg report
4. Scientific meeting
   1. Objectives
   2. Papers
   3. Publications
   4. Participation
   5. Editing
   6. Location
5. Performance indicators
6. Other matters

List of participants