Wageningen was the venue for a meeting of the representatives of a consortium of research institutions and universities seeking to establish an open access platform for the utilization of the new life sciences for the 22 basic crops on which the CGIAR works. The consortium comprises a large number of CGIAR centers, spearheaded by IRRI, CIMMYT, and IPGRI, and includes the NAAS (China), EMBRAPA (Brazil), and CIRAD (France) Cornell (US), John Innes (UK), Wageningen (The Netherlands), and NIAS (Japan).
The meeting agreed on a detailed first year work program and a sketched out fiver year program of research that involves bio-informatics, gene banks, gene constructs and tool development, all aimed at assisting in the improvement of germplasm for the basic crops of the poor. The group reaffirmed the importance on focusing on drought tolerance as the first case study of the new joint effort.
The program was launched at a meeting earlier this year, held in January 2003 at the Library of Alexandria, where Serageldin was elected chair of the group's Program Steering Committee.