To promote social and economic development, technological innovation and extension are essential.
In developing countries, they are particularly important in agricultural sectors as most of those countries are
mainly dependent on agriculture. Japan is expected to make contributions in this area, taking its technological
advantage, so that the developing countries themselves will have suffi cient capacity and proper ownership in
promoting research and extension activities.
The Millennium Development Goals (2000) announced the will of international society to halve
the population in hunger and poverty by 2015. The actual situations in developing countries endorse the
increasing importance of technical cooperation in agricultural development. In working for this area, it is
necessary to monitor continuously whether the supports have made effective contribution to the issues and
problems in the recipient countries.
To promote Japan’s international cooperation, those who are engaged in the agricultural research are
expected to make further contributions by:
? conducting domestic research activities that may provide benefi ts to the developing countries;
? participating in research projects in developing countries to establish/strengthen their research
systems and to achieve the specifi c research goals; and,
? participating in projects and other cooperation schemes in developing countries of more applied and/
or practical natures to address the various problems on sites.
These efforts should be made on a demand-driven basis instead of supply-driven, with proper
consideration of the development stages and needed levels of technologies. Also, the attentions should be
paid to the emerging “programme-approaches”, in which synergy effects are expected from linkages between
various development tools and schemes. For example, the possibility of collaboration should be pursued
among mutually-related projects and/or international organizations on agricultural research.
This speech will review Japan’s research-related cooperation in the past and present with some specifi c
cases, and examine:
? how researchers have been involved in development efforts;
? what organizational linkages have functioned well;
? how researchers’ experiences have been accumulated in terms of development activities; and,
? what are the characters and abilities of researchers expected from development society.
Also, the speech will introduce the recent efforts and future directions of JICA’s cooperation, as well as
the expectations for the researchers in this regard.