SARD in Mountain Regions: a four year project document to be submitted to donors and other partners in late April 2004

The Project Team for Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development in Mountain Regions (SARD-M) will officially submit a multi-donor four-year Project Document on SARD-M to interested governments and other potential partners in a Meeting which will be organized in Rome at the end of April 2004.

This Project Document is a result of a participatory agreement on the objective, orientation and modus operandi of the project, reached among the various partners that participated in the First Meeting of the Adelboden Group (Rome, 11-12 September 2003, see October 2003 Update on this meeting) and further contributed to the intensive preparatory work.

In this proposal, the SARD-M Project is featured as a catalyst and as a framework of synergies of projects, initiatives and activities relating, at regional, national and decentralised levels, to the design and application of policies inspired by SARD for mountains and highland-lowland integration. Its objectives aim to: 1) raise awareness on the need of SARD policies for mountain regions and highland-lowland integration, 2) build the capacities to design those policies, and 3) support their concrete implementation.

At the same time, in the aftermath of the information event on SARD-M held on 2 December during the FAO Conference (see December 2003 Update on this event), the Project Team, in close collaboration with the Swiss Federal Office for Agriculture (FOAG), organized numerous bilateral meetings with governments and other concerned key stakeholders, further expanding the emerging SARD-M network.

In addition, it recently created the SARD-M electronic mailing list, with currently 173 recipients. If you wish to subscribe to this list, you can either send your e-mail address to sard-m@fao.org or you can sign-up directly by sending an e-mail to mailserv@mailserv.fao.org with the subject line blank and the following text in the first line of the message: subscribe SARD-M-L xxx.xxx@yyy.zzz (your address).

For further inquiries on the objectives/modus operandi of the project and the Adelboden Group, you can read the new 6-page brochure on the SARD-M Project available online in English, French and Spanish.

For more information/details on the SARD-M Project, please contact: sard-m@fao.org