Dear Dr. Jones and Dr. Holderness,
I take this opportunity to thank you and your Chairman and the colleagues for giving me an opportunity to attend the GCARD meeting held in Montpellier in March 2010. I also wish to take this opportunity to compliment all of you for organising this meeting so effectively by involving different stakeholders. This is probably the best meetings of CGIAR I have ever attended because of the diversity and opportunity for everyone to contribute.
I also feel that restructuring of the programme of CGIAR under the leadership of GFAR provides an excellent opportunity for the Civil Society Organisations to associate with the programme who can play significant role in effectively transferring technologies from research institutions to small farmers.
I am happy to inform you that BAIF is a reputed CSO, working in India since 42 years for promoting sustainable development of natural resources while providing livelihood to over 3 million small farmers. BAIF is currently associated with ICRISAT and ILRI and we hope we will have opportunities to work with other international research institutions as well in the years to come.
I take this opportunity to invite you to visit us at your earliest convenience.
With best regards,
DR. N.G. HEGDE
Trustee and Principal Adviser
BAIF Development Research Foundation
Website: http://www.baif.org.in
The GFAiR Blog 
Please note that the ‘Humidtropics’ World Cafe (MP1.2 Integrated systems for the humid tropics) was held from 9-10 August in Accra. Participants were selected from the tropical Americas, Asia and Africa and represented a wide range of stakeholders. They focused on 20 key questions related to the strategic objectives helping to define the needs to be addressed and the possible research for development activities and outputs that have highest potential in ding so. The input from the participants is thus an essential and integral part of the proposal. The draft proposal will be subjected to a global e-consultation from 16-24 August 2010 and the draft with full information on how to participate will be posted on the 16th August at http://www.humidtropics.org We look forward to your participation in the e-consultation which will take shape of an online questionnaire with open-ended and closed review questions that would take less than 10 minutes to complete.