the following factors could have contributed (Morrison et al.,2004):
•   Loss in donor confidence in agriculture;
•   Perceived high transaction costs and complexities in ag­ricultural investments;
•   Changes in definitions in aid statistics;
•   Weaker demand for assistance to agriculture from many developing country governments;
•   Changes in development policy and approaches to more market led approaches
•   Shifting emphasis towards the education and health sec­tors;
•   Changes in aid modalities, such as the movement away from the green revolution technologies of the 1960s to 1980s and the integrated rural development projects of the 1980s and 1990s, to the current sector wide ap­proaches and support to poverty reduction strategies (Eicher, 2003).

However, science and the use of new ideas have been ac­knowledged by many as being important in delivering the MDGs and there has been renewed interest by the donor community on the role of agriculture in promoting eco­nomic growth and poverty reduction. In addition, a number of new funding sources such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have become available.
        A number of developing countries, especially in SSA, have become increasingly dependent on donor funding. Al­though the share of donor contributions in total funding for SSA agricultural R&D has declined slightly in the later half of the 1990s (Figure 8-6). These declines resulted in part from the termination of a large number of World Bank projects in support of agricultural R&D or the agricultural sector at large. Donor contributions (including World Bank

loans) accounted for an average of 35% of fundingto princi­pal agricultural research agencies in 2000. Five years earlier, close to half the funding of the 20 countries for which time series data were available was derived from donor contribu­tions. These regional averages mask great variation among countries. In 2000, donor funding accounted for more than half of the agricultural R&D funding in seven of the 23 sample countries. Eritrea, in particular, was highly depen­dent on donor contributions. In contrast, donor funding was virtually insignificant in Botswana, Malawi, Mauritius, and Sudan (under 5%) (Beintema and Stads, 2006).
         Since the International Conference on Financing for De­velopment convened in Monterrey 2002, the share of aid to least developed countries in donor gross national income (GNI) has increased to 0.08%, and longer term commit­ments to reach 0.7% have been made by donors but it is still short of the target, and the level of the external assistance to agriculture has remained unchanged (FAO, 2005a). How­ever the situation continues to change.
         To improve upon past efforts to achieve food security, the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) has developed the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Devel­opment Programme (CAADP). In line with CAADP's goal of improving agricultural productivity with an average of 6 percent per year, is the recommendation to double the re­gion's intensity in agricultural research by 2015 (IAC, 2004). Doubling Africa's agricultural research intensity ratio from 0.7% in 2000 to about 1.5% by 2015 would require an av­erage annual growth rate in agricultural R&D spending of 10% (Beintema and Stads, 2006). This goal seems unlikely considering that growth in Africa's R&D spending averaged 1% per year during the 1990s as reported earlier. There is no evidence that governments and donor organizations have substantially increased their funding to agricultural research