the free flow of information, with a greater exclusion of research results from the public domain given their increased market value.

The private sector plays an active role in developing biotechnologies. Its interest grew with the advent of deregulation, economic liberalization, regional economic integration processes, and the growing recognition of intellectual property rights related to genetic material and other agricultural inputs (Piñeiro and Trigo, 1983; Trigo and Kaimowitz, 1994). This will have major implications for the region stemming from the wide dissemination of new biotechnologies, increased use of intellectual protection mechanisms, and support to regional industries, and will affect the interactions between the different public research institutions.

With regard to strategic research initiatives, according to Trigo and Kaimowitz (1994), efforts that do not have short-term commercial application require direct participation by the public sector. At present, according to Castro et al. (2005), strategic research only represents about 10% of public research in the six countries analyzed.

2.2.4 Priority research processes

Castro et al. (2005) point to the high historical importance of research on factors that affect production efficiency and, at the same time, the low importance assigned to research approaches more focused on scientific topics and social and environmental aspects. This shows that agricultural research finds itself at a crossroads, where the well-trodden paths towards the search for efficiency in production that have sustained research in the last fifty years have been exhausted but new paths are not yet known and research organizations do not have sufficient capacity to pursue

To identify the technology demands of users and define their research priorities accordingly, the national institutes have taken several steps, among the most outstanding ones decentralizing and regionalizing their activities. To this end, they have taken advantage of their experimental stations located in different areas of each country, which tend to specialize in specific commodities according to local characteristics. (Piñeiro et al., 2003)

It has also been pointed out (Castro et al., 2005) that the selection of priority lines of research requires:

• A strategic institutional planning mechanism to help develop a prospective approach to long-term needs that can provide a framework and nourish discussion by the scientists themselves regarding the relative importance and likelihood of success of various lines of research;
• Institutional mechanisms to facilitate effective linkages with technology users and ensure that these users can exert the necessary social oversight over decisions regarding priorities and resource allocation; and
• A financial structure to align research initiatives with the needs that have been identified. However, national AKST system institutes are implementing these types of mechanisms to varying degrees and at different paces (Castro et al., 2005).

2.2.5 Monitoring and assessment of institutional performance regarding AKST

The follow-up and assessment of institutional performance has not been sufficiently attended to by most AKST institutions in LAC. In general, assessment occurs as an isolated action that is seldom used to improve organizational performance due, among other reasons, to a lack of the in-