Background
Agricultural universities worldwide are facing numerous challenges
including increasingly limited resource allocations, declining
enrollments, keeping up with advances in information and other
technologies, remaining aware of and responsive to stakeholders,
and the need to aggressively globalize their teaching, research
and outreach programs. Although the scale of the problems
and the local conditions vary across and among regions, there are
remarkable similarities in the fundamental nature of these challenges.
The realization that these are shared challenges, combined with
a political and economic climate that lends itself to the lowering
of national barriers, presents an environment conducive to global
networking and cooperation among universities. However, when GCHERA
was born, existing international organizations did not (and do
not) have the mandate to bring together agricultural universities
on a global scale to share lessons learned.
GCHERA grew out of an international conference held in 1998 in
Kiev, which marked the 100 th anniversary of the National Agricultural
University of Ukraine and the completion of a four-year university
linkage project involving many institutions around the world and
financed by the United States Information Service. The consortium
was formed as a result of shared concern for the future of the
planet and a conviction that higher education in agriculture should
play a leadership role in solving problems associated with food
security and environmental sustainability. The consortium
aims to include and serve institutions with programs in agriculture,
veterinary medicine, and natural resources management, including
the biological, physical and social sciences dimensions of these
fields. The founders designed the organization to be helpful to
institutions world wide that are working to make significant reforms
in their systems of higher agricultural education.
The consortium is governed by a regionally balanced Executive
Committee and led by a President. Global meetings of the
consortium are held every two years, the first having been held
in Amsterdam in 1999. Currently the consortium has approximately
400 members from more than 100 countries.
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