For almost twenty years higher education institutions in Australia have been assisting international agricultural development by training agricultural scientists from Third World countries, particularly at the post-graduate level, in Australia, and by helping to strengthen Asian universities to develop further their own Faculties of Agriculture and Veterinary Science. With the support of the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee (AVCC) initiated the Australian-Asian Universities' Co-operation Scheme in 1969 specifically to assist universities in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore to strengthen their training and research activities in two key areas of development: food production and population studies. During the period 1969 to 1978 the Scheme

developed into a pattern unique in global terms and potent to this day. First, the program aimed above all at staff development and revolved around the proposition that no institution could contribute effectively to economic, social or technological change with a staff that was inappropriately prepared for the task. Second, the theme of co-operation was emphasised, with program priorities being determined by overseas governments and universities, and with program activities conceived and implemented in terms of academic collaboration, usually designed to continue well beyond the years of formal support. Third, despite the fact that the program could not exist without aid funds and despite the location of it within the official Australian aid effort (and the accountability that this implied), the program continued to be planned, implemented and monitored within the academic community and with academic concerns to the fore. In this way, the program retained a freshness, a person-to-person quality that programs executed through government-to-government channels could rarely hope to maintain. Fourth, Australian participants - individuals and their home institutions - volunteered their services, and the voluntary nature of the program enhanced, rather than detracted from, its professionalism. Last and highly significant was the view that individual components of the program needed to be conceived and implemented in the medium and long term (e.g. 5 to 15 years). Staff development in the institutional context of faculty or departmental up-grading implied a long-term perspective, which the Scheme was quick to realise. This required a program that did not seek quick, readily identifiable results and refrained from rapidly switching from one activity to the next.[88]

The success of the Scheme led the AVCC, with the continuing encouragement and support of the Australian Government, to expand the program from 1978 onwards. Gradually more institutions, disciplines and countries were included and, increasingly, Australia's colleges of advanced education contributed to its activities. These developments eventually led to the reorganization of the Scheme, first (1981) as the Australian Universities' International Development Program and then (1984) as the International Development Program of Australian Universities and Colleges Ltd. (IDP). By 1987 IDP supported over thirty institutions of higher education in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Brunei, Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific, and the biological, physical and social sciences related to agriculture still featured prominently in its program.

Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering