CTA - Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation

The Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) was a joint international institution of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group of States and the European Union (EU). CTA's mission was to advance food and nutritional security, increase prosperity and encourage sound natural resource management in ACP countries.

CTA sought to be the partner of choice for those working to empower agricultural and rural communities in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific with the knowledge and skills they need to fight poverty and hunger.

CTA resources are now curated and maintained by CABI. CABI (Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International) is an international not-for-profit organization that improves people’s lives worldwide by providing information and applying scientific expertise to solve problems in agriculture and the environment.

2021 - Although CTA as an institute will cease to exist, the Centre has made every effort to ensure that its rich portfolio of valuable intellectual assets remain global public goods and continue to be available publicly to those that can benefit from them. As part of the orderly closure process, the Centre’s management instituted a process to take stock of its intellectual legacy assets and plan for their responsible transfer, retention or disposal, in close consultation with EU and ACP stakeholders. This included a comprehensive plan for handling these assets, which was approved by the EU and CTA’s Executive Board.

Partnerships have been the cornerstone of CTA from its very beginning and were a central feature of discussions about the future of the Centre’s intellectual legacy assets. Following the official announcement of CTA’s closure, several key developmental partners across ACP expressed an interest in continuing some of CTA’s most interesting work. These included regional institutes such as the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), OACPS Secretariat and the Centre for Coordination of Agricultural Research and Development for Southern Africa (CCARDESA); EU-based organisations such as Wageningen University & Research (WUR); global research and knowledge institutes like CGIAR, the Global Center on Adaptation (Rotterdam) and CABI; NGOs such as the Grameen Foundation and WaterWatch Foundation; and UN organisations such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development regional office for the Pacific.