The socio-economic surveys on the importance of landraces were completed in Palestinian Authority and Syria, and are still continuing in Jordan and Lebanon. More than 150 farms were individually surveyed in each participating country. Rapid rural appraisals were conducted in each community in the project sites to gather local knowledge on germplasm, and on community management of shared resources. A thematic group meeting is scheduled at Amman 3-4 October 2000, to standardize the databases for joint analysis at the regional level.
        Training of project staff and farmer workshops were important activities of the project during the first year. Two regional courses on water/soil management and eco-geographic/botanical surveys were conducted at ICARDA, and were each attended by project staff from Jordan, Syria, the Palestinian Authority, and Lebanon. The other courses provided

by the Regional Component (ICARDA) are reported in Table 2.
        Other courses are offered by the National Project Components (1 in Jordan, 2 in Lebanon, 3 in Syria, and 5 in the Palestinian Authority). Table 3 summarizes the training and farmer workshops organized by different project components.