North-east Brazil covers 1.5 million sq.km. and is home to 44 million people. It is the poorest region in Brazil, characterised by social and environmental problems associated with drought, inappropriate land use, and unsustainable exploitation of natural resources. Yet the north-east is one of Brazil's major centres of biodiversity, with an estimated 20,000 plant species about which little is known.. There is considerable expertise within the region, undocumented knowledge as well as some published information about plants and their uses. Information, on an estimated 3,000 plant species or more, is held across a large number of institutions in the region. New results are being generated by the 100 or so relevant research projects being undertaken at any one time. However, lack of co-ordination, and limited access to publications, results in poor exchange of information between researchers and considerable duplication of effort. The access of NGOs and extension agencies to reliable plant information is even more limited.

An estimated 40% of the region's plant taxonomic information is overseas, in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and other European institutes. Several million reference names and bibliographic data records are held at Kew, in addition to at least 7 electronic datasets on economic use of plants and biodiversity. A major objective of this project is to repatriate this information.

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in popular knowledge and use of native plants for agricultural extension and medicinal purposes, particularly amongst NGOs, extension agencies and popular movements. For example, 'living pharmacies' have spread in poor urban neighbourhoods of cities such as Fortaleza, providing some 10,000 people with free medicinal plants. However, this kind of plant knowledge and use needs to be combined with scientific information, if it is to make a real contribution to environmental and socio-economic improvement.

Plantas do Nordeste (PNE) is a collaborative programme established in 1991/2 involving Brazilian researchers and the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, which seeks to promote "native plants for local people" in the semi-arid north-eastern region of Brazil. It is an interdisciplinary programme which, through applied research, is generating new information about the native plant resources of the region and their use.

From the start, PNE has been committed to disseminating research results to a wide variety of direct plant users and intermediary agencies, in the hope that the information would promote more sustainable use of natural resources and improve the livelihoods of poor people in the region. Each research project has an extension, information, and dissemination component. Plans for an integrated Information Dissemination and Training Subprogramme that would incorproate these components into a wider programme were laid in 1991, and discussions with DFID for funding this subprogramme have been in process since then. To date, information and dissemination activities have been funded from Kew core funds, and the Weston and Reuters Foundations.

To foster sustainable use of plant resources by local people in north-east Brazil.

To establish a sustainable, demand-led information, dissemination and training programme (SIDT) related to plant use, linking researchers, intermediaries and end-users.

• Plant information gathered, co-ordinated, managed and exchanged.
• Plant information disseminated to researchers, intermediaries and users.
• User needs analysed, monitored and fed back into project.
• Human resource skills developed in plant resources management.
• PNE strengthened and SIDT operating sustainably.