Conference 16 of the FAO Biotechnology Forum takes place from 8 June to 8 July 2009 and is entitled "Learning from the past:
Successes and failures with agricultural biotechnologies in developing countries over the last 20 years". The conference is being held to complement
a series of sector-specific technical documents that are being prepared for the FAO international technical conference
on Agricultural Biotechnologies in Developing Countries, which takes place in
Guadalajara, Mexico.
Biotechnology represents a broad collection of tools that can be used for a variety of purposes, such as the genetic improvement of plant varieties
and animal populations to increase their yields or the genetic characterisation and conservation of genetic resources for food and agriculture. Some
of them have already been used for many years in a wide range of developing countries. For example, a survey carried out by FAO nearly 20 years ago on
the use of artificial insemination indicated that over 16 million cattle were inseminated in developing countries in 1990/1991.
The aim of the e-mail conference is to analyse past experiences of applying different agricultural biotechnologies in developing countries, to
document and discuss what has succeeded or failed, partially or fully, and to determine and evaluate the key factors that were responsible for their relative success or failure.
The conference will cover the different food and agricultural sectors (crops, forestry, livestock, fisheries/aquaculture and agro-industry) as well
as the wide range of biotechnologies normally covered in conferences of this FAO Biotechnology Forum i.e. including some biotechnologies that may be
applied to all of the sectors, such as the use of genomics, molecular DNA markers or genetic modification, and some others that are more
sector-specific, such as micropropagation (in crops and forest trees), embryo transfer (livestock), or sex-reversal (fish).
As usual, the conference is open to everyone, is free and will be moderated.
To join the Forum (and also register for the conference), send an e-mail to mailserv@mailserv.fao.org leaving the subject blank and entering the following text on two lines:
subscribe BIOTECH-L
subscribe biotech-room4
People who are already Forum members should leave out the first line of the above message, to register for the conference. For more information, contact biotech-mod4@fao.org.
The Background Document for the conference has now been published (in
both HTML and PDF). Its aim
is to provide some brief background to the subject as well as to mention the issues to be considered in the conference. As usual it is planned that
a document will be prepared after the e-mail conference is finished summarising the main issues that were discussed.
