The FAO Electronic Forum on Biotechnology in Food and Agriculture was established in March 2000 with the aim of providing quality balanced information on agricultural biotechnology in developing countries and to make a neutral platform available for people to exchange views and experiences on this subject.

The book on its first six e-mail conferences, entitled Agricultural Biotechnology for Developing Countries: Results of an Electronic Forum, by J. Ruane and M. Zimmermann, was published in 2002. It is also available in Spanish and Chinese. The book on conferences 7 to 12, entitled Results from the FAO Biotechnology Forum: Background and dialogue on selected issues, by J. Ruane and A. Sonnino, was published in January 2007.

The most recent conference (number 14) of the Forum ran from 5 March to 1 April 2007 and dealt with the subject of water. Its title was "Coping with water scarcity in developing countries: What role for agricultural biotechnologies?". During the conference, 78 messages, 75% coming from developing countries, were posted from people living in 24 different countries. Read the Summary.

Thirteen moderated e-mail conferences had been hosted by the Forum before that. The first six e-mail conferences, held in 2000-2001, lasted on average 9 weeks. Conferences held from 2002 onwards have been shorter, lasting 4-5 weeks, and 350-650 people have subscribed to each one. In the 14 conferences held so far, over 1200 e-mails have been posted, coming roughly 50:50 from people living in developed and developing countries.

The previous conference, Conference 13, ran from 6 June to 3 July 2005 and was entitled "The role of biotechnology for the characterisation and conservation of crop, forest, animal and fishery genetic resources in developing countries". About 650 people subscribed and 127 messages were posted, from people in 38 different countries. See the FAO book entitled "The role of biotechnology in exploring and protecting agricultural genetic resources", edited by J. Ruane and A. Sonnino, containing the background and summary documents from the e-mail conference plus papers from an international workshop held as part of build up to the conference.

Before that, Conference 12 ran from 17 January to 13 February 2005 and was entitled Public participation in decision-making regarding GMOs in developing countries: How to effectively involve rural people. Over 500 people subscribed and 116 messages were posted, from people living in 35 different countries.

Objectives of the Forum:

To provide an open forum that will allow a wide range of parties, including governmental and non-governmental organisations, policy makers and the general public, to discuss and exchange views and experiences about specific issues concerning biotechnology in food and agriculture for developing countries. This is done through a series of moderated e-mail conferences, each running for a limited time period only, on specific topics, for which background (before the conferences) and summary documents (after) are produced.

Farmers and specialist breeders have developed and used many biotechnologies to improve plants and animals within agriculture, or to make food and agricultural products. Now, improvements in molecular science and in reproductive biology and a radical new understanding of genetics have resulted in the development of a range of new cutting-edge techniques. These allow us to directly modify genetic material, better study the extent/pattern of genetic variation, and they may greatly speed up progress. They may also help us to tackle so far intractable problems. The Forum will focus on such techniques.

Biotechnology is a collection of tools that can be applied to many areas of food and agriculture (including animals, crops, fish and forest trees). This collection comprises scientific tools that are very diverse and sometimes highly controversial. They may pose ethical problems and require substantial debate among policy makers, researchers and the public at large. Particularly in some areas of biotechnology, the debate has become quite polarised and there is therefore an increasing need for quality, unbiased, factual information. It is in this spirit that the Forum was established in March 2000.

Awards/Reviews of the Forum website

1) Selection by The Internet Scout Project for inclusion in the Scout Report (May 26, 2000), a weekly current awareness publication that highlights new and newly discovered Internet resources of interest to researchers and educators. See http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/report/sr/2000/scout-000526.html.

2) Chosen as a "Hot Pick" in the Netwatch section of the journal Science (28 July 2000). See http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/289/5479/503b

3) Chosen by New Scientist as the "Site of the Day" on 29 December 2000.