The FAO Biotechnology Forum 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. It has hosted 16 moderated e-mail conferences so far.

The latest one, Conference 16, ran from 8 June to 8 July 2009 and was entitled Learning from the past: Successes and failures with agricultural biotechnologies in developing countries over the last 20 years. Its aim was to analyse past experiences of applying different agricultural biotechnologies in the crop, forestry, livestock, fisheries/aquaculture and agro-industry sectors in developing countries. During the conference, 121 messages were posted by 83 people living in 36 different countries, the greatest number coming from India, Nigeria, Argentina, United States and Cameroon. A total of 90 messages (i.e. 74%) were posted by participants living in developing countries. All the Messages posted are available on the web. The conference was held to complement a series of technical documents being prepared for the FAO international technical conference on Agricultural Biotechnologies in Developing Countries which takes place in Guadalajara, Mexico.

The previous e-mail conference was devoted to the role of agricultural biotechnologies for production of bioenergy in developing countries, with a major focus on liquid biofuels. The conference took place from 10 November to 14 December 2008 and was organised in collaboration with the FAO Working Group on Bioenergy. The conference covered biotechnology applications for first-generation and second-generation biofuels and, to a lesser degree, for biogas production and for biodiesel production from microalgae. A Background Document was finalised before the conference began. During the 5-week conference, a total of 88 messages were posted, coming from 52 different people in 21 different countries. A total of 60% of messages were from people living in developing countres. See the Archives of the conference to read the messages.

The 14 previous e-mail conferences, that took place from 2000 to 2007, dealt with issues such as the appropriateness of agricultural biotechnologies; their impact on hunger and food security; gene flow (GMOs), intellectual property rights; their role in the agricultural research agenda; regulation of GMOs; their role in food processing; their role in the characterisation and conservation of genetic resources for food and agriculture; the potential of marker-assisted selection; public participation in decision-making regarding GMOs; and, most recently, their role for coping with water scarcity in developing countries.

Forum Publications:

1. The book on its first six e-mail conferences, entitled Agricultural biotechnology for developing countries: Results of an electronic forum was published in 2002 and is also available in Spanish and Chinese.

2. The book on conferences 7 to 12, entitled Results from the FAO Biotechnology Forum: Background and dialogue on selected issues was published in 2007 and is currently being translated into French.

3. In 2006, the book entitled The role of biotechnology in exploring and protecting agricultural genetic resources was published, containing the background and summary documents from the 13th e-mail conference plus papers from an international workshop held as part of build up to the conference.

4. In January 2009, the book on Coping with water scarcity: What role for biotechnologies? was published, presenting the background and summary documents from conference 14.

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.