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-----Original Message-----
From: Biotech-Mod2
Sent: 24 March 2007 09:15
To: biotech-room2@mailserv.fao.org
Subject: 47: Re: What are biotechnologies and how will they solve water scarcity

After the World Water Day, once again, I would like to bring my contribution to Sarbeswara Sahoo's second question in Message 46 "How can biotechnology be made popular among the farmers in developing countries where they are still guided by traditional customs and norms?": Among our traditional communities, we have leaders or local authorities (as regulator) who can intervene for the due course, sometimes NGOs can play a key role in technology transfer. Coming to our topic, the UN Millennium Development Goals aim at reducing by half the number of persons that do not have access to safe water nor to basic sanitation. Beside, the technologies we can address to solve water scarcity in developing country can be built up from a sustainable management model which encompasses all the stakeholders, basically the partnership between public and private sectors that would be both efficient and economically viable, but also socially acceptable.

Norbert Tchouaffé
Agricultural engineer
Technology and sustainable development specialist
Plant stress member
Ministry of Environment and Nature Protection (MINEP)
Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MINADER)
Cameroonian association of rural development (ACADER)
Box. 876 Yaounde,
Cameroon
Phone:(237)563-09-22
ntchoua (at) yahoo.fr

-----Original Message-----
From: Biotech-Mod2
Sent: 24 March 2007 09:23
To: biotech-room2@mailserv.fao.org
Subject: 48: Re: Marker assisted selection for yield under water stress

This is Professor R. Chandra Babu, with experience in phenotyping crop plants for drought tolerance traits including field level screening in target ecosystem and in QTL mapping of drought tolerance in rice.

Phenotyping is key in evaluating lines developed through any techniques, conventional/biotechnology approaches, for drought tolerance. Large scale field based phenotyping under target ecosystem for drought stress is critical in transfering these lines to farmers' fields. Published literature in this area seems very scanty.

R. Chandra Babu
Tamil Nadu Agricultural University
Coimbatore,
India
chandrarc2000 (at) yahoo.com