Dear Forum Members,
As you know, the Forum hosts a series of e-mail conferences. You, as a Forum member, will NOT be automatically subscribed to them. Instead, you should subscribe yourself to any conference you are interested in joining.
We plan to provide periodic updates from each conference while they are ongoing. These may be used to highlight and summarise what has been discussed and, maybe more importantly, what has not been discussed. Normally, a conference update will only be sent to the individuals that have subscribed to that particular conference. However, as the Forum began only recently (9 March), this first brief update from Conference 1 ('how appropriate are currently available biotechnologies in the crop sector for food production and agriculture in developing countries') is being posted to all Forum Members to give those who have not subscribed to the Conference some information about it, in case they might wish to subscribe to it.
Conference 1 was officially launched on Monday 20 March and it is planned to continue it to 19 May 2000. The first e-mail messages were received and posted on Thursday 23 March. We have carried out a brief analysis of the messages posted from Thursday 23 to Wednesday 29 (inclusive). A total of 28 messages were posted, representing roughly 6 per working day. Messages came from Colombia (1), France (2), Israel (1), Kenya (4), Phillippines (5), Senegal (1), Turkey (1), Uganda (2), UK (2) and USA (9).
Some of the themes that have been discussed to date in the conference include
- the difficulty of developing appropriate biotechnologies when the capacity
and resource levels of national agricultural research systems are low
- the potential advantages (e.g. reduced pesticide use) and disadvantages
(e.g. development of Bt resistance) of genetically-modified crops
- reminders that new biotechnologies include a vaste range of tools (apart
from genetic modification of crops)
- the role of multinational biotechnology companies in developing countries
- micropropagation as an appropriate biotechnology
For further information, have a look at the archives. Archives of messages can be received by e-mail if you have subscribed to the Conference (e.g. to get those posted so far in March, send an e-mail message to mailserv@mailserv.fao.org with the one-line message send listlog/biotech-room1.mar2000). Alternatively, they can be viewed on the Forum website at http://www.fao.org/biotech/logs/c1logs.htm .
Unfortunately, we were unable to include a couple of messages we received for posting to this conference. This was because they were too long (messages should not exceed 600 words, please do not send attachments) or because we did not feel that the message was directly relevant to the theme of the conference.
For people wishing to submit messages to this conference, we would ask them to carefully read the Background Document, especially Section 4 which outlines certain elements that should be included for discussion in the Conference.
Forum members who wish to join the conference but have not yet done so, may subscribe by sending an e-mail message to mailserv@mailserv.fao.org leaving the subject blank and entering the one-line text message as follows: -
subscribe biotech-room1
We hope the Forum and its conferences will be of benefit to you
The Forum Administrator