Dear Forum Members,
The Electronic Forum on Biotechnology in Food and Agriculture hosts a series of e-mail conferences. The second conference, Conference 2, will deal with forestry and the theme is 'how appropriate are currently available biotechnologies for the forestry sector in developing countries'. We plan to send out the Background Document for this conference to Forum members and to place it on the Forum website ( http://www.fao.org/biotech/forum.asp ) on 20th April. We will begin the 2-month long conference on Tuesday 25th April.
The theme of Conference 1 is 'how appropriate are currently available biotechnologies in the crop sector for food production and agriculture in developing countries'. The conference began on 20 March and will run until 19 May. Discussion has been both lively and interesting. So far, almost 70 messages have been posted, representing an average of 5 per working day, from 31 participants in 21 different countries. Messages are restricted to a maximum of 600 words. Messages that have been posted can be viewed in the archives on the Forum website: http://www.fao.org/biotech/logs/c1logs.htm
In the Background Document for Conference 1, it was indicated that three major kinds of recently-developed biotechnologies could potentially be used for the crop sector in developing countries: a) biotechnologies based on molecular markers, b) genetically modified crops, c) micropropagation. Much of the discussion in the conference so far has focused on genetically modified crops and their appropriateness (or lack thereof) due to
i) their environmental impact
ii) their impact on human health
iii) the status with respect to intellectual property rights and to
potential dependence on multinational companies
iv) the status with respect to biosafety regulations and controls
v) the level of capacity-building or resources required to use them
vi) their impact on food security and national food production
In the remaining duration of the conference (just over 5 weeks) it would be good to put more of an emphasis on the other major kinds of biotechnologies mentioned above, i.e. micropropagation and biotechnologies based on molecular markers, and on the other elements mentioned in Section 4 of the Background Document.
You, as a Forum member, are NOT automatically subscribed to the conferences. Instead, you should subscribe yourself to any conference you are interested in joining. If you wish to join Conference 1, but have not yet done so, you can 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
For people with more than one e-mail address or that change e-mail addresses frequently, note that you should be registered for the Forum and for any conference with the same e-mail address.
We hope the Forum and its conferences will be of benefit to you, and look forward to your participation.
The Forum Administrator