Future work

The Panel was appointed from January 2000 for a period of four years, coming to an end in December 2003. While the Panel has been able during its two meetings to address a certain number of pressing ethical issues related to food and agriculture, many others remain for further consideration. It might be advisable to extend its work for another period to address major issues that still require ethical reflection. These could include:

• ethical perspectives on poverty reduction, with a focus on targeted intensification of agriculture for poverty reduction in the rural areas of developing countries;
• advances in biotechnologies, including transgenic technologies, with a focus on sharing the benefits and minimizing the risks, including further examination of legal regulations in this field with a view to formulating recommendations in this regard;
• ethical issues involved in the balance of public and private agricultural research, and questions of responsibility for funding adequate public research, appropriate to the needs of developing countries in particular;
• making modern biotechnologies useful for small and presently marginal landholders;
• the impact of biotechnologies on biodiversity;
• intellectual property rights under the TRIPS Agreement for agriculture and plant and animal breeding and their relationship to the realization of collective rights, such as Farmers’ Rights;
• the broader issue of the changing balance between common or public goods through privatization of ownership, with particular reference to plant and animal genetic resources, water, air and agricultural knowledge (which is increasingly privatized through patents, licensing and related arrangements); and
• ethical issues related to exploitation of limited resources in forestry and fisheries.