FAO recognises the potential of biotechnology in promoting human well-being, particularly in meeting critical needs for food, agriculture and health care.

There is need to promote the safe adoption of biotechnology through biosafety as defined in the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. Biosafety refers to the need to protect human health and the environment from the possible adverse effects of the products of modern biotechnology.

There is need for development and/or strengthening of human resources and institutional capacities in biosafety. This collection of documents is an attempt to contribute towards this capacity building effort. It is meant to give the reader a broad choice of training resources on different biosafety issues, ranging from recombinant DNA laboratory safety, through biosafety and containment issues for GMO research in greenhouses, to the requirements of, or criteria for, assessing GMOs and the effects of introducing a GMO into the environment. Some of the documents detail the development and implementation of biosafety regulations to enable technology transfer.

The documents have been classified as guidelines, manuals reports, toolkits, cd-roms. Clicking on any of these categories in the navigation bar will result in a list of documents within the selected category. The list only gives the document titles; more details about the document can be found by clicking on the title of choice. The site also offers a page with selected useful links to webpages related to biosafety.