To complement the FAO technical documents being prepared, a moderated e-mail conference will be held from 8 June to 8 July 2009 entitled "Learning from the past: Successes and failures with agricultural biotechnologies in developing countries over the last 20 years".
It will cover the different food and agricultural sectors – crops, forestry, livestock, fisheries/aquaculture and agro-industry – as well as the wide range of biotechnologies currently available i.e. including some biotechnologies that may be applied to all of the sectors, such as the use of genomics, molecular DNA markers or genetic modification, and some others that are more sector-specific, such as tissue culture (in crops and forest trees), embryo transfer (livestock), or triploidisation and sex-reversal (fish). The aim of the conference is to analyse past experiences of applying different agricultural biotechnologies in developing countries, to document and discuss what has succeeded or failed and to determine and evaluate the key factors that were responsible for their success or failure.
The e-conference takes place through the FAO Biotechnology Forum (the ‘Forum’), which has hosted 15 e-mail conferences over the past 10 years. Before the conference begins, a Background Document providing easily-understandable background information on the conference theme will be sent to all Forum members by e-mail, together with instructions on how to subscribe. The Background Document, as well as all the e-mail messages posted during the conference, will also be placed on the web, at http://www.fao.org/biotech/conf16.htm. The conference is open to everyone, is free and will be moderated.
To join the Forum (and also subscribe to the conference), send an e-mail to [email protected] leaving the subject blank and entering the following text on two lines:
subscribe BIOTECH-L
subscribe biotech-room4
People who are already Forum members should leave out the first line of the above message, to subscribe to the conference. For more information, contact [email protected].
