Developing and Harmonising Biosafety Regulations for Countries in West Asia and North Africa

Abstract

This workshop is on the safe use of biotechnology, the second in a series of four aimed at intensifying the cooperation of the Arab countries in the region. Notwithstanding the fact that modern biotechnology offers new tools for solving problems in agriculture, food processing, and veterinary and human medicine, these tools are new and the experience and capacities are limited, especially in countries of the developing world. To share experiences, facilities, and expertise within the region, and to identify and make use of synergistic effects are, therefore, of prime importance and are major objectives of this series. The first meeting was held in Cairo in January 1999 and was jointly organized by the Egyptian Agricultural Genetic Engineering Research Institute (AGERI) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). In that workshop, biosafety developments in several regions of the world, e.g. Latin America. Asia and North America were reviewed. This was the first time that a number of WANA country representatives came in contact with the developments in other parts of the world. It also became clear that to gain more information, more workshops had to follow in order to strengthen the development of biosafety policies in the region. It was at the end of the first workshop that FAO, AGERI and ICARDA discussed the possibility of organizing a number of workshops to promote the different aspects of biosafety development in the region. The second meeting was to bring together policy- and decision-makers of ten nations of the region for three days, to identify and discuss issues related to biosafety and biotechnology. and to further support and enforce a regional harmonization of these issues.