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Today we will be holding the last and final town hall on the Biodiversity World Tour. This event will be taking place in Nagoya, Japan where world leaders are meeting right now at the Conference of Parties meeting to negotiate the fate of biodiversity in our world.
Therefore for this event we brought together a panel that will be able to discuss exactly how we will be able to push policymakers to fulfill the goals and requirements being set here.
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Meet our panelists:
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Andrew Seidl:
Andrew Seidl (Ph.D. 1996, Food and Resource Economics, University of Florida) is Head, Economics and Environment Programme at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Andy’s programme emphasizes community scale natural resource based economic development and environmental policy. He often works with communities, regions or countries that feature unique or valuable natural amenities to identify strategies for local people to capture economic benefits in order to encourage their environmental stewardship. Prior to joining IUCN in 2009, Seidl was Associate Professor & Public Policy Extension Specialist in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at Colorado State University for 12 years. Seidl has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Manchester, UK and the Central American Institute for Business Administration’s (INCAE) Latin American Center for Competitiveness and Sustainable Development (CLACDS) in Costa Rica, a Natural Resource Economist at the Brazilian Center for Agricultural Research in the Pantanal (CPAP-EMBRAPA) in Corumba, Brazil, and Commodity Analyst at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO-UN) in Rome, Italy.
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David Tribe:
Dr Tribe is a panelist on the third tour stop in Nagoya and also will be contributing to the blog.
Dr David Tribe gained a BSc in Biochemistry and Chemistry, followed by a PhD in Molecular Genetics, at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and his subsequent career has spanned both academia and industry.
He has worked with the CSL Group (Australian vaccine developer); CNRS (the French National Center for Scientific Research); and most recently he spent eight years at DuPont Central Research, USA, working on Biotechnology research and Molecular biology.
On the academic side, Dr Tribe spent 13 years at the University of New South Wales, Australia, working in the Biotechnology field, and he is at present a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and the Department of Agriculture and Food Systems at the University of Melbourne. Dr Tribe’s research activities centre on agricultural policy and food risk management and he also teaches graduate programmes in food science and risk management.
He is active in public communication about food policy issues, and together with Professor Bruce Chassy, of the University of Illinois, USA, he maintains two blog websites: GMO Pundit (http://gmopundit.blogspot.com/) and Academics Review (http://academicsreview.org/).
Dr Tribe is a Member of the Australian Society for Microbiology. His numerous publications cover areas such as food safety, GM crops, gene technology in food, and biodiversity.
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Emile Frison:
Dr. Frison is a panelist on the third tour stop in Nagoya.
Emile Frison is the Director General of Bioversity International (formerly IPGRI – International Plant Genetic Resources Institute) since 1 August 2003.
Emile Frison has spent most of his career in international agricultural research, including 18 years of work related to plant genetic resources. He obtained an MSc in plant pathology from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and a PhD from the University of Gembloux in Belgium.
Dr Frison commenced his career in international agricultural research at the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Nigeria in 1979. He worked in Africa for six years (Nigeria and Mauritania) and subsequently became Development Manager of an agrochemical company in Belgium for three years. He joined Bioversity in 1987 to coordinate research on plant health aspects in plant collections. In 1992, as Regional Director for Europe, he initiated a new phase of the European Cooperative Programme for Crop Genetic Resources Networks. He also launched the European Forest Genetic Resources Programme in collaboration with FAO.
As Director of Bioversity’s International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain (INIBAP), Dr Frison gave added impetus to research on this neglected crop, the tropical world’s fourth most important staple food. In 1997, he launched the Global Programme for Musa Improvement (PROMUSA), which brought together researchers and growers with an interest in bananas and plantains. In 2002 he launched the Global Consortium on Musa Genomics with 27 members from 14 countries. The Consortium’s goal is to decode the genetic sequence of the banana and use that information to improve the varieties available to smallholder farmers. “Although we work with plants, people are central to our interest” says Frison, “we continue to work with our partners to assist the poorest of farmers attain better livelihoods.”
As of August 2003 Dr Frison has led the System-wide Genetic Resources Programme (SGRP) of the CGIAR. In January 2004 he took on the role of Secretary for the CGIAR’s Genetic Resources Policy Committee (GRPC). He has been a Member of the Executive Council of Ecoagriculture Partners, Washington DC since 2006. In December of the same year he joined the Comité d’Orientation de l’Agence de Recherche pour le Développement, Paris.
Dr Frison played a leading role in the creation of the Alliance of the 15 CGIAR Centres. He was Chair of the Alliance Executive in 2007 and 2008 and in that capacity was actively involved in the CGIAR reform process, first as a member of the Scoping Team in 2007, and then as a member of the Change Steering Team in 2008.
In October 2007 Dr Frison was nominated Extraordinary Professor (part-time) at the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. He has also been a Member of the International Advisory Council of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. As of March 2009 he is a member of the Executive Board of the Global Crop Diversity Trust.
Emile Frison is a Belgian national and has published over 150 scientific articles.
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Kazao Watanabe:
Kazuo N Watanabe is a Research Professor at the Gene Research Center and Institute of Biological Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Japan. He has been working on various aspects of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) with a special interest in biosafety, access and benefit sharing and sustainable uses of biological resources, focusing on agrobiodiversity. He has also been working with Bioversity International (Formerly IPGRI) in Rome as an Honorary Research Fellow and with the Department of Plant Breeding at Cornell University as adjunct faculty.
His interest is in international and multidisiciplinary activities related to the conservation and use of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture including biotechnology applications for sustainable development. By contributing his knowledge and experiences gained within the natural sciences and technology to the socio–economic and political sciences, he would like to offer an integrated view on how natural resources and modern science and technology could lead to sustainable development for food security, poverty alleviation, and regional and world peace
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I hope you will join us tomorrow for what is sure to be a fascinating discussion on the future of our world’s biodiversity in the coming decades.
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And dont forget, you can submit your questions for the panel ahead of time at www.biodiversityworldtour.com/contact
