This was a lively, interactive session where discussion ranged widely across many issues: including the need to bring all stakeholders into managing biodiversity, the importance of raising public awareness via the media to engage the public in that management, and the significance of advocacy in addressing policy-making on these issues.
Focus should remain on research and ensuring it reaches the end user, suggested one participant. “Is this a mega-programme or a giga-programme?” asked Denis Blight of The Crawford Fund.”If you try to incorporate every brick into the architecture, you will never build anything.”
Participants agreed that knowledge sharing was a vital piece of the puzzle – leveraging an interactive global information system so that agricultural biodiversity actors could share findings and draw on a wide pool of research. Capacity building, as always, was a dominant theme, in the context of maintaining and managing gene banks, as well as local research centre governance.
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