Biotechnology meeting to focus on legal issues
JAKARTA (JP): Legal issues affecting biotechnology are among topics to be discussed at the first Indonesian Biotechnology Conference, a representative of its organizing committee said yesterday.
Hari Hartiko said legal issues and bioethical issues were of vital importance to Indonesia, given the extent and vulnerability of its biological heritage.
Discussion of these issues is particularly important given Indonesia's lack of laws regulating biotechnology. These laws are already present in neighboring Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines.
Hartiko said the three-day conference, to open here today at the Jakarta Convention Center, would include 593 participants from 17 countries, with 506 from Indonesia and 87 from abroad.
This is the first Indonesian biotechnology conference. Future conferences would probably be held every two or three years, he said.
Other countries taking part are Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Sweden, Syria, Taiwan and Turkey.
He said that of the 116 papers to be presented at the conference, 54 were on industrial biotechnology, 38 on agricultural biotechnology, 16 on medical biotechnology and eight in forestry biotechnology.
Australian biotechnology company ForBio Limited's Southeast Asia regional manager, Ross Gilmour, told The Jakarta Post that few papers would be submitted on forestry biotechnology because it was a new field.
Gilmour said that large corporate plantations in Indonesia had recently established research divisions and were beginning to carry out basic research to improve harvests. This would eventually include biotechnology programs.
He said the prospects for research were bright but, because of the high risks and large investment involved, companies demanded that research could deliver commercially viable biotechnology products.
He said research was expensive and cited the example of the US$6 million spent on a robotics-assisted biotechnology research facility for Monfori Nusantara, in Parung, West Java. Monofori is an Indonesian subsidiary of the Monsanto chemical company of the United States.
The facility was expected to produce 10 million seedlings annually for improved, fast-growing trees, he said.
Gilmour said plans were underway to develop acacia, eucalyptus, teak, rubber and palm oil plants through biotechnology.
"Acacia, currently plants in Kalimantan over 500,000 hectares of land, which needs eight years to harvest and yields 20 cubic meters per hectare, but with new technology it takes half as much time to harvest and the yields more than double," he said. (01)