Egypt: The 10th International Barley Genetics Symposium to start on April 5 in Alexandria

The 10th International Barley Genetics Symposium will be held at Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt, from April 5 to 10, according to Seed Quest, April3. The Symposium has been jointly organized by the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), and Bibliotheca Alexandrina with the support of Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and OPEC Fund for International Development.

The Symposium is the most important forum for barley scientists and the industry worldwide, where results and current trends of barley research and production are presented and discussed, and future strategies are decided.

At Alexandria, scientists will deliberate on issues like global barley production, improvement of crop quality, impact of climate change and global warming on barley crop and new technologies to overcome these challenges. It will also cover a diverse range of applied and basic research on barley.

Barley is cultivated in over 56 million hectares of land the world over and it is the fourth most planted cereal crop. Over the last few years there has been a steady increase in barley and scientists believe that with the increasing global temperatures and the challenges posed by climate change, barley cultivation would expand even more, as this crop grows in warm areas.

“Barley can help people survive climate change and global warming, it is the crop of the poor people,” says Dr. Stefania Grando, ICARDA’s Principal Barley Breeder and the Chair of the local organizing committee of the Symposium.

Besides being the staple food for the poor in parts of North Africa, Central and South Asia, Barley is grown as a cash crop in many developing countries and is used for malt production all over the world.

It is for the first time that the Symposium is being held in Africa and the Middle East Region. The First International Barley Genetics Symposium was held in Wageningen, the Netherlands in 1963. In the past it was held five times in Europe (the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Czech Republic), twice in North America (USA and Canada), and once each in Australia and Asia (Japan). The last Symposium was held on 20-26 June 2004 in Brno (Czech Republic), and was attended by about 350 delegates from all over the world.

Established in 1977, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) is one of the 15 centers strategically located all over the world and supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). With its main research station and offices based in Aleppo, Syria, ICARDA works through a network of partnerships with national, regional and international institutions, universities, non-governmental organizations and ministries in the developing world; and with advanced research institutes in industrialized countries. This event is an example of the cooperative and collaborative efforts to insure that our efforts are meeting the needed research topics for the region and that the outcome is of a focused and high quality scientific for development product.

04 April, 2008