INRA and University of Reading represented AMIGA project at the GMCC-13 Conference, which took place in Lisbon, Portugal, on November 13-15, 2013. GMCC-13 was the sixth in a biennial series of Conferences on ‘Coexistence between GM and non-GM based Agricultural Supply Chains’.
The event covered different aspects of the discourse over agriculture, including developments in farming systems, plant breeding and biotechnology and sustainable use of agricultural biological diversity. During the conference AMIGA partners were invited to present two papers and to have a speech within a plenary session on agricultural systems.
On the first day Antoine Messean (AMIGA deputy coordinator, from INRA, France) chaired a plenary session on ‘Agricultural Systems and Coexistence at Farm and Landscape Level’. On the second day, the University of Reading partners in AMIGA presented two papers in the session ‘Constraints and opportunities of coexistence in agro-biodiversity based systems’. These were given by Dr Ian McFarlane on ‘Extent to which potential benefits to EU farmers of adopting transgenic crops are reduced by costs of compliance with coexistence regulations’ and by Rui Catarino on ‘Modelling the effect of Bt crops introduction on multiple pest population dynamics, insecticide use and economic returns to farmers’. AMIGA work will also have the possibility to be selected, since some of the papers from GMCC are being considered for publication in AgBioForum, a quarterly publication devoted to the economics and management of agro-biotechnology .
The conference was attended by academic and industry experts in GM-related topics, and attracted key stakeholders from around the world; there were more than 160 participants.