ag-west bio -
welcoming the world to abic 2010

It’s the final countdown to the 10th Agricultural Biotechnology International Conference (ABIC) being held in Saskatoon from September 12 to 15. Long time client of Innovation Place Ag-West Bio Inc. is hosting the event for the fourth time. Dr. Wilf Keller, President and CEO of Ag-West Bio is the conference steering committee chair. 

“I’ve been involved with ABIC since it started back in 1996 and it’s evolved into a meeting that includes a lot more business leaders and managers rather than just a technical conference,” said Keller. “ABIC gives potential investors, international business partners and even legal firms a snapshot of where biotech is at as well as being a great networking opportunity.”

Muriel Adams, Managing Director of the ABIC Foundation, has been overseeing the preparations for this conference for more than a year. She says delegates include senior decision makers from several multinational corporations as well as policy makers, politicians and bureaucrats from around the world. “We’ve also got 15 start-up companies, many of them are international, and they usually come to this conference because of the opportunities for them to meet the corporate leaders as well as the researchers.”

Many of those researchers will be participating in the poster competition. “The 56 posters in the competition is where we see the most technical information presented,” said Adams who adds “It’s very high level work, usually post-doctoral work and up.”

The poster competition, like the rest of the conference, is divided into three broad themes: energy, human and animal health and new for this year, sustainability. “There is a growing interest in environmental concerns so there is more interest in renewable resources, nutrient use efficiency and the overall environmental impact of agricultural production,” said Keller.

Conference program committee co-chair Brent Zettl, President of Prairie Plant Systems, is even more adamant about considering sustainability. “The role of agriculture will become more important, especially as water resources become increasingly taxed,” said Zettl. “Food will become more expensive again and it’s important for technology to keep ahead of the curve.”

Along with the growing interest in sustainability, Keller says he’s also noticed more emphasis over the years on convergent technologies bringing together agriculture and health and more recently, technologies bridging agriculture and bioproducts like fuels, plastics and polymers. The plenary sessions reflect those themes with talks on food security and safety, vaccines and advances in biofuels.

While the focus of the talks has changed over the years, the conference continues to have a strong international component. This year, speakers and delegates will come from as far away as Australia, China, Japan, Thailand, Italy, Belgium and throughout the United States and Canada.

“Research and the challenges that go with it are global, and this is a chance to broaden our perspectives,” says Adams who points to the example of jatropha, which is increasingly grown throughout Africa as a biofuel. “We obviously don’t grow jatropha in Canada but some of the technologies around using it are transferrable to the things we are doing here.”

This year’s conference is continuing the tradition of kicking off with a public forum. Local biotech businessman John Cross and author and broadcaster Jay Ingram will speak at the public forum scheduled for 1:30 to 3:00 pm on Sunday, September 12 at TCU Place.

For more information about the ABIC conference please go to www.abic.ca/abic2010

- August 2010