Madagascar is a biodiversity hotspot and its forests harbor a vast diversity of precious woods. For decades, ever increasing demand for timber on the international market and its high commercial value have led to massive illegal exploitation of rosewood, palisander and ebony species in Madagascar. Controlling the international trade of illegally logged timber is challenging. One reason is that logs and sawn wood are difficult to assign to species or geographic origin (provenance).
“We need a societal discourse in which the political and ethical dimensions of the research in question are explored. What sort of agricultural system do we want? How are the new technologies to be used?” emphazised Prof. Matthias Mahlmann, lawyer and member of the Swiss Ethics Commission for Non-Human Biotechnology, at a recent panel discussion on genome editing at the www.tnam2019.ethz.ch.
The participants of the TNAM 2019 conference take a tri-national view on the main issues and potential consequences of the ruling of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on organisms obtained by mutagenesis. The PSC has summarized the discussions at: https://www.plantsciences.uzh.ch/en/outreach/roundtable.html
