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COORDINATING COMMITTEE | contacts
Chair Dr Lum Keng Yeang, Malaysia;
Mr Jomari Hj. Ahmad, Brunei Darussalam;
Dr Hean Vanhan, Cambodia;
Mrs Liana Bratasida, Indonesia;
Mrs Phyu Phyu Lwin, Myanmar;
Mr Horacio O. San Valentin, Philippines; Ms
Wendy Yap Hwee Min, Singapore;
Dr Banpot Napompeth, Thailand;
Mr Dam Quoc Tru, Vietnam.
Status
ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) endorsed this BioNET
LOOP in 1998. ASEANET has subsequently been appointed to serve as
the Technical Secretariat to the ASEAN Plant Health Cooperation
Network.
Member countries 10: Brunei Darussalam,
Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines,
Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
Context The
ASEAN region has some of the richest and yet most threatened
biodiversity on this Earth. The 500 million inhabitants within the
nations of ASEAN continue to rely on this biodiversity for their
livelihoods. Central to the conservation and sustainable use of this
biodiversity is the availability of adequate skilled human resource
and relevant supporting technological tools. Taxonomy provides the basic tools to inventorize this
biodiversity, thereby providing the necessary access to existing
biological information and enabling the generation of new
information crucial to the conservation and sustainable use of these
resources for national and societal
development.
Goals and priorities
- Assist member nations to implement and
fulfill national obligations under the Convention on Biological
Diversity.
- Play a leading role in regional
activities in support of the Global Taxonomy Initiative.
- Assist member economies to comply with
requirements of the SPS Agreement under the WTO.
- Focus work on four core areas of capacity-building: i) information and communication technology; ii) human resource development iii) rehabilitation of collections; and iv) new technologies in identification and taxonomy.
Current activities
- Extensive taxonomic capacity building for
SPS and trade related issues in collaboration with the Department
of Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry, Australia.
- Sponsoring and organisation of training
and workshops on invasive species and database development.
- Acting as Technical Secretariat to the ASEAN Plant Health Network, which reports to the ASEAN Sectoral Working Group on Crops.
Recent achievements
- In collaboration with the Australian
Department of Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry, ASEANET has
organised several workshops on SPS and trade for its member
countries funded by AusAID.
- Banpot Napompeth, national coordinator
for Thailand, has been contracted by the National Bureau of
Agricultural Commodity and Food Standards, Ministry of Agriculture
and Cooperatives, to translate all the 29 International Standards
for Phytosanitary Measures into Thai language, a voluntary task
obliged under the International Plant Protection Convention
(IPPC).
- In 2007, ASEANET has organised the
ASEAN-NIS Workshop on Invasive Species and Database Development in
collaboration with the Global Invasive Species Information Network
(GISIN) at MARDI, Serdang-Selangor, Malaysia.
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