The International Cooperative Biodiversity Group Programme

The issues and the challenges with establishing and maintaining these programmes have been well delineated by Soejarto and co-workers at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).70 The specific aims of the UIC-ICBG group are  

The Vietnam-Laos IBCG programme at UIC, which was initiated in the late 1990s, has five main sites of operation  

Fluid communications (personal as well as electronic) and regular all-group meetings were also cited as critical components for the operation of a successful programme. 

As Rosenthal et al. point out,73 several countries in the ICBG programme have used participation to explore the effectiveness of their own policies and practices for access to genetic materials and benefit-sharing. The programme has demonstrated that bioprospecting is a research process and that, while 

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