Meeting AESAN "Marine Biotechnology Workshop"

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The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is a regional intergovernmental organization comprising ten Southeast Asian countries, which promotes intergovernmental cooperation and facilitates economic, political, security, military, educational, and sociocultural integration among its members and other Asian states. It also regularly engages other states in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond (for more info check wikipedia). The idea i similar to European Union as far as i understood. ASEAN Committee on Science and Technology organised a workshop on Marine Biotechnology in UnAir and i was an invited speaker in the panel session of this workshop.
There were many participants to this workshop which was based on using marine biotechnological for community development and some keynote and invited speakers . We all talked about possible biotechnological method which can be apply to improve the power of fisheries and aquaculture community in Indonesia. The first day every speaker from different country explained their models and methods and talked about their researches. How to use fish processing technology or micro algae? How to extract pigment and/or enzymes from algae and use them to make value added products. 
The speakers were invited from Thailand, Malaysia, Japan etc)


I talked mostly about EU perspectives on Blue Growth (Blue Biotechnologies, BioEconomy etc). Also gave some examples of EU funded project (AquaEXCEL, AquaTNET, EURSTIP, Arriana, Diversify etc). At the end of my talk i explained how Turkish government support community development with development agencies or other funding offices (IPARD etc). It was interesting to see some of Professors came to me and wanted me to talk in their department to explain them EU funding process and how to get involve it. I kindly rejected because i didnt have time for that for this trip.


After morning speeches, we dived two focus group to build  a project proposal. Our group focused on value added methods on macro algae since the Indonesia had 8 million ton macro algae aquaculture and the farmers could not get enough money from algae they produced. They sell the dry algae to Korea and/or China for further processing (agar, alginate, pigmenst, enzymes etc). So my group made a presentation next day mooring and gave an advice to UnAir academician to build a proposal for the application of marine biotechnological methods on macro algae production for community development. 


Afternoon of second day we are invited for city tour and of course the tour was fantastic. We had visited first a Batik and Hand Craft Shop for shopping (ladies loved that), then we were taken 10th November Museum which was the remembrance of independent war of Indonesia and last one was "House of Sampoerna" (a cigarette museum).




So, the second week was started with a workshop and I have still not given a lecture to my UnAir students in Surabaya... Hopefully tomorrow :)




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