News and videos on the EU Programme for the ‘Knowledge-based bio-economy’

The online participation service connects researchers, companies, non-governmental organizations, regional actors and other stakeholders willing to benefit from this EU funding and to promote the knowledge based bio-economy. In a first for CORDIS, the new service will include a series of regular video interviews. In these, Christian Patermann, director for ’Biotechnologies, agriculture and food research‘ at the European Commission, explains new research opportunities and challenges.

’The big problem for the perception of the advantages and perspectives of biotechnology in Europe is that citizens are looking too narrow at what biotechnology really is. Many people think that biotechnology is genetical modification, and that in particular for food. This is not true.’, said Mr Patermann in one of his first video interviews on the service. ’We have to make aware people that biotechnology and life sciences are much more.’

The CORDIS Knowledge-Based Bio-economy Service can support this process. It offers a dedicated newsroom, reporting on the latest developments in European research policy and funding. The events section provides advance information on the conference ’Towards future challenges of agricultural research in Europe‘, organised by the European Commission in Brussels on the 26 and 27th of June.

To promote transparency on the spending of the EU research budget, and to increase awareness about European research, the service will publish collaborative projects, funded under this FP7 theme, expected to last two to five years and to tackle major societal needs. The service highlights also specific opportunities for small and medium-sized companies and international cooperation with non-EU countries, which is a high priority under this FP7 research theme.

The aim is to help all actors, from the farmer, academia and industry, through to the consumer, to cooperate to make the bio-economy a workable, dynamic and successful initiative.

The service is available at: http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/kbbe

It is the first in a series of thematic CORDIS services for the priority themes under the FP7 Cooperation and Capacities programmes, part of a larger multilingual FP7 gateway on CORDIS (http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7).