Delegates from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) in Vietnam made a one-day stop at the University of Missouri on December 6, 2007. The delegation, led by Dr. Bui Ba Bong, Vice Minister of MARD, participated in a round table discussion with officials from the National Center for Soybean Biotechnology, the Curator’s Professor in the International Program, Dr. Jerry Nelson, and AAC Director Sang Kim. In addition, they toured the Soybean Genome Mapping Facility and the Life Sciences Center, and met with MU’s Vietnam Initiative Group. Dr. Bong noted that MARD was interested in graduate education programs, collaborative research programs, and developing training workshops on Intellectual Property Rights and biotechnology.

The MARD trip was coordinated by the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service. MU’s College of Agricultural Food and Natural Resources (CAFNR) and MARD discussed a formal agreement and drafted a version of an MOU that will be signed some time in early 2008.

Both MARD and CAFNR share strong mutual interests in Agricultural Biotechnology and they discussed cooperating on several academic programs that they hope will benefit both parties. Those programs include graduate education of Vietnam students in plant sciences, animal sciences and forestry; workshops of mutual interest and various research projects. MU was the only academic institution that the MARD delegation visited on their U.S. trip.