More than 450 specialists, entrepreneurs, producers, students and academics from some twenty countries will attend the Fruticultura 2017 event, which will be held from October 15 to the 19 in the National Hotel of Cuba, in the capital.
The event will include the V International Symposium on Tropical Fruits and IX International Symposium on Pineapple. Some of the attending countries with the largest number of representatives are Costa Rica, Brazil and Mexico, as well as Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Peru, Canada, France, USA, South Africa, India, China, Indonesia and Spain.
Juliette Valdes-Infante, executive secretary of the event, said participants would be able to exchange experiences and knowledge about pineapple cultivation and other fruits, diseases, as well as technologies used by producing countries.
She also said that it would also contribute to improving the production, conservation, industrialization and commercialization of tropical fruits, in order to achieve sustainable development.
Valdes-Infante said that, in the V Tropical Fruit Symposium, they would discuss the importance of post-harvest technology in the agricultural food chain, and the use of biotechnological techniques for the propagation and genetic improvement of tropical fruit trees.
Meanwhile, the IX Pineapple Symposium, which will be held in Cuba for the first time, will focus on issues such as limitations for cultivation and commercialization of this crop, main pests and their impact on the development of this crop, and traditional management of plantations of pineapple MD-2 in Costa Rica.
Theodor Friedrich, representative of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Cuba, will speak on Conservation Agriculture, while Raixa Llauger, of the FAO Subregional Office in Mesoamerica, will give a conference related to fruit production and its contribution to food security.
The Cuban institutions that will attend the event include, the Institutes of Research in Agricultural Engineering, Plant Health, Tropical Fruits and Tropical Food, the Bioplants Center, the Granma, Agrarian, and Havana univiersity, as well as Credit and Services Cooperatives, among others.
As part of the program, the delegates to the symposium of Fruticulture will visit the Agroindustrial Company Victoria of Giron, at the municipality of Jagüey Grande in Matanzas, while the participants of the Pineapple symposium will visit the Pineapple Production Business Unit of the Agroindustrial Company Ceballos, in Ciego de Avila.
Source: acn.cu