In 2016, GODAN was the first time officially appointed as an Observer to the meeting of the  G20 Agricultural Chief Scientists. I represented the GODAN secretariat at the meeting in   Xian.  Now all important Agricultural institutions of G20 members are GODAN partners (except Russia). Germany announced at the meeting to hold a Linked Open Data workshop in 2017 and to create a German position in the GODAN secretariat

UPM in Kuala Lumpur is the AGRIS center with which my team in FAO has a collobaration of more than a decade.   So it was a special pleasure for me to come here to present GODAN. This was in the context of a meeting on "sharing of scientific information".  I was enthusiastic about the activities of the loca AGRIS center.

It is true for most countries, what the Economists retains nearly a Dogma: democracy and individual freedom go together. But this is not true for nearly half of the worlds population. The democratic India want to punish homosexuality with 14 years of jail; the Chinese autocracy is tolerant towards gays (actually the government campaigns for tolerance in the population.

On April 30 2013,  the G8 organized a summit on open data in Agriculture. It took place in Washinton at the Worldbank. I represented the EC and the EC funded project agInfra.