US$6 Million for Research
The Government of South Korea offered Costa Rica  us$6 million to establish an institute of joint research on biodiversity. This was one of the leading agreements reached by President Abel Pacheco and his Korean peer Roh Moo-hyun at a Central America and Korea Summit last week.

During his visit to Costa Rica, Moo-hyun commented his amazement at the natural wealth of the country, "the sky so blue and the mountains."

The new institution, the Korea-Costa Rica Biodiversity Research Center, will be jointly developed and operated by the Costa Rican National Biodiversity Institute (INBio) and the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology (KRIBB).

INBio director doctor Rodrigo Gamez commented that the Koreans had analyzed several Latin American institutions to develop the project, and finally decided to do it here.

INBio of Costa Rica is a private research and biodiversity management center, established in 1989 to support efforts to gather knowledge on the country’s biological diversity and promote its sustainable use. The institute works under the premise that the best way to conserve biodiversity is to utilize the opportunities it offers to improve the quality of life of human beings.

INBio is a non-governmental, non-profit, public interest organization of civil society that works in close collaboration with different government institutions, universities, the private sector and other public and private organizations, both within and outside Costa Rica.

Although INBio is a national initiative in terms of its sphere of action, it has also become part of an international effort aimed at integrating conservation and development. The application of scientific knowledge on biodiversity to economic activities such as ecotourism, medicine and agriculture, or the development of mechanisms for the charging and payment of environmental services, exemplify this integration effort and form part of the activities that attract the attention of the international community.