Closure

At least an easier task than I have carried out the previous hour when we discussed the preliminary conclusions and recommendations has, as a compensation I guess, been given to me as well. To say a few words as a closure of this symposium. The beginning of such a series of closing statements is most difficult. Because I have never met anybody saying this was a lousy symposium. So any statement to the contrary is not really qualifying a symposium. Our goals were precisely specified during the opening but meeting these goals should not be the only yardstick. Some of the speakers have put less emphasis on needed agrometeorological information than others had hoped for. But of course a meeting as this one is only the beginning of interdisciplinary thinking in our field of work. But I know a few other criteria: We have had a large audience throughout these two long days; We have had an actively participating audience generating good discussions and challenging a lot of what was said by the various speakers; We have had many very good papers dealing with agrometeorological aspects of potato growing in an extremely large number of differing climatic and farming conditions; We have been chaired by as heterogeneous a team as possible, varying from an anthropologist to a physicist to a tropical agronomist; We have been organized by a series of famous institutes and organizations that have used some of their most excellent senior staff members to do the actual organizing; And we have been so fortunate to have had these people backed up by a few assistants who did an extremely difficult and not always very rewarding job largely behind the screens; It was a good idea which worked out well to have this symposium after the ISHS one on "Recent and future developments of the potato in the world"; Finally we have succeeded in formulating together a few recommendations which we think to be essential messages to those who have to provide all of us with the means to do a proper job now and in the future. I think this summing up allows me to state that I have illustrated that this symposium was more than worth the trouble, the efforts and the time and has really brought some people of very different disciplines on a higher level of speaking terms. And that might well be the most important result of all. Then finally, also on behalf of Mr. Kassar, President of the Commission for Agricultural Meteorology of WMO, which I was representing here, I thank you all once more for your much appreciated contributions and I herewith declare the official sessions of this symposium closed.