Ladies and Gentlemen,

On behalf of the.comanising committee, first of all I would like to warmly welcome you to the 4th Conference on Medicinal and Aromatic Plants from the Southeast European Countries held in Iasi, Romania. We are very pleased you accepted to join this scientific meeting in such a numerous audience, because your presence here is the first condition for a successful outcome of the Conference. We are glad that our colleagues from India join us (and that’s why we thank them for their interest in this meeting and for their effort to travel from such a distance). We also thank our colleagues who came from Albania and, unfortunately, had some problems in getting the visas.

The "adventure" of our Association started six years ago, when its first Conference was held in Arandjelovac, in former Yugoslavia. From the very beginning, the presence in the conference was a significant and a distinguished one and the.comanisation was excellent. It was a very promising start. In Arandjelovac, Romania was represented by a number of 13 researchers (and a number of 180 are present here today) who were called by our current president "the commando group" from Romania due to their presence, behaviour and capacity of interaction with others. If only we had known that after six years it would have been our turn to host this prestigious Conference, maybe we wouldn’t have attended that first meeting in Arandjelovac. Of course, it was only a joke! It is a great honour for us to.comanise such a meeting, though it’s an important responsibility and implies a big effort and a massive amount of work.

From this point of view, Mr. Ristic was a visionary when he stated in 2003, at the 8^th National Symposium in Piatra Neamt "The medicinal plants – present and perspectives" that the way in which the symposium was.comanised might represent the premise in.comanising an international Congress in the field. It wasn’t quite a congress, but it was an international Conference. And who knows, in six years or maybe less, we’ll participate in the first Congress of this Association, but not as its hosts.

I must confess that we, the Romanian, have important hopes and expectations from our Association. As a person who attended all the editions of the Conference (and I’m very proud of this fact), I consider it is the moment for this Conference to be transformed into a more important forum which can be able to guide the research activity in each member country in the field of knowledge, protection, valorisation and amelioration of the medicinal and aromatic plants. Other aims of this forum must be: to harmonise the national strategies in the area; to elaborate the main study directions; to coagulate all the energies from this region in order to carry out these studies; to establish contacts and collaborations with other international scientific societies in the field; to work as a support for the governmental policies in the medicinal plants field. This forum must also aim at the establishing of multinational partnerships in order to approach some scientific research projects within the European 6th or 7th Framework Programmes, and within other international programmes, as well.

In order to achieve such goals it is necessary to try to reach a better.comanisation at national level and within our Association. This is the reason why, if our President agrees to this idea, our aim is to.comanise a local Romanian branch in Iasi, which can offer a proper framework for our activity, and which can determine a more efficient and useful way to solve all the above mentioned issues. The borders of the European Union are continuously enlarging and, in the end, will include the majority of the countries present here. Then it is necessary for us to be well-prepared,.comanised and efficient in order to deal with the new exigencies and challenges imposed by this big European "family".

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Being aware of the importance of this Conference, we have tried to do our best as your hosts, and to offer the best conditions for a proper development of this conference. We are aware of the fact that, despite our will, some difficulties have occurred and we apologise for the inconveniences. Our sincere desire is the Conference to be a success, a wide-open environment for exchanging the latest achievements and news in the medicinal and aromatic plant area of study, so that we are expecting your contributions in the field. Most of the 50 oral presentations and 123 posters belonging to specialists from 15 participating countries will definitely raise our interest. We consider that this 4^th edition of the AMAPSEEC Conference represents a step forward by introducing 2 sections to offer the chance of presenting oral contributions to as many colleagues as possible. We also edited the volume of Proceedings in an electronic format.

We wish you to have a great time in Iasi during our three-day meeting. The city of Iasi is one of the most important cities in our country, and is the cultural capital of Moldavia. It is the city where the first Romanian University was set up, a beautiful town with a lot of tourist attractions. Please feel like home! Maybe during these 3 days our foreign guests will discover a new Romania, not that one which they knew before their arrival, and they will want to come back for visiting other interesting and picturesque places.

Finally, together with my colleagues Professor Ursula Stanescu and Professor Constantin Toma, I would like to express our gratitude to professor Antonia Poiată, Dr. Monica Hăncianu, PhD student Diana-Elena Maftei, Dr. Anca Miron, Dr. Cristina Tuchiluş, Dr. Daniela Nicuţă, PhD student Oana Gacea, Carmen Olaru, Dragoş Ganaite etc., for their hard work in.comanising this important meeting.

Thanks to our sponsors who supported us in this activity, and we hope your stay in Iasi will be a pleasant one.

Last, but not least, we would like to thank our President, Mr. Mihailo Ristic, our permanent contact over the last 6-7 months, for his suggestions and support in.comanising our Conference.

Thank you all and I wish you lucks!

The University of Bacau