The 7th Meeting of the APEC HLPDAB was held in 2008 in Lima, Peru. The main issues discussed included: commodity trade and the low-level presence of regulated recombinant DNA plant materials in trade; the implications of transparent policies and regulations for the use of agricultural biotechnology; and key concerns on liability and redress in research and trade. It was agreed that the HLPDAB would undertake work complementary to that of APEC's Agricultural Technical Cooperation Working Group's (ATCWG) subgroup on Research, Development and Extension of Agricultural Biotechnology (RDEAB) with respect to harmonising the technical aspects of regulation.

Throughout 2008, many bilateral exchanges on agricultural biotechnology also took place under the auspices of the HLPDAB:

• Chile and Australia looked at the issues limiting development of the biotechnology sector in Chile. 
• Viet Nam and the Philippines focused on the policy development process in the Philippines and the way the regulatory community interacts with the developers of technology. In a second exchange, key policy figures in the Viet Nam National Assembly met with Filipino farmers who are deriving benefits from the adoption of genetically modified (GM) technology, with policy makers and regulators who oversee the regulatory framework, and with researchers targeting production issues with GM solutions. 
• Peru and the Philippines covered the whole process of taking a biotech crop product from the lab to market, emphasising the key role that a sound regulatory environment plays.

The 8th Meeting of the APEC HLPDAB was held in 2009 in Singapore, and was attended by 16 economies. The main issues discussed included regulatory harmonisation with respect to the Codex Alimentarius Annex on Food Safety Assessment in Situations of Low-level Presence of Recombinant-DNA Plant Material in Food (LLP), and technical approaches to global challenges such as food and energy demand and environmental challenges. It was preceded by a Private Sector Day that brought together representatives of agricultural businesses, the public sector and academia to learn more about new studies and developments in the biotech industry and the agricultural sector throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

Activities in 2009 included two APEC Policy Roundtable discussions on LLP which took place in February and July 2009. LLP refers to the unintentional or inadvertent mixing of a grain commodity with small, insignificant quantities of another transgenic variety of grain. Both activities continued work on assisting APEC members to make use of the Codex Alimentarius Annex with the goal of reducing disruptions to trade. During the first roundtable in February, the details of the Codex Annex were discussed, as well as the economic and trade implications of APEC member economies' regulatory policies governing the application of the Codex Annex. The second roundtable centred on case studies that showed how economies have dealt with situations of LLP, and how they have resolved them under their own domestic regulatory environments. Capacity building activities in 2009 included areas of risk assessments and testing methodologies for product specific identification.