Boosting cross border Organic Ecosystem through enhancing agro-food alliances
Agriculture puts a lot of pressure on the environment. Soil fertility, biodiversity and human life are all negatively impacted by intensive and extensive farming. There is no doubt that organic agriculture is a great solution to achieve food safety and security as well as environmental sustainability. However, organic agriculture is still relatively underdeveloped in Mediterranean countries with heterogeneous situations from country to country. Main shared challenges are inconsistent or lacking support policies from national/local governments, low innovation capacities, limited knowledge of sustainable farming practices, and a weak value chain where MSMEs operate in a disaggregated way. ORGANIC ECOSYSTEM project aims at reducing these obstacles and make the MSMEs operating in organic agriculture more competitive and better integrated. The project intends to establish a cross-border agro-food ecosystem which will set the ground for the development of the Mediterranean whole organic sector. This will be encouraged through new business alliances, creation of innovative value chains, and specialized support provided to MSMEs to increase the quality and the commercialization of products and their capacities to access to new markets.