Better fruit from smart business
Improving Mediterranean supply chain through innovative agro-food business models to strengthen small-scale farmers competitiveness, using prickly pear and fig as case study.
The InovFarmer.MED proposal focus on PRIMA’s Thematic Area 3 – Sustainable Mediterranean agro-food value chain for regional and local development, addressing specifically the topic 2.3.1 “Increasing the resilience of smallscale farms to global challenges and COVID-like crisis by using adapted technologies, smart agri-food supply chain and crisis management tools”. Knowing that environmental and social changes are deeply affecting Euro Mediterranean agro-food systems, and that COVID-19 outbreak imposing restrictions on movement, has demonstrated the fragility of the Mediterranean food systems, already distressed by climate change, population growth and scarcity of resources, the InovFarmer.MED consortium has developed a empowerment strategy addressing vulnerabilities of the producers in particular, smallholder farmers, to establish lines of resilience to face these challenges.
InovFarmer.MED will address, as case-study, the value-chains of two traditional agrifood products with high potential economic relevance and social significance for small-scale farmers of Mediterranean basin: fig (Ficus carica) and prickly pear (Opuntia ficus indica).
InovFarmer.MED intends to respond to the following challenges:
Increase food production by training smallholders on efficient agroecological practices, eco-friendly technologies and tools that preserve the healthiness and quality of fig and prickly pear;
Evaluate the impact of a change-management in production, transformation and commercialization methods providing smallholders evidence-based monitoring;
Increase smallholders income by co-creating new business models that are crisis resilient;
Improve access to market by creating new channels that cope with movement restrictions and unexpected product stocks;
Reduce food loss by leveraging transformed products and by-products exploitation.
