Launch of the IntercropVALUES project

The IntercropVALUES project was launched on the 29th of November. The meeting was held in the French city of Montpellier, where more than fifty people from the different entities that make up the consortium attended. The meeting, which lasted two days, served to agree on how to deploy the activities to be carried out over the next four years under the coordination of the French Centre for International Cooperation in Agronomic Research for Development -CIRAD-. The participants had the opportunity to visit the CIRAD facilities in Montpellier, such as the Agri-Food Technology Platform. 

 

Project objectives

Food production is a resource-intensive activity that has a profound impact on the environment. These negative effects of agriculture, combined with climate and global changes, call for more sustainable agricultural systems. Despite its benefits, crop diversification in agriculture is hampered by various technical, organisational and institutional barriers along value chains (input industries, farms, commercial and processing industries, retailers and consumers) and within socio-technical systems.  Intercropping, an agro-ecological practice for crop diversification involving mixtures of arable crop species, has long been recognised for improving the sustainability of crop production. However, they are not widespread in European agriculture, as monoculture systems have been the main model of agriculture developed after World War II.

The IntercropVALUES project sets as its main challenge the development of intercropping for agri-food value chains and the provision of ecosystem services in Europe and Southern countries. 

 

Funded by the Horizon Europe programme

The IntercropVALUES project, funded with 7.4 million euros by Horizon Europe (the EU's main funding programme for research and innovation), aims to exploit the advantages of intercropping to design and manage productive, diversified, resilient, profitable and environmentally friendly cropping systems, acceptable to farmers and agri-food chain actors. It develops both a scientific research action for a better understanding and modelling of the intimate functioning of intercropping and a detailed analysis of blockages and levers at the value chain level to identify credible solutions that can be adopted by farmers and value chain actors.

As a multidisciplinary and multi-stakeholder project, Intercropvalues brings together scientists and local actors representing the food value chain. It includes 27 participating organisations from 15 countries (3 continents) from a wide diversity of organisations and stakeholders. The implementation of IntercropValuES is based on a network of 13 co-innovation case studies (CICS), defined with a "problem-finding approach" in which the actors involved in the consortium are grouped according to the objectives they express. Local or territorial actors (stakeholders) will work together with researchers in a participatory approach to co-innovate in the development of both processing technology and production methods of products and product value along the Fork to Farm chain. The CICS are located in different locations in Denmark, Sweden, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Serbia, Italy, Mozambique and Switzerland.

Participation of INICIATIVAS INNOVADORAS

INICIATIVAS INNOVADORAS participates as a communication officer and as an assistant in the coordination of the project. During the first months, it will develop a communication, dissemination and exploitation plan that will serve as a roadmap during the whole IntercropVALUES period. Furthermore, it will support the dissemination of the project results, adapting the channels to the different end-users, such as farmers, advisors, food processing companies and machinery industries, retailers and citizens, academia, policymakers and influential bodies. Dissemination will be done through social media, the website, videos and infographics, fact sheets and practical policy briefs. Webinars will also be organised for farmers and target industries, as well as training courses for university students.

For information on the project, you can follow the project on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. The website will be launched soon.