For the 2nd AREPO Plenary Meeting for 2017 held in Crete, Anne Clermontelle, European agri-food strategies expert, has presented the progress of the Interreg Sudoe project AGROSMARTcoop.
AREPO is actively participating to the projet since july 2016. To briefly reminding the project, AGROSMARTcoop is a European project cofinanced at 75% by the ERDF. It aims to revitalize the economic growth of the Sudoe rural areas with the support of their agri-food cooperatives, especially through the creation of a virtual platform for intercooperation. This platform will be equipped with advanced services to support and improve the sustainable technological innovation and the intelligent marketing, with the sharing of best practices between cooperatives.
The consortium covers 6 Regions of the Sudoe: Galicia, Castilla-La Mancha, Basque Country and Extremadura in Spain, Norte Region in Portugal and Nouvelle-Aquitaine in France, and is composed of 8 partners with 5 cooperatives unions, 2 research centers and AREPO.
The project duration is 24 months for a total budget of 1 295 000 € to implement its activities, which means 925 000 € of ERDF help.
Regarding the project progress, the activities implementation is suffering some delays but the benchmarking of strenghts and needs of agri-food cooperatives of the Sudoe on sustainable technological innovation and intelligent marketing is finalizing and the virtual platform of intercooperation is being developed.
AREPO has a budget of 112 500 euros cofinanced at 75% by the ERDF. We have actively participated to the benchmarking of intelligent marketing with our experience and our network of Regions, and we will play a key role in activities of promotion, networking and results dissemination to our member Regions and to strategic political representatives. This is the reason why we will organize our great European Event in March 2018.
This event is organized every 2 or 3 years and consists to highlight the importance of quality products to European institutions.
The event is generally built in two parts:
- An afternoon of conferences with high-level speakers on a priority theme of AREPO;
- An evening of presentation and tasting of products under European quality schemes of our member Regions.
AREPO will organize this event for the 4th time and it is important to highlight the systematic presence of the European Commissioner of Agriculture: Mrs Fischer Boel in 2009, Mr Ciolos in 2011 and Mr Hogan in 2015. This event is covered by the press and is a real opportunity for agri-food cooperatives of the Sudoe to communicate on the AGROSMARTcoop project and to promote their quality products.
