Some thoughts after our Technical Meeting

On November 28, we celebrated our first face to face technical meeting after the pandemic crisis. On behalf of the Traceability and Big Data Thematic Partnership Coordinator Team, I want to thank everybody for their attendance and active participation. Really, it was a pride and a pleasure to be able to attend this event with all of you.

As we know, this partnership counts with 24 regions and 13 associated entities coming from 14 European countries working together with the aim of contributing to the digitisation of the agrifood value chain through digital technologies and data. That means it has been a very good playground for interregional cooperation amongst our members. During the last years, projects such as SmartAgriHubs, Hiba and Regions 4 Food, have come as a result of the common work done within the partnership.

Nevertheless, our regional contexts have changed, also the international context, the agrifood sector needs have evolved and new challenges have emerged, but many of the former ones are still valid.

At the end of the meeting, we have seen the most important achievements we have got during these years: we have our agrifood sector, competence centres and a very wide variety of innovation structures and testing facilities, we have clusters and Digital Innovation Hubs, we have stakeholders working in many technologies, we have support from our regions and support from the European Commission in the form of new tools, and what is more, we have expectations about this partnership, so at this point, we need to deal with all these elements and re-think how our partnership can work and help our agrifood sector in the current context.

I think it has been really enriching working specifically on learning communities and on the identification of potential interregional investments during our meeting. It is true that we need to learn each one from each other. We have a lot of knowledge and experience that help us improve our agrifood sector more and better. We really thank you for your effort done in defining topics and how the learning communities could work.

Also for your work done in the panel about new projects. The European Commission is asking us to work together, regions, clusters, all types of organisations and we have to take advantage of the different existing opportunities.

All of us have very clear strategic lines in your regions linked to the transformation of the agrifood sector in terms of digitalisation and sustainability. Therefore, we need to see to this partnership as an opportunity to actually help our agrifood sectors to do that.

“If you want to go fast, go alone but if you want to go far, go together”. This is what the partnership can offer, going further. This is the added value of the Traceability and Big Data partnership. We have been working on this partnership for six years now and Andalusia has been leading this partnership together with Emilia Romagna and we have been doing our best but the only way we will actually succeed and meet expectations is having all regions and associate members committed to participate actively. Having your politicians, your workforce but also you committed and actively involved in the development of the activities.

We believe this meeting has represented a first step in our way to be a successful and fruitful partnership. Thank you all of you and go ahead!

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