Madeira Smart Specialization Platform for Agriculture, Food, and Bioeconomy Domain

This is a strategic coordination and innovation framework established under the Regional Smart Specialization Strategy (EREI-RAM 2021–2027). It serves as a collaborative "Regional Platform for Smart Specialization" (PREI) designed to mobilize the region’s scientific and technological assets toward high-growth sustainable sectors.

The Platform for Agriculture, Food and Bioeconomy (PAFB) associate the main regional actors from the agriculture and agrifood sector, representing all the chains of the quadruple helix, including research centers, public administration, agrifood enterprises, farmers, and their representative organizations. The overall challenge is to create a center of expertise that promotes the sustainability and resilience of local production systems and fosters research and innovation in close collaboration with the promotion of bioeconomy initiatives aimed at the agri-food sector. The domain innovative actions are organized around an innovative research agenda (IRA), which was elaborated through co-creation workshops involving more than 40 stakeholder representatives, at the beginning of Platform activities. The IRA has as its main goals to develop:

i) technological innovation in current problems related to the regional agricultural and agri-food sectors.

ii) research programs transversal to transformative activities of the thematic areas, allowing them to respond to societal challenges facing the regional agricultural and agri-food ecosystem.

iii) efforts aimed to strengthen regional, national, and international cooperation among the agents of the ecosystem involved in the pursuit of smart specialization challenges and goals for the domain.

iv) capacity-building actions that promote the acquisition and development of the skills and capabilities to strengthen the sectors’ sustainability and bioeconomy.

In such a context, for PAFB to be part of the S3 Partnership on Traceability and Big Data (S3P T&BD) is an opportunity to reach one of the goals of its IRA and for its actors to participate in the European initiatives in sector digitalization, one of the key challenges of the agricultural and agri-food sectors, which faces the need for reliable data acquisition.

The EREI-RAM Smart Specialization for the domain has 4 thematic axes: Agriculture; Food; Bioeconomy; and Education. Each axis is structured in transformative activities, which are implemented through entrepreneurial discovery, depending on 3 to 6 strategic initiatives that have been prioritized by platform actors, but whose prioritization is currently under validation by external independent consultants, to direct specific funding programs to support their realization.

An important role in the implementation of the IR agenda goals and processes of entrepreneurial discovery is played by the University of Madeira research centers, with the ISOPlexis Center for Sustainable Agriculture and Agri-food Technologies leading research and cooperation activities with platform partners. ISOPlexis participates in other European platforms, such as EMPHASIS and AEGIS-ECPGR, and actually roles several R&D projects, such as AGROSUS, IsUP-AgrO, ROTATES, Co.nTe or Resilient Crops, that are aligned with EREI-RAM goals for PAAB domain, and where the data acquisition and digitalization key milestones to improve the quality, sustainability and resilience of these sector, based on local endogenous genetic resources and productions, in context of climate changes and other global challenges that they are facing. In this context, we want to point out the efforts for digitalization of traditional vineyards and banana plantations and implementation of network agrosystems and farms such as Living Labs, that can generate big data for modulization of local food production systems.