European Union officials, scientists, NGOs and farmers met in Brussels on Thursday and Friday to ask how the bloc's agricultural research can be turned into businesses that scale while public money is tight, AgFunderNews reported.
The EU AgRI 2040 conference, hosted by the European Commission, gathered views on the strategic research and innovation framework the Commission adopted on 8 September for agriculture, forestry and rural areas. It sets out eight action areas, from soil health and animal welfare to rural demographics and artificial intelligence, which the Commission describes as starting points that can change with stakeholder input. A separate but linked roadmap, Food 2040, covers food processing, aquaculture and diets.
Elisabeth Werner, the Commission's director-general for agriculture and rural development, said Europe is as good at innovation as any other continent but that its innovations do not find their way to deployment. "If you want to have an idea about speed, look to China," she said.
Agriculture commissioner Christophe Hansen spoke of "a lot of pressure on the farming budget" and called for a stronger link between the Horizon Europe research programme and the Common Agricultural Policy, whose 2028-2034 budget is under negotiation. The Commission also hopes a proposed €234 billion European Competitiveness Fund, together with Horizon's proposed €175 billion, would make €409 billion available for innovation across sectors, agriculture included. Hansen said entrepreneurs had told him they move to the United States because reaching the market takes one or two years there and around ten in Europe.
Bureaucracy was a recurring complaint. A Finnish farmer described an EU certification that involved three or four bodies, against one in the United States. Iulia Blagu, who manages a 920-hectare family farm in Romania and leads the women farmers' association ANFA, said everything that reaches her farm comes "too late and too expensive", and that solutions developed in recent years had not been accessible to her through long droughts.
Ekaterina Zaharieva, commissioner for startups, research and innovation, said public bodies should buy more from European innovators so that a first public contract gives companies and investors confidence. Bill Callanan, chief inspector at Ireland's Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, said governments can help by expanding demonstration facilities where companies test their processes, and urged researchers to communicate beyond technical reports.
Speakers also said demand for new products needs building. EIT Food chief executive Richard Zaltzman said adoption needs innovation across the whole value chain at once, while James Morrison of the Commission's research directorate said regulation "creates markets" and that wider regulatory sandboxes could help startups scale. Blagu put the farmers' test simply: if something works in the lab but fails on ten farms, "then we have the answer."
Reported for AgFunderNews by Rich Bellis.
Photo: Karen Eliot / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Source: AgFunderNews
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