According to the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition 2016-2025, 821 million people remain chronically undernourished, 149 million children under 5 years of age are stunted, over 49.5 million children under the age 5 are wasting, over 2 billion people suffer from micronutrient deficiencies and 2 billion people overweight (almost a third of adults worldwide) of whom around 678 million are obese. In contrast, underdeveloped countries face malnutrition or "hidden hunger" due to consuming foods that are poor in nutrients. Therefore, a new approach to food enrichment in modern agriculture is biofortification which has become a promising strategy in modern agriculture. Biofortification through plant breeding consists of developing micronutrient-enhanced crop varieties through conventional breeding where the interaction of genotype with (a)biotic stress factors in a changing climate is important to define the desired level of micronutrient increase. From biofortification to the micronutrient-enhanced food and feed (fϴϴd), the initial grain, which hides all the genetic potential necessary for improving and transforming fϴϴd, is essential. Modern agricultural production is required to offer health-safe fϴϴd with high nutritional value and satisfactory sensory characteristics, respecting the principles of organic farming, the priority in the European Green Deal. Protecting fϴϴd safety, and nutrition in the long-term, will require transformation of fϴϴd systems in terms of access to new resources that are precious in Serbia. Institutional transformations would help utilize the outstanding knowledge and skills accumulated over the years in the developed EU countries. Serbia has great potential that has not been fully utilized, and the EU partners could turn it into an efficient productivity model. With that in mind, we formed a team composed of three collaborators from Serbia, Slovenia, and Greece. We created the transformation model that will launch Serbia into a cutting-edge R&I position in Europe through the CREDIT Vibes project which presents a cloud of Creativity, Research, Education, Development, Innovation, and Transformation (CREDIT) where the training of the highly-skilled researchers and non-research staff is the priority. It was guided by the idea that if Maize Research Institute from Serbia is structurally transformed and thus improves the transfer of agro-technology and agro-knowledge and increases the number of manageable projects, other institutions in Serbia and the region will copy that pattern and enhance. When several smaller micro-transformations unite, the community's interest rises to the global level, and excellence is born.
The overall objectives are:
• Crop management in order to achieve high seed quality and vigour using multi-crop-based organic production
• Establish Technology Transfer Office (TTO) and Project Management Office (PMO)
• Expand networking and collaboration
• Train highly-skilled researchers and non-research staff
• Dissemination, exploitation and communication of project results
