Project description
How meaning shapes the global journey of olive oil
The global success of food products is shaped by both their quality and how they are perceived in different societies. One example is olive oil, a flagship product of Europe’s agri-food sector. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the EUOIL project combines semiotics with ethnography, anthropology and geography to study the meanings, identities and values of olive oil in global supply chains. Morocco and the United States will be used as case studies to explore the socio-cultural effects on food trade. Overall, the project’s findings will support more effective promotion and distribution strategies for agri-food products in an increasingly interconnected global market.
Objective
This project aims at designing an innovative and transferable framework for the analysis of the global circulation of olive oil. The EU is the leader of the olive oil sector, accounting for 67% of production worldwide, while the US represent its main export market. Yet, despite this highly globalised distribution, the effectiveness of the EU's promotional and distribution policies is negatively impacted by a poor understanding of how olive oil products' meanings and identities interact within diverse sociocultural contexts. To fill this gap, this project will develop an interdisciplinary methodology, rooted in semiotics and intertwined with ethnography, anthropology and geography, leading to an extended notion of semantic value. This approach will explore the semantic impact of key interactions along the supply chain: with human actors, such as trade operators, as well as other-than-humans, such as “terroir”, media and distribution spaces. The project will focus on emerging stakeholders, such as women-led cooperatives and other minority groups. The resulting framework will be tested on two relevant cases: the US, as the EU’s main trade partner with a high growth outlook, and Morocco, as an emerging supply partner from the Southern Neighbourhood, increasingly integrating with the EU agricultural system. This fieldwork research will produce an in-depth analysis on olive oil as a social object, and a new lexicon to reshape further studies and management of sociocultural factors affecting the global circulation of food products. Overall, this project will impact the scientific approach to agri-food chains by overcoming the current separation between so-called hard and soft sciences; objects and values; and production and promotion. Furthermore, it will foster the propagation and intercultural translation of the sustainability and quality values embodied in European agri-food products and promoted by the Common Agricultural Policy and Farm to Fork Strategy.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-GF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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90133 Palermo
Italy
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