The CORE Organic (CO) Cofund programme period from 2016 to 2022 is the fourth continuous period of the CO network and it has further highlighted the relevance of transnational collaboration among the CORE Organic funders, stakeholder partners and research community. During the programme period CO partners have identified a set of recommendations to exploit the innovation potential on the programme level and in future research projects with the objective to increase the overall impact of the programme and disseminate results from the research in organic food and farming.
On the programme level: On 1 October 2019, the network of 26 ministries and research councils from 19 countries/regions celebrated CORE Organic’s 15th year of activity. Based on an impact assessment a comprehensive CORE Organic Report was prepared. The report highlights the networks’ impact by increasing innovation potential, making knowledge accessibility, aligning national research and international outreach in support of the ERA-NET’s objectives. By joining forces, the network sustained focused and coordinated research and innovation efforts, covering the most important challenges of organic value chains. The objective of CO has been, from the beginning, the enhancement of the European Research Area (ERA) on organic food and farming with more efficient use of research funds and with a higher impact of research on the organic sector's development. This has been achieved, among other things, by reducing redundancies between EU and national funding and by ensuring better use of the limited resources for research and innovation, thus achieving critical mass in research on organic food and farming. These improvements aimed at supporting the development of a larger and more sustainable organic food system, including farming practices, processing and innovative value chains, with the purpose of fulfilling the growing demand for organic products, subsequently supporting health, trade and job creation. After presently 17 years of experience, CO Cofund fulfilled its mission. Significant parts of national and EU research funding in organic food and agriculture were channeled into a common pot for transnational projects.
On the transnational project level: During the CO Cofund programme period, the CO consortium launched three transnational calls (2016, 2019 and 2021), and selected 29 transnational research projects for funding. During the CO Cofund Final Research Seminar held on 17-18 May, 2022 in Brussels (photo below), scientific results from some of the selected projects were presented emphasising two key findings:
1) multi-actor approach that was the key element since the beginning of CORE Organic and still plays an instrumental role when facing the challenges of today’s agri-food systems, and-
2) relevance of the inter- and transdisciplinary approach together with the system approach adopted in the CO research projects due to its capacity to encompass the entire food system, e.g. by better involving farmers, food processors, retailers, focus on SMEs and consumers. The involvement of partners from the whole value chain requires further effort and sound planning already during the call preparation and development phase of the proposal. The projects should already in the proposal phase focus on exploitable, measurable and relevant results for the organic sector and its stakeholders along the value chain, improve further dissemination practices and connect researchers, practitioners, consumers, and policy makers. The discussion also proved that organic food and farming offers concrete solutions to today's existing challenges for more resilient food and farming practices.
