An awareness workshop was organized on Wednesday in Errachidia, with the aim of presenting the conclusions of the MED-LINKS project aimed at providing small producers with adapted and efficient solutions improving efficiency, sustainability and equity throughout the fruit and vegetable supply chains in Mediterranean partner countries, namely Morocco, France, Italy, Greece and Egypt.
The project is coordinated by the University of Bologna (Italy), with the participation in particular of the universities of Moulay Ismail in Meknes and Cadi Ayyad in Marrakech, in addition to several other universities around the Mediterranean.
Co-funded under the Partnership for Research and Innovation in the Mediterranean (PRIMA), the project focuses on the assessment of the competitive performance of Mediterranean supply chains and the analysis of consumer preferences, as well as the promotion of adoption and implementation of quality and sustainability standards.
In a press statement, the international coordinator of the project, Luca Camanzi, indicated that the project aims to provide actors in the small-scale supply chain with management practices and to foster optimized commercial relationships improving quality, sustainability and profitability.
It is also about providing farmers with innovative managerial tools and business models allowing them better decision-making and resilience against constraints linked in particular to access to markets, he said.
For his part, the local coordinator of the project, Mohamed Ait Hou, noted that this workshop aims to present the conclusions of the Med Links project, which includes 11 research teams representing five Mediterranean countries.
The project should offer small farmers tailor-made innovative solutions that allow them to reposition themselves in the supply chain and maintain their competitiveness on the markets, said Mr. Ait Hou, also a teacher-researcher at the Faculty of Science and Technology. Errachidia techniques at Moulay Ismail University.
He also reported the launch of a digital marketing platform in five languages, aimed at explaining to farmers how to obtain quality certificates, and promoting links between producers and consumers.
MED-LINKS has implemented optimization processes tailored to specific business clusters in three different fruit and vegetable supply chain systems namely Short Local Food Supply Chains (SFSC), Green Public Market (GPP) and export-oriented supply chains (EOSC).
