Diversifood: Cultivating diversity and food quality

11 April 2019. Brussels. DIVERSIFOOD is a European project aiming at enriching cultivated biodiversity by testing, renewing and promoting underutilized or forgotten crop species. Through multi-actor approaches, it supports the spread of a new food culture, based on diverse, tasty and healthy food.

To deal with this issue, the DIVERSIFOOD team organised a forum with policy makers and stakeholders. Diversifood results and key lessons were shared, such as:

• new approaches for cultivated biodiversity management, for plant breeding for sustainable farming systems, 
• and new relationships among actors of the food systems. 

In the afternoon there was time  for discussions, to share knowledge, collect feedbacks and to further develop current policies for cultivating diversity and food quality  (for FP9, CAP 2020,…). The outputs of this workshop will feed the final recommendations of Diversifood.

Annette Schneegans of #DGAGRI talked 

about the challenges of food 

diversity in agriculture and research funding

Presentations:

• Underutilized/forgotten crops: definitions and concepts (A. Costanzo, ORC) 
• New approaches for plant breeding for for sustainable farming systems (I. Goldringer, INRA)
• First results regarding the EU experimentation of Heterogeneous Material marketing: presentation of cases studies (A. Costanzo, ORC) 
• Value chain for produces coming from participatory plant breeding/underutilized crops (B. Oehen, FiBL) 
• From on farm conservation to Community biodiversity management (R. Bocci, RSR)

Related:

1 November 2017. Kigali, Rwanda. FNI and DIVERSIFOOD, in collaboration with Biodiversity International and LI-BIRD, Nepal hosted a side event on the development of community seed banks during the Seventh Session of the Governing Body of the Plant Treaty.

The fast development of community seed banks in different parts of the world is increasingly contributing to the conservation and sustainable use of crop genetic diversity, and thus to the implementation of the Plant Treaty. At the side event two major studies that shed light on this current development were presented:

• Community Seed Banks – Origin, evolution and prospects from Biodiversity International and 
• Survey of community seed banks in Europe by the EU Horizon 2020 project DIVERSIFOOD.

The report “Community Seed Banks: Sharing Experiences from North and South“presents the contents of the event, as well as key decisions from the Governing Body Session of relevance for communityseed banks. What are the key messages of these resolutions? And how will they be followed up in practice among the Contracting Parties? The report provides some answers, at the same time highlighting how DIVERSIFOOD project follows up on this question.
Download the report

Related:

Agroecological practices for sustainable agriculture in Benin