The acting Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Luis Planas, attends the informal Council of Ministers of Agriculture of the European Union, organized by the Romanian Presidency in Bucharest. In this meeting the topic of research in agriculture and bioeconomy has been addressed.
In this framework, Planas considers the promotion and deployment of the opportunities offered by the bioeconomy a priority to achieve an economically sustainable activity that benefits people who live in rural areas and society as a whole. Therefore, it values positively that the bioeconomy is included as a specific objective of the new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and can be addressed from both pillars.
Within the first pillar (direct payments), eco-schemes offer the possibility of financing annual commitments for the management and valuation of agricultural and livestock waste. Also in the first pillar, sectoral interventions will facilitate the design of measures to encourage new practices aimed at promoting a more efficient and circular use of the resources used in food production.
Likewise, the minister pointed out that the second pillar (rural development) also offers multiple opportunities to establish synergies between agriculture, livestock and the bioeconomy, through climate and environmental commitments or through the promotion of investments oriented towards sustainable solutions.
In this context, Planas believes that public policies, such as the CAP and the Horizon Europe, should provide a "clear impulse" to make the bioeconomy an economically sustainable activity in the medium and long term.
Also, the minister has expressed the need for farmers to identify the positive economic returns of the bioeconomy. Therefore, communication, dissemination and training are essential. Innovative technologies, new products of biological origin, new value chains and new industrial applications must also be developed. The community initiatives developed within the framework of Horizon 2020 "are a good example in this sense".