The IV Steering Committee meeting was the occasion to monitor the project’s interregional learning activities, financial issues and communication strategy that had taken place during the last semester.
Furthermore, project partners presented the state of the art of their Action Plan’s first draft, elaborated during this IV semester as a result of the learning process which had included the implementation in the partner’s regions of methodologies to identify the barriers and needs of the digitization of the agrifood value chain, elaboration of catalogues of technologies and data and the identification of the good practices in digitization of the agrifood sector. These good practices were explored during the III semester and enabled project partners to learn more about them and to inspire them in the drafting of the Action Plan that will improve the Policy Instruments tackled by the project.
Next semester (1st June, 30th November) REGIONS 4FOOD project partners will be involved in the peer review phase of the Action Plans drafts: all actions included there are directly inspired by the interregional learning achieved during the previous semesters, mainly by the study visits made to explore the good practices in digitization of the agrifood value chain.
Peer review will enable project partners to improve their Action Plans drafts. Project partners will incorporate, whenever possible, the suggestions resulting from the peer reviews during the last semester of Phase I (1st December 2020 - 31 May 2021) thus achieving their final Action Plan, which will be implemented during Phase II (1st June 2021 - 31st May 2023).
Also, project partners will work on a draft of strategic policy recommendations that deal with the project's theme (policies and strategies that enhance the digitization of the agrifood value chain) that will be debated with an European expert in the next Interregional Seminar at the end of the semester. Both outputs (peer reviews of the Action Plans and draft of strategic policy recommendations) will be discussed at regional level with the partners' stakeholders.
