Supported by countries and regions having an island context, including Cyprus (Cyprus), the North-Aegean and Thessaly (Greece), Malta, Sicily and Sardinia (Italy), Corsica (France), the Balearic islands (Spain), to which are associated the Azores islands (Portugal), the project aims at improving the efficiency of regional policies by reinforcing the innovation capacities for agriculture.

This project takes place in a food crisis context justifying a “new global agricultural policy” with domestic agriculture development at stake in the South and reorientation towards a more environmentally friendly agriculture in the North. The Mediterranean islands, between North and South, must face both issues at stake.

The ambition is to create a sustainable system of closer relationship among public authorities in order to better coordinate their search for solutions to similar problems in their agriculture, and thus improve, altogether, the efficiency of regional policies. But it is also to help economic, technical and scientific actors of the different islands to meet each other in this framework. While facing the same difficulties, indeed they rarely, or never, get to know each other.

In front of the isolation of the institutional and economic actors, and the tendency to look for solutions in a strictly local context and to reject solutions coming from the continent as they are considered, often rightly, as ill-suited, create a real obstacle to innovation and public policies’ efficiency. The project intends to deliver a new answer: breaking isolation by bringing the islands together.

Starting from a common vision of problems, partners work together with the objective of testing and setting up an innovating method to disseminate innovation in the insular agricultural and rural world, which will serve as a basis for the follow up of their cooperation.

As a first step, the definition of the innovating method is based on the joint assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of each island-region in terms of innovation for agriculture and on the identification of efficient practices, especially with respect to new relationships to establish between the public authorities and actors of the rural and agricultural world in the islands (Component 2).

The livestock breeding sector, the importance of which is underlined for the islands, serves as test-sector, on a methodological point of view, to plan the activities of the future network, based on a detailed assessment of methods, good practices and experiences of each region in terms of innovation for agriculture in this sector. (Component 3)