Maria da Graça Carvalho participated today in the Conference on Bioeconomy-Food, Wellbeing and Environment that took place in Brussels. The conference made part of the 1st FAB-Industry-Forum.
The member of the ITRE committee participated in the session Food, Wellbeing, Environment - drivers or issues of concern?. Ms Carvalho´s intervention focused on the way in which food, wellbeing and the environment has been dealt with under H2020 and secondly on a consideration of the different instruments that will foster innovation and will encourage the valorisation of research in a commercial context. To conclude, MEP Carvalho made an appeal with regard to the current negotiation centring on the budget.
In the roundtable discussion participated also Ciaran Mangan, EU Commission; Françoise Gorga, ETP; Bettina Zeuch, Food Industry and Gert Huemer, SME Association.
The Forum was supported by the European Union's 7th Framework Research Programme and it was organized by the Food Cluster Initiative which joins regional food and bio-projects in the European Research Area together with the CommNet network, communicating the bioeconomy and the themes Food-Agri-Bio (F.A.B)
New solutions for big challenges lie at the heart of EU funded research projects, which are financed with 50 bn Euro for the years 2007-2013. Still the technology transfer which has to translate the scientific knowledge generated by the research projects into economic applications and into public policy is a widely unknown field.
The conference pretended to look in depth into the mechanisms behind the technology transfer in the fields of bioeconomy and the sub-themes food, wellbeing and environment. In 2010, the bioeconomy represented about 2 trillion € annual turnover, 1 trillion € value added, +/-9% GDP and 22 million jobs, +/- 9% of the EU´s work force.