Growing multiple crops simultaneously on the same field, the so-called “intercropping” practice has almost disappeared from our European agricultural landscapes, despite its numerous environmental, economic, and nutritional benefits.
The IntercropVALUES project, which aims to develop cereal-legume intercropping along the value chain, investigated the barriers to the use of intercropping across Europe.
The spread of intercropping is hindered by barriers of different types (e.g., cultural, financial, organisational, technical) affecting all actors of the food value chain. When it comes to identifying solutions, the whole causal chains linking barriers together should be considered.
Intercropping won’t develop without a coordinated commitment from all stakeholders of the food value chain, including policymakers. For this reason, IntercropVALUES, under the coordination of IFOAM Organics Europe and Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), has developed a policy brief that is now released. This policy brief presents a series of five recommendations policymakers should consider to foster the use of intercropping:
- Promote the development of coordinated value chains adapted to intercropping
- Enhance the involvement of stakeholders in policy-making
- Ensure coherency between policy objectives and instruments
- Increase and facilitate access to financial support for all actors involved in intercropping value chains
- Improve advisor training and knowledge transfer
In the next months, the policy brief will be disseminated and presented at different events, one of them being the consortium meeting that will take place in Louvain La Neuve on September 10-12 2024. If you want to read the brief and learn more about the barriers to intercropping and the recommendations proposed to solve them, you can find it here.
This news article was written by Claire Morelle, IFOAM Organics Europe.