25 Jan The agriculture of Veneto Region towards sustainability with “Biodiversity Friend”
The new year started under the best auspices for the agriculture of the Veneto region. The Council of the Regione Veneto through the Resolution n. 2860, 30/12/2013, approved the Project “Qualitative characterization of the principal fruit and vegetable products of the Veneto region and their environment of production”. The Project amount is 1.300.000 euro to be used for the conservation of the products and their original place of production; in this context the relation between “product and environment” is fundamental to guarantee, both for farmers and consumers, the identity of the products, food safety and responsible consumption.
Through this resolution the Council of the Regione Veneto supported the themes that the WBA used in 2010, International Year of Biodiversity, to propose the standard “Biodiversity Friend” to certify the conservation of biodiversity in agriculture.
The Project will be developed through three actions. The first action concerns the “Qualitative characterization of the fruit and vegetable products” by means of nutritional-nutraceutical and metabolomic analysis on the most important DOP/IGP products cultivated in the Veneto region. The second action concerns the “Qualitative characterization of the cultivation environment of the fruit and vegetable products” through synthetic methods of biomonitoring to evaluate the environmental quality and the biodiversity conservation in some hundred farms of the Veneto region. In particular, the Regione del Veneto in the Project supports the protocol “Biodiversity Friend” as a method of evaluating the quality of air, water and soil, and recognizes that it is the “first and, until now, the only certification able to evaluate the biodiversity conservation in agriculture”. The third action, finally, concerns the “Project communication activities”.
After the patronage of the Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies obtained at the presentation of the protocol in 2010, it is the first significant recognition of our standard at an institutional level. The next goal will be the recognition of “Biodiversity Friend” as a “quality system” for the Italian and European agriculture, according to the trends determined by the new Community Regulation 2014-2020 to support the rural development (Reg. EAFRD n. 1305/2013).
