Last Friday, the launch meeting of the SOSFood project took place in Compostela, at the CiTIUS facilities. This arises from the collaboration between USC, the Datalife digital innovation hub and the University of Vigo through the Investigacións Agro-ambientais e Alimentarias group.
The main researcher of the project, Jesús Simal Gándara, attached to CISPAC and professor at UVigo, emphasizes the relevance of SOSfood in the current context. “The farmers’ demonstrations against the 2030 Agenda highlight the importance of involving all interested parties, including the farmers themselves, in the development and implementation of policies related to agriculture and the environment,” he says. Therefore, adds the person responsible for the proposal, “it is crucial to find a balance between the need to protect the environment and promote sustainable agricultural practices, while providing support and ensuring the profitability of agricultural, livestock and fishing activities”.
SOSFood will use the potential of data exploitation technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) to provide an accurate and global picture of the European food system, thus promoting the development of predictive tools. This consortium, in which 17 entities from all over Europe participate, including USC through the Centro Singular de Investigación en Tecnoloxías Intelixentes (CiTIUS), recognizes “the urgent need” to intervene in the food system to make it more productive, inclusive, sustainable and resilient, given the current environmental emergency situation. The ultimate goal is to help the different parties involved in the food chain to make well-informed decisions, focusing on involving all links in the value chain: production, transformation, distribution, sale, consumption and waste management.
The project will carry out an interdisciplinary analysis of the food system, involving specialists from the European environment in health, nutrition, economy, environment and health. The results of the project are aimed at all the actors in the value chain, and importantly, at the final consumer, together with a set of recommendations based on scientific evidence, which are aimed at guiding the future policies of the European Union.
SOSFood will carry out three case studies in three different European settings: Galicia (representing an autonomous region); Athens (a metropolitan area); and Lithuania (a state area), with the aim of validating the feasibility and representativeness of the analysis methods and the developed algorithms. This will be the culmination of an initiative that is presented as a significant milestone in the search for healthy (and fair price) solutions to global food challenges, promoting collaboration between various sectors and using technology to address the complexity of the European food system.
This initiative has the support of the European Commission’s ‘Horizon Europe’ Framework Program. It constitutes an unprecedented effort in the EU in order to analyze the growing environmental emergency and transforming the food value chain in Europe, being assessed by the Commission as the best project of all those presented.
According to estimates by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in 2050 it could be necessary to “produce 60% more food” to supply a world population of 9.3 billion people. Hence the relevance of projects like this.
