Agriculture: FAO-ENEA webinar on promoting sustainable agri-food systems

To focus on collaborative research to achieve the agrofood objectives across multiple goals and targets of the 2030 Agenda: this is the core message of the webinar recently organized by FAO and ENEA to take stock of the fallouts of the Memorandum of Understanding signed in 2018 between FAO and CNR, CREA, ENEA and ISPRA. In particular, the virtual meeting allowed to share the results of the research work carried out by the visiting scientists from Africa to ENEA in the context of ENEA collaboration with TWAS (The World Academy of Sciences) and in the field of microbiome application for sustainable agri-food systems.

Actually, the partnership with TWAS - a “Programme unit” within the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) - has allowed, among other things, to host scientists from Burkina Faso, the Republic of the Congo and Cameroon who worked in the laboratories of ENEA SSPT Department, under the supervision of Dr. Massimo Iannetta and Dr. Annamaria Bevivino.

The ENEA presentations touched on various fields of activity such as:  use of local plant extracts as biocontrol agents against seed-borne fungi in Burkina Faso; strategies for increasing soil organic matter in the mixed-species plantations of Acacia and Eucalyptus in the Congolese coastal plains; optimization of the antimicrobial efficiency of natural antimicrobial compounds in association with the mild heat treatment to improve safety and microbial stability of fruit juices and; finally, the microbiome applications to foster food quality and safety within the Horizon SIMBA project.

Ambassador Lo Monaco, head of the Italian Representation at the United Nations in Rome, underlined, together with the FAO referent for MoU Dr. Selvaraju Ramasamy, the importance of this collaboration.

The CNR, CREA and ISPRA contributions on the research activities of their bodies on the theme of the sustainability of agri-food systems, aimed at underlining the importance of a close cooperation and global involvement towards the final goals set in the 2030 Agenda, closed the proceedings.