The EPSO Working Group on Nutritional Security finalised its programme for its fourth workshop taking place online on the 4th December 2023.

The food nutritional security goal foresees to ensure sufficient, safe, highly nutritious food, sustain local communities and foster correct lifestyles and healthy ageing for all. The current climate change and other stress factors, such as world population growth, wars and local conflicts, new emerging zoonotic diseases, are impacting on our dietary choices.

To reach the nutritional security goal, there is a need to redesign our food systems towards more sustainable, resilient ones which can be capable of providing enough food with a high nutritional quality for everyone.

In this context, the EPSO ‘Nutritional Security’ Working Group aims to discuss and contribute to defining new paths and solutions for innovative solutions in the food and nutrition area:

  • Genetic improvement of major and minor crops
  • Novel technologies for crop biofortification
  • Minor crops and novel foods for more sustainable productions and nutritious diets
  • Assessing the nutritional value of high nutritious food
  • Discussion towards the next consensus document

Registration and talk title submissions should be made by email to Katia Petroni [email protected] and Angelo Santino [email protected] until 1st December 2023.

The workshop will start at 13:45 and end at 17:15.

We look forward to meeting you on the 4th December!

Katia, Angelo, Monica, Chiara, Marina, Theresa and Karin

Katia Petroni, Angelo Santino, Monica Schreiner, Chiara Tonelli, Marina Korn, Theresa Fitzpatrick (Organising Committee) and Karin Metzlaff (EPSO Executive Director).

Click here to read:  The Programme of the 4th workshop on Nutritional Security at 27.11.2023

Contacts:

Katia Petroni, University of Milan, IT & EPSO NS WG

Angelo Santino, CNR, IT & EPSO NS WG chair

The 26th Europe-wide seminar of the series supported by the European Plant Science Organisation (EPSO) and aimed at the Plant Science community and its stakeholders.

TTT: The seminar will be held online each third Thursday of the month at three (CET).

 On 19th October 2023 at 15:00 (CET) we will present three talks exploring Plants and Nutritional Security.

Dr Angelo Santino, Institute of Sciences of Food Production, CNR, Lecce, Italy: “NGTs for nutritional improvement of Solanaceae”

Dr Ian Dawson, SRUC, UK and CIFOR-ICRAF, Kenya: “Considering climate change when diversifying future food systems with healthful ‘forgotten crops’: sub-Saharan Africa as a case study for wider application”

Assoc Prof Katia Petroni, Department of Biosciences, University of Milan, Italy: “Unlocking the health benefits of anthocyanin-enhanced diets”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The seminars will be hosted on Zoom and last approximately 1.5 hours. Numbers will be limited to 300 attendees and therefore please register early if you would like to join. There will be ample opportunities to ask questions and join the debate. So please join us to support this new and exciting initiative for European Plant Science by following this link just prior to the start of the seminar.

EPSO members register in advance for this meeting: registration link

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

In the coming months we will be on the lookout for talented plant scientists among the EPSO membership to present their findings and perspectives to the EPSO seminar series. If we approach you to talk, we hope you will be happy to support the initiative. This is a fantastic opportunity for both eminent world leaders and talented up-and-coming early career researchers to present their research to an international audience and to network with potential collaborators. If you wish to suggest a theme for one of the autumn seminars and / or nominate yourself or one of your colleagues to give a seminar, we most welcome your suggestions. Please contact Tim George ([email protected]) to provide your name and potential talk title.

We look forward to seeing you all for the 26th EPSO seminar on the 19th October 2023.

 Tim George, Alan Schulman and Marie-Theres Hauser

EPSO Plant Science Seminar Series Organising Committee

 Click here to read: Full EPSO news item

 

Contacts:

Tim George, Hutton / UK & EPSO Board

Alan Schulman, LUKE / FI & Adviser to the EPSO Board

Marie-Theres Hauser BOKU / AT & EPSO Board

 

National funders in the European Research Area Network on Sustainable Crop Production (SusCrop ERA-net) together with experts from science and stakeholders developed (supported by 2 workshops)  the white paper on ‘Future Research Needs in Sustainable Agriculture’. 

The four main research needs are:

  • Topic 1: Knowledge generation in relation to nutritional value and health benefits of protein / niche crops;
  • Topic 2: Knowledge generation and transfer on multi-stress resistance for stable yield;
  • Topic 3: Innovation pipeline: Protein / niche crops for food and feed value chains: How to build a value chain for uncultivated protein / niche crops;
  • Topic 4: Impact assessment and trade-offs.

The white paper is available both on the SusCrop website and to download here.

Please disseminate this widely for consideration at European as well as national levels.

Contacts:

Heather McKhann, INRAE & SusCrop ERA-Net (prepared synthesis as white paper)

Christian Breuer, PTJ & SusCrop ERA-Net co-ordinator

Karin Metzlaff, EPSO & official observer SusCrop ERA-Net

 

The EPSO Working Group on Nutritional Security finalised its statement on Nutritional Security and has the pleasure to announce its fourth workshop will take place online on 4th December 2023

Nutritional Security Statement:

 Plant research and innovation can contribute through four main paths to achieve Nutritional Security (NS):

  • Underutilised nutritious fruit, vegetable, and pulse crops: improve their economic performance and further increase their nutritional quality
  • Biofortification: increase micronutrients in staple crops, enrich compounds that enhance the bioavailability of micronutrients, or both
  • Supplements: add beneficial compounds during food processing – the most common strategy until now, but the mainly synthetic compounds need to be replaced by their natural counterparts in future
  • Novel Food: re-design food systems to include alternative, resource-saving terrestrial and aquatic food sources such as halophytes and macroalgae

For all four pathways attention has to be paid to reducing allergens and anti-nutrients.

 The fourth workshop:

UPDATE: The next meeting foreseen in Milan in September is postponed to 4th December and will be held online.

The food nutritional security goal foresees to ensure sufficient, safe, highly nutritious food, sustain local communities and foster correct lifestyles and healthy ageing for all. The current climate change and other stressors, such as world population growth, wars and local conflicts, new emerging zoonotic diseases, are impacting on our dietary choices. To reach the nutritional security goal, there is a need to redesign our food systems towards more sustainable, resilient ones which can be capable of providing enough food with a high nutritional quality for everyone.

In this context, the EPSO ‘Nutritional Security’ Working Group aims to discuss and contribute to defining new paths and solutions for innovative solutions in the food and nutrition area.

Registration and talk title submission should be made by email to Katia Petroni and Angelo Santino until 20th October 2023.

We look forward to meeting you in September!

Katia, Angelo, Monica, Chiara, Marina, Theresa and Karin

Katia Petroni, Angelo Santino, Monica Schreiner, Chiara Tonelli, Marina Korn, Theresa Fitzpatrick (Organising Committee) and Karin Metzlaff (EPSO Executive Director).

Click here to read:

The Statement on Nutritional Security, 31.05.2023

Updated announcement, 12.07.2023

Contacts:

Katia Petroni, University of Milan, IT & EPSO NS WG

Angelo Santino, CNR, IT & EPSO NS WG Chair

EPSO welcomes the European Commission consultation and provides input on the achievements and suggests where improve Horizon Europe and the next Framework Programme (FP) to have a higher impact. 

The European Research and Innovation FPs are crucial to enable scientists and innovators across Europe to collaborate to generate knowledge, to apply this knowledge to address today’s and future challenges and to help build a strong, competitive and resilient, inclusive and democratic European society and improve life on earth.

Plant scientists took an active role in the EU FPs from the start and want to contribute in the future.

They are active in pillar 1, mainly in the European Research Council and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, both working very well.

They could contribute more to pillar 2, particularly in cluster 6 on Food, bioeconomy, natural resources, agriculture and environment. To this end, we suggest the following improvements:

  • Further implement the following concepts:
    • Address Food and Nutritional Security, environmental sustainability, biodiversity (natural and cultivated) and human health in parallel as much as possible.
    • Improve / adapt crops towards ‘Diverse crops for diverse diets and human health and resilient production’.
    • ‘Combine approaches on crop improvement, crop management and crop processing’.
    • Policy makers should define the goals but leave the pathways to how to achieve these open to the stakeholders
  • Create a new heading ‘Enabling sustainable crop improvement’ in the Work Programme and / or partnership ‘CropBooster-Quest’:
    • CropBooster-Quest – Plant (systems) biology, crop improvement and plant breeding to achieve a critical mass investment enabling the community to substantially help addressing the challenges mentioned above and interacting with partnerships on biodiversity, agroecology, food systems.
    • To bridge the gap until a new partnership can be active, add the heading ‘Enabling sustainable crop improvement’ in the Work Programme.
  • Better link the health cluster (1) with the food, agriculture, biotechnology cluster (6) to truly enable plant biologists, breeders, processors, nutritional scientist and health experts to interdisciplinary research and innovation to improve nutritional compounds in plants for the human diet, which are then further protected during crop processing and human digestion. In addition, plant made pharmaceuticals can be co-developed for medical purposes.

 All scientists would benefit from more general improvements in pillar 2 across all disciplines and sectors:

  • Types of action: Add Research Actions (RAs) in pillar 2 to overcome the gap of collaborative basic research and complete the research and innovation cycle.
  • Identify funding priorities: Consult European academic associations. Define the goals, but not the pathways to how to reach these to truly enable innovation.
  • Implementation procedures: Increase trust in and flexibility for beneficiaries.

In the EPSO position paper we briefly explain each of these recommendations.

EPSO looks forward to further discuss and help implement these recommendations with colleagues from the European Commission and the Member State ministries and funders.

Click here to read: Full EPSO position paper on Horizon Europe and beyond

EPSO submission to the EC consultation is available here

Contacts:

Karin Metzlaff, EPSO Executive Director, BE

Odd Arne Rognli, NMBU, NO & EPSO President

The CBE Joint Undertaking allocates €215.5 million in its 2023 WP to advancing competitive circular bio-based industries in Europe across 18 topics.

Europe’s climate targets for 2030 and increasing Europe’s strategic autonomy are the twin objectives of the Circular Bio-based Europe Joint Undertaking (CBE JU) in the annual Work Programme for 2023 published recently. Approved projects from 18 topics will further circular and sustainable production in accordance with the European Green Deal.

An Info Day in Brussels is planned for 20 April 2023 and will also be available online. On the Info Day, the call for proposals will open with a deadline of 20 September 2023. Further details are provided in the link.

The call covers three broad areas of intervention: (i) innovation actions – flagship; (ii) innovation actions and (iii) research and innovation actions. Topics for submission will be published on the EU’s Funding and tenders portal.

Horizon Europe funds CBE JU with private investments supplementing each Euro of public funding committed.

Other partnerships that started already and are relevant to Plant Scientists include, for example, Biodiversity (the Biodversa+ call was published in 2022) under Horizon Europe cluster 6.

ERA4Health (https://era4health.eu/ ), a new European Partnership under Horizon Europe in cluster 1, has recently started its activity, launched the first calls and its website. On 13 January 2023, ERA4Health has published its second call for proposals: Increasing health equity through promoting healthy diets and physical activity (HealthEquity), relevant to plant scientists – e.g. our Working Group on Nutritional Security. The submission deadline will be 14 March 2023. An info webinar on the call will be organised on 26 January.

More partnerships relevant to EPSO members are in preparation, such as the European Partnership accelerating farming systems transition: agroecology living labs and research infrastructures, and European Partnership on Safe and Sustainable Food Systems for people, plant & climate.

Whenever new Horizon Europe Work Programmes and calls are published, EPSO updates its Horizon Europe Briefing document for members.

Link: EPSO updated Brief on Horizon Europe Work programmes 2023-24, updated 17.1.2023

Contact:

Karin Metzlaff, EPSO BE