VEC Conference – Valuing and Evaluating Creativity for Sustainable Regional Development, Östersund (Sweden), September 12th, 2016

On September 12th, 2016, with encouragement from UNESCO and UCCN member cities, Mid Sweden University has organized the scientific conference titoled VEC – Valuing and Evaluating Creativity for Sustainable Regional Development, in conjunction with the 10th Annual Meeting of the UCCN.

The VEC conference aimed to advance dialogue and catalyze action towards establishing a long-term scientific platform as called for by the UCCN.

Within this context, Mr. Giuseppe Biagini (Founder of ITKI US) and Mr. Giovanni Venegoni (Senior Researcher & Projects Coordinator at Milan Center for Food Law and Policy), have presented the “TRusT™ Project: Technology and Traditional Knowledge as a Resourceful Tool for Encouraging the Sustainable Development of Local Economies”.

The “TRusT™ Project” is an attempt to align itself to the UNESCO 2013, Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, Article 2; take under consideration the COP21’s concerns regarding the need of the agriculture adaptation to climate change; and take under consideration the indications promoted by the FAO Committee on World Food Security (CFS), presented at the 2015-2016 Recommendation on Connecting Smallholders to Markets – Zero Draft.

Particularly relevant to the ITKI-UNESCO-City of Gastronomy “Food and Water in Arid Lands: Dialogues across Contemporary and Traditional Knowledge” Conference, the TRusT™ for ITKIUS Project addresses two points concerning “Local food systems and markets”:

    1. promoting products with specific quality characteristics, such as products linked to geographical origin, organic, or products resulting from agro-ecological approaches which help local populations to preserve traditional food systems and diets;
    2. encouraging transparent pricing of agricultural products and developing and disseminating tools that give smallholders access to timely and affordable market information to enable them to make informed decisions on what, when and where to sell;

The Project additionally addresses two more points regarding “Nutrition and smallholders’ access to markets”:

    1. providing information and capacity building to smallholders about food standards, good practices and markets’ requirements to increase food safety and smallholders’ market competitiveness;
    2. facilitating production diversification to increase resilience to climate and price shocks and enable more diverse food consumption, reduction of seasonal food and income fluctuations.

To clarify, the TRusT™ Project consists of an innovative story-telling, tracking and tracing software platform (App and web platform) that gathers information connecting producers and consumers. The TRusT™ Solution, developed by Tech Gap Italia, one of the technological partners of ITKI US, on gives local chefs, farmers and producers a new way to communicate the quality and unique characteristics of their products, leaving a lasting impact long past the end of a meal.

To download the VEC Report click here.

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