MIXED Policy Workshop
On 3 December MIXED hosted a policy workshop in Brussels ‘Mixedness in European Agriculture – hot topics for policy makers’. MIXED had invited relevant experts and policymakers to give their input and join the conversation around finalising the policy recommendations from the project.
The workshop gathered more than 30 people and to create a common ground for everyone, the workshop started off with an introduction to the MIXED project. This was followed by a presentation with reflections on results and outcomes of the project with particular focus on issues related to the transformation to more ‘mixed’ systems. Six ‘hot topics’ were centre of rotation for this session led by Miranda Meuwissen from Wageningen University. The six topics were defined as: 1. Relationships matter, 2. Positive for ecosystem services, 3. Seeing is believing, 4. However (1st) ‘going mixed’ brings challenges, 5. However (2nd) benefits are context-dependent, 6. Mixedness comes in many forms.
Already by the end of this session it was clear that there was a genuine interest from the participants and a good foundation for further discussion.
Discussing the policy recommendations
The second part of the programme was an interactive session working with the policy recommendations. Simone Sterly from IfLS gave an introduction to the five clusters that has been identified prior to the draft policy recommendations. Afterwards the participants were invited to join group discussions in the relevant clusters. Divided into groups they were all involved in discussions around what is needed in terms of policy recommendations to continue the work around mixed farming and agroforestry systems. The discussions were lively and the interest and engagement from the experts made it clear that it is an important topic. The policy recommendations will now be developed further, but the clusters will remain as follows:
- Increasing further the knowledge on public goods provided long-term by different MiFAS
- Strengthen capacities of farmers and intermediaries
- Taking a landscape perspective in strategies and decision making
- Improving the regulatory and administrative frameworks
- Promoting the long-term viability of sustainable and resilient mixed farming systems
This was the final transnational workshop of the project and for a closing remark, the project coordinator from MIXED's sister project AGROMIX, Ulrich Schmutz, was invited to give an insight into the policy recommendations and learnings from AGROMIX. This was a great way to create synergies and strenghten the impact of the two projects.
The MIXED policy recommendations will now be fine-tuned based on the expert’s input and then shared at a later stage, so stay tuned for the final version, that hopefully will pave the way for more mixed farming and agroforestry systems across Europe.
