Highlights:

This AU-EU Innovation Agenda proposes specific objectives with short-, medium- to long-term actions for all four HLPD priority areas agreed by the Ministers in July 2020: Public Health, Green transition, Innovation & Technology, and Capacities for Science.

This document details the actions related to the four priorities of the EU-AU HLPD.

Related to the Green Transition and food systems:

Short-term actions:  

Fostering the development and enhancement of sustainable and resilient agricultural and food systems value chains, capitalising on successful collaborative AU-EU R&I projects, to improve food and nutrition security and sustainable agriculture (FNSSA) leveraging regional, national and local specificities and competitive advantages. By doing so, increase local transformative, post-harvesting, warehousing and processing capacities and strengthen links between farmers, fishers and markets and consumers.

Medium-term actions:

Fostering digital applications and green technologies to enhance climate resilience and adaptation and to give impetus to agricultural and agro-ecological production as well as aquaculture, healthy and sustainable food processing and consumption. Co-designing with food system actors to scale digital solutions for food production (harvesting and warehousing included), processing and marketing to support sustainable and agro-ecological transition.

Catalysing the development of circular economy strategies and policies, to ensure the implementation of actions foreseen by the AU-EU Innovation Agenda in both food and nutrition security and sustainable agriculture (FNSSA) and climate change and sustainable energy.

Long-term actions:

Improving the agricultural and fisheries innovation ecosystem, to strengthen capacities of actors to co-design, co-invest, scale up and employ innovative technologies and methodologies through a multi-stakeholder approach, to build thematic networks in Africa and to strengthen exchanges of knowledge and experiences between Europe and Africa. By doing so, enhance the capacity of the agricultural sector to create decent jobs, given the importance of agricultural and fisheries employment in Africa. This will entail engaging the private sector, stimulating public-private partnerships, enhancing capacity for proactive innovation policy development and co-investment in the area of food and nutrition security and sustainable agriculture (FNSSA) and climate change and sustainable energy (CCSE) including mitigation, adaptation and resilience to face future climate challenges.