The Making of Fragile Agro-ecosystems Productive, Adaptive and Sustainable: Multifunctional Agro-pastoralism – PAS-AGRO-PAS

The objective of the PAS-AGRO-PAS project is to increase productivity, adaptiveness, sustainability and profitability of Mediterranean agro-pastoral production systems, by exploiting every dimension of their multifunctionality through a novel systemic approach that will identify stressors currently impacting on agro-pastoral systems’ viability, with views to implementing tailored strategies that redirect agro-pastoralism from subsistence-oriented fragile production systems towards commercially-oriented resilient systems. To achieve this objective, PAS-AGRO-PAS will explore a representation of 10 agro-pastoral production systems from Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Cyprus, Morocco, Egypt and Tunisia, covering a wide range of environmental, agro-ecological, economic, socio-cultural and institutional traits and challenges; and will apply a systemic approach from farm to global scale, interlinking three systems:

(i) “agro-ecosystem”, with interventions on the productivity and diversification of crops, pasture and livestock resources (such as better utilisation of crop residues, new grazing surfaces, use of biodiverse pasture seeds, including forage legumes into rotations with crops, alley cropping with barley, drought-tolerant forage and crop varieties, effective treatment of manure, matching livestock production cycle to feed resources, multi-nutrient blocks to enhance digestibility, etc.) that will be implemented, in order to ensure low input, maintenance/increase of biodiversity, enhanced soil fertility and custody for local adapted breeds – in the short term, and the rehabilitation of rangelands and the reduction of vulnerabilities to climate change – in the long term;

(ii) “socioeconomic system”, with interventions towards the valorisation of agro-pastoral products (through assurance of quality, safety and typicity, and creation of notebooks of product standards for origin/quality certification), the leveraging of the marketable “healthy” trait of food produced with environmentally friendly systems, the efficient integration into markets, and the rising of the “commercialisation mentality” of agro-pastoralists, in order to ensure economic benefits and generational renewal; and

(iii) “information system”, whereby, within a multi-actor co-creation process, the agro-pastoralists’ traditional knowledge will be sourced and steadily integrated with the outputs of this project, taking advantage of the networked and cooperative digitalisation of Agriculture 4.0, in order to efficiently manage information resources and access to decision-making support e-tools.

Furthermore, the successful implementation of PAS-AGRO-PAS with the expected impacts at the farm, at the regional and at the global scale will be sustained by two important pillars: (i) “capacity building activities” for agro-pastoralists on effective strategies, climate change mitigation and adaptation, quality of their products, pricing and economic profitability, commercialisation and entrepreneurship, inclusive development, with special focus on women, the youth and newcomers; and “divulgation activities” with key stakeholders and policy-makers for providing policy guidelines for more enabling structural, economic and institutional settings; and (ii) the development of the PAS-AGRO-PAS Mediterranean e-platform, which through systematised data, reports, models and web applications for resource allocation, ration formulation and feed management, optimum slaughter weight prediction, and e-commerce, will better inform evidence-based decisions for both agro-pastoralists and policy-makers.