Quality standards and authenticity to foster competitiveness of agrifood SMEs

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QUALIFY has been designed to foster the competitiveness of the SMEs in the agrifood sector by tackling a challenge that affects the involved regions and the whole EU (as stated by the European Commission): the improvement of the quality processes of these SMEs, the fight against the fraud in the sector, and the promotion of the authenticity in their products. Overcoming the barriers related to these challenges is to foster the reduction of costs, better chain values, better processes, and better products that will allow the tackled SMEs to grow and be more competitive in the national and international markets, where they need to enlarge their presence in front of larger companies, which are much less challenged by the presented topics. To work in this direction, the project tackles the ERDF funds devoted to increase SMEs competitiveness in 6 EU regions/states which are representative of the EU geographical dimension and which incorporate agrifood and SMEs as core aspects of their respective RIS3. The project aims at ensuring that when the projects funded under these schemes tackle agrifood SMEs they introduce aspects of quality, fraud prevention, and authenticity, which must complement the existing financial and non-financial instruments, enlarging the desired outcome: the growth of these SMEs. The project also aims at enlarging the capacities of the managing authorities, relevant SMEs representatives and other stakeholders to better tackle these aspects and develop better and more efficient projects. The main project outputs are: 6 policy instruments enlarged and improved through 6 action plans + monitoring systems, setting-up of a course with materials on the project topics for managing authorities and SMEs to foster an e-learning process, 30 stakeholder meetings, 2 dissemination events, 6 partner meetings with study visits, a continuous contact with national and EU institutions working in these topics, and over 40 best practices learned/exchanged.

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