A sensible follow-on from the Strategy for Intelligent Specialisation in local agriculture is the launch of the Agrotur project, which aims to connect rural famers with their local hotel, restaurant and tourism providers to encourage direct trade.
Focusing on low density rural areas of the Algarve, the local university is starting the study to look into the commercial and practical realities of this trade between food producers and buyers.
The Agrotur project emerged following the Strategy for Intelligent Specialisation which recommended strengthening the regional supply chain by linking local producers with their trade customers.
"The main objective is to understand how these new commercial networks can and should advance," explained Hugo Barros, the man responsible for the project at the University of the Algarve.
The follow-on study proposes to categorise what is being grown locally and match it to local demands. Then, marketing and distribution strategies can be devised that increase consumption of locally grown products.
This study also will estimate the added value that these new partnership networks can bring to the Algarve region.
Several low-population parishes have been visited by researchers, and although they have a predominantly ageing population that is more in tune with subsistence farming, this is changing.
There is already a small but significant groups of exceptions to be added to those small producers who were involved in the original study. A new group of young entrepreneurs has emerged due mainly to the economic crisis. These younger farmers have settled in rural areas, often taking over abandoned family farms, to take advantage of rural grants and to change their lifestyles.
The Agrotur project will run until the end of this year and is funded by CRESC - Algarve 2020.
Another, grander project, with EU Horizon 2020 funding is the largest contract ever awarded to a Portuguese space-based company.
Deimos Engenharia is taking charge of a consortium of 27 institutions and companies from 13 European countries which are all in the NextGEOSS programme.
Horizon 2020 is the EU's program to support science, technology and innovation and the €10 million contract under the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) involves the aggregation of data from all the European satellites in the European Earth observation programme, making the data widely accessible and increasing the uses to which it can be put.
The objective of the project is develop image interpretation tools and jointly to process a large amount of data so that it is organised and accessible..
"It's like we're sorting the millions of books in the US Library of Congress," says Nuno Avila, director of Deimos Engineering.
The big users of this data will be scientists, managers, NGOs and public entities such as Civil Protection authorities, which aim to be more responsive to natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes or epidemics.
"We will associate words with images in order to simplify searches," explains Nuno Catarino, the project leader. Wider access to the information captured by European satellites will also make it easier to monitor the spread of pests such as the malaria mosquito, and to target aid to refugee camps.
For Deimos Engineering, "this is the culmination of the various data processing technologies that the company has been developing in research and development projects within the European Space Agency and the European Commission."
It also represents "a magnificent example of the effect that Portugal's participation in the European Space Agency can bring to national companies."
