Agricultural Research In the Mediterranean Network

The project is expected to help coordinate national research activities and identify common research programmes among the countries of the Mediterranean area, fight fragmentation and exploit synergies.

The very basis of ARIMNet is mapping the partners’ national research programmes in order to identify lacks, redundancies, complementarities, and synergies. The project will also identify partners’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Based on this information, research programmes will be modified in order to address uncovered topics, avoid overlapping, organise complementarities and maximise synergies. Joint activities constitute another pillar of the project. It includes integrating activities such as the creation of a web-based information exchange platform, take-up activities of best practices, joint training, sharing of scarce resources like expensive equipment. Last not least, ARIMNet will result in a joint vision of agricultural research in the Mediterranean Area and recommend a strategic agenda to reach the objectives.

This ARIMNet Project is an ERANET action supported and funded under 7th Framework Programme (FP7) by the European Commission.

Strategic aim and scientific and technological objectives:

ARIMNet has as its strategic objective to reinforce the scientific cooperation between countries of the Mediterranean area, including EU and non-EU member states, in order to maximise its support to sustainable development, notably, management of natural resources and mitigation of threats resulting from global change.

To reach this overall goal, ARIMNet will:

•   Enhance synergies between research programmes in view of avoiding duplication of efforts and orienting spared resources to unaddressed issues;

•   Raise cooperation between the organisations in order to carry out ambitious research projects that cannot be undertaken at an individual level;

•   Outreach the benefit of the network beyond the consortium to create spill-over effects impacting all concerned research organisations, and out of the Mediterranean area, export the concept to other relevant areas, the Black Sea area, for instance.

ARIMNet will result in four main achievements:

•   Better coordination between partners’ agricultural research programmes through: monitoring of participating countries’ agricultural research programmes; identification of duplications, complementarities, gaps, and synergies between partners’ agricultural research programmes; redesign of partners’ agricultural research programmes in order to eliminate overlapping and address uncovered topics

•   In-depth and durable cooperation between the ARIMNet partners thanks to: transnational joint activities; institutional arrangement for facilitating the implementation of joint research projects; design and development of common methodologies for programme management

•   Long term contribution to structuring the European Research Area by: elaboration of common vision on agricultural research in the Mediterranean area; proposal for a strategic outline of agricultural research in the Mediterranean area; take-up activities for bringing the experience, methods and tools gained by ARIMNet into use by other geographical areas.