The COVID-19 pandemic severely affects the European Agri-Food sector. Several challenges for our UCs have been identified and the IoF2020 COVID-19 taskforce aims to share smart solutions with the entire sector. Everyone should get the opportunity to learn from best practices, that is why the taskforce is sharing great examples on the Social Media channels of IoF2020 and on the taskforce section on the IoF2020 website.
Last week three workshops for our use-cases (UCs) have been organised by the COVID-19 taskforce. The aim of the workshops was to bring together our use-cases and discuss their situation with regard to COVID-19. Other objectives for the workshops were:
-
- Creating synergies by joining resources and joint technology use
-
- Explore the possibilities on how to collaborate with end-users and involved stakeholders outside of IoF2020
-
- Communicating about the COVID-19 developments within each UC to the ecosystem
-
- Preparing a proposal for the SmartAgriHubs (SAH) open call if interesting (will be announced on the SAH portal as of 12/05)
-
- Identifying resources within the remaining IoF2020 budget
The co-creation workshops were led by Nadim Choucair (WP4) and were based on interactive whiteboard support. The session was optimized to generate synergies and push forward potential solutions.
Facts and figures were collected. Each challenge was matched with possible solutions with details about the end users and their place in the value chain. Use cases were asked about the use of their solutions for their end-users and where are the frictions in the value chain. Examples of issues that were brought to the workshop are listed below:
-
- Restricted opportunities for in-person audits
-
- Complex management of logistics and storage
-
- Fresh goods perish due to longer transport times
-
- Delays in deliveries and potential temporary shortages
-
- Difficulties in handling deliveries
-
- Limited physical presence to handle stocks + farm work
-
- Maintaining additional health and safety of workers
-
- Missing labour for quality controls and food safety checks
-
With use of the interactive whiteboard, the figure of a sailboat was adopted to represent the things that are working for the UC (above the water) and the things that are holding you back (below the water, at the anchor) (see example below).
Two important questions were asked to answer by the UC:
-
1. What have you solved for your target audience about “the physical distancing” problem?
-
2. What is still missing to make sure your target audience can resume operations while maintaining safe physical distancing?
-
The taskforce has gained new insights in the challenges, issues and solutions the sector is currently working with. Participation of the UC in the workshops was therefore highly appreciated by the IoF2020 COVID-19 taskforce. As a next step to fight the challenges, the taskforce expects to identify resources within the remaining IoF2020 budget to provide sufficient funding for possible solutions. The taskforce expects to implement the gathered solutions in the next two months. In this way we can share the smart solutions and knowledge with our other UC and the wider agri-food sector that are in need of (smart) support during the crisis.
Are you interested in the smart solutions of our UC? Check our channels regularly to stay up to date!
