Date Published: 17/03/2021
ARCHIVED - Jaen University Sustainolive project aims to improve sustainability in olive farming sector
ARCHIVED ARTICLE
Spain and five other countries are taking part in the project, which is financed by the EU.
The Mediterranean landscape is dotted with millions of olive trees, and their sustainability is a priority to guarantee the survival of the crops and the environment they grow in. More than two million tonnes of olive oil are produced in the area each season, and the process to obtain it generates huge amounts of by-products that could be dealt with more sustainably than they are generally at the moment.
With this in mind, Sustainolive - a project led by the University of Jaen with EU funding - intends to boost the olive sector’s ecological and financial opportunities by encouraging growers from six countries to pool their knowledge.
The aim of the project, which involves 22 organisations from Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Morocco and Tunisia, is to improve the sustainability of olive groves and management of olive mill by-products by analysing their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The 2.1 million euros earmarked for its development under the EU’s research and innovation programme highlight its environmental relevance and the importance placed on the project and olive farming sector.
Sustainolive researchers seek to provide innovative solutions to problems and to exploit the by-products of olive oil mills, making them efficient, sustainable and financially viable.
Another main goal of the programme is to detect and remove the barriers that stop farmers from making use of the knowledge generated in research centres. Many producers are familiar with sustainably management practices, initial studies have found, but do not apply them.
The project says on its webpage:” The SUSTAINOLIVE consortium faces the paradox that, despite having recognized the health benefits of olive oil consumption, its production is based on an increasingly less sustainable model. The challenge remains to reconcile practices in olive groves that are profitable and sustainable, considering the protection of the environment and avoiding the overexploitation of natural resources.
To achieve this objective, it is necessary to improve the natural environmental regulation favoring biodiversity, the optimization of inputs, the development of new cultivation systems and the use of technologies adapted to this transformation. Thus, the general objective of SUSTAINOLIVE is to promote the sustainability of the olive oil sector through the implementation and promotion of innovative and sustainable solution sets in management practices, based on agroecological concepts and in effective and active exchange of knowledge in the main actors of the sector.”