The project “ CrossMarkets-Institutional cooperation to enhance cross-border selling at local farmers’ markets” is aimed at enhancing institutional cooperation across municipalities (as owners / operators of local farmers’ markets) in order to jointly develop solutions to overcome the above legal and administrative obstacles hindering farmers / primary producers in selling their products on the other side of the border. Through this kind of cooperation more support will be provided also to the actual stakeholders, i.e. farmers, primary producers and local distributors. 
The solution proposed includes exchanging experiences and requirements across the institutions in the first place, and as a result, jointly elaborating a set of support tools, making available all necessary information about locations and specific requirements of farmers’ markets on both sides of the border in a bi-lingual format. This involve clear descriptions, visual explanation of processes, as well as bi-lingual version of all documentation required.

The project was submitted by Pannon European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation Ltd.

Activities for the B-solutions project were initiated in 2018.

Within the framework of the project as the first steps workshops were organised for the stakeholders. For the local producers and for market operations, where were investigated their problems and their needs.

Main topics of the workshops:

1. Workshops for producers:

• Introductions of participants (organisational structure, location of the property, size, main agricultural products and services, cooperation)
• The present situation of the area (main strengths and weaknesses)
• The possibilities of selling local agrarian products (present target groups, sale channels, demands, trends)
• Possibilities of selling local products cross border (earlier practices in crossborder selling, possibilities, openness for selling cross-border)
• Challenges, difficulties in selling crossborder (e.g.: physical barriers, linguistic barriers, demand and supply problems, etc.)
• Necessary interventions for making crossborder sales easier

2. Workshops for market operators:

• Introduction of participants (location, owner, type of market, order of operation, number and compositionof sellers, services)
• Evaluating the demand and supply of local agrarian products
• Advantages and disadvantages of operating market for local products
• Market regulations (main regulations concerning product selling)
• Presence of crossborder sellers in the market (experiences)
• Advantages and disadvantages of crossborder sellers
• Necessary interventions for making crossborder selling easier

The univocal opinion of the participants that legal regulation is the most important problem, at the moment, these regulations undermine cross-border sale. Lack of information and solvent demand is also a problem, since in case of obeying all the rules the selling price of these products will increase significantly, by the time they arrive to the cross-border market.

Following the identification of problems, a questionnaire was made, which was filled in by a wide circle of producers.

The questionnaires can be downloaded from our website.