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Learn how Rural Development funding supported a series of training courses on work safety for small private forest owners and forest users in Slovenia.

Find more good practices for vocational training and skills acquisition in the ENRD Project Database.

Over 400 rural development enthusiasts will gather at the networX event in Brussels on 11-12 April 2019. Will you be one of them?

Express your interest in joining the event via this registration link by 25 February 2019.

A recent ENRD workshop (29 January 2019 – Brussels, Belgium) explored the contribution of the 2014-2020 Rural Development Programmes (RDPs) to biodiversity conservation and EU nature policy objectives, and discussed the future of biodiversity conservation in the post-2020 period.

The event explored ways of ensuring the effective involvement and co-ordination of both agricultural and environmental authorities and stakeholders in designing and implementing biodiversity support, including in the preparation of the future CAP Strategic Plans.

Participants shared good practice examples, exchanged on bottlenecks and lessons learned from the current programming period, and reflected on possibilities to link with the needs of EU nature legislation when designing the Strategic Plans.

Browse through the 33 Finnish Smart Villages that will be offered guidance, ideas, peer support, and networking opportunities throughout 2019.

The Finnish Rural Network initiative identified and will also assist the progress of the selected villages in developing accessible and high-quality services in areas such as healthcare, education, energy, mobility, and local food.

Follow the ENRD work on Smart Villages and find out how EU policy instruments can support various actions in the latest publication on the topic.

Browse through the rich ENRD collections of resources on Rural Bioeconomy, Smart Villages and LEADER/CLLD, now available in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Polish.

The web portals bring together inspiring initiatives, networks, tools, projects and organisations related to the three topics and are continuously expanded to include new materials.

The second meeting of the ENRD Thematic Group (TG) on 'Mainstreaming the Bioeconomy' (17 January 2019 – Brussels, Belgium) discussed territorial and local approaches to developing the bioeconomy in rural areas. 

Participants exchanged on approaches to engaging local and regional stakeholders, supporting small- and medium-size rural bioeconomy enterprises and using the Rural Development Programmes (RDPs) and other funding instruments to support the bioeconomy at local and regional levels.

The EU institutions reached a political agreement in December 2018 on a new set of rules intended to protect EU farmers, their organisations, and small and mid-size businesses from unfair trading in the food supply chain.

Once the legal text is formally adopted, it will ban, for the first time ever, up to 16 unfair trading practices covering retailers, food processors, wholesalers, cooperatives or producers' organisations, and individual producers.

Help to better understand the current and potential uses of precision faming tools – fill in this short survey by 10 February 2019!

The survey is targeted at farmers, both users and non-users of Precision Agricultural Technologies, and is available in all EU languages. It is ran by a partnership between several EU institutions and agencies and European NGOs.

Three pilot Local Action Groups (LAGs) have been set up in Albania within the framework of a World Bank project running between 2017 and 2019 and will work to implement their Local Development Strategies throughout 2019.

The initiative is expected to pave the way for the take-up of LEADER-like approaches in the country, contributing to improved rural development and increased participation of rural communities.

The ENABLING thematic network, funded under the EU’s Horizon 2020, is working to create the right conditions for the development of efficient biomass to bio-based products value chains.

Through identification and dissemination of best practices, the project aims to achieve economic (biomass market growth), environmental (contribution to the circular economy), and social (job creation) impacts by its completion in December 2020.

Find out more about research and innovation thematic networks on the EIP-AGRI website.

Two new calls for proposals seek to fund information and promotion actions for EU agri-food products on both the internal and third country markets. Apply by 16 April 2019.

A total of €191.6 million is available in 2019 to co-finance programmes ranging from general campaigns on healthy eating to specific market sectors.

Explore rural-urban relations and how these could be incorporated into public policy and governance structures in the latest publication of the Horizon 2020 project ROBUST.

Browse through the project’s ‘Living Labs’ – identifying and testing new solutions for rural-urban interactions – and its ‘Communities of Practice’ on topics ranging from new businesses and labour market, to public infrastructures and social services, to sustainable food systems.

Find out about the potential contribution of EU research to agriculture, the agri-food sector, rural areas and the challenges they face in the latest briefing of the European Parliament’s Think Tank.

The publication examines the role of research and innovation in the context of the legislative proposals for the post-2020 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

The 2018 edition of the UN’s annual Conference of the Parties - COP (2-14 December 2018 – Katowice, Poland) culminated in a detailed set of rules and guidelines – the Katowice Rulebook – on implementing the Paris Agreement on climate change.

In addition, the conference brought about three initiatives: a partnership for e-mobility; a declaration on just transition towards a low-carbon economy; and a declaration ‘Forests for Climate’.