Program on Innovation and Agroindustrial Development / Programma per l'Innovazione e lo Sviluppo Agroindustriale (P.I.S.A.): Poverty Reduction and Sustainable Development

This document is on the Programma sull'Innovazione e lo Sviluppo Agroindustriale (PISA), which is an international program whose general objective is to support innovative projects of agroindustrial development aimed at generating value-added and employment in the rural sector of developing countries. This program builds on the work that Italy and the Regione Toscana have developed with Colombia and other Latin American and Caribbean countries in recent years (in the development of the RESECA-Colombia Project since 1998), as well as on the work that stakeholders of agricultural development have been doing in the context of the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR).1 The importance of these issues has been identified by all the Regional/Sub-regional Fora in the regional priority setting exercise that the GFAR has been supporting in collaboration with TAC during the last year. In order to address the issue of value-added, the projects that will be supported will go beyond agricultural technological research to include post-harvest and processing aspects, and they will be based on a commodity-chain ("filière") approach. This international program will be implemented through specific Projects that will be presented by NARS institutions in the developing world. Three such projects are presented in sections 3, 4 and 5 of this document.