"The Agricultural Academy (AA) applied for a mobility project for higher education, training and staff in the beginning of February, 2017.The project proposition was approved by the Bulgarian National Agency (The Human Resources Development Center) and a contract for financial support was signed between the Agency and the Agricultural Academy on the 07.07.2017. The first training mobilities for staff from the AA started in March, 2018. The mobilities were for a group of scientists from the Agricultural Institute in Stara Zagora (part of the Agricultural Academy) and the training took place in the Institut de l’elevage in Paris, France. The National Agency had approved for this project 95 outgoing educational mobilities for staff with total duration of 663 days and 8 outgoing mobilities for studies and traineeships for students with total duration of 24 months.The main objectives of the project, set by the Governing board of the AA, were the following:• To increase the inflow of scientific and educational knowledge into the structural units of the AA in order to improve the level of key competences and skills;• To strengthen the scientific and educational cooperation between the AA and its current partner organizations from Europe;• To begin new partnerships with other leading educational and scientific organizations from Europe;• To enhance the employability of students and staff from the AA and to improve their career prospects;• To broaden the understanding of innovative educational and scientific practices of the participating students and staff;• To increase the awareness of students and staff from the AA to the ""Erasmus+"" Programme and the different project opportunities it offers.• To improve the language competences of the participating students and staff.Just as in the previous three years, the possibility for participation in educational mobilities met with great interest from the academic and administrative staff of the AA.The mobilities for staff took place in different reputable HEIs and Research institutions, like the Institut de l’elevage, the University of Padova, the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research, the Politechnical Institute in Beja, Portugal, the Wageningen university in Holland, the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria, etc.Like mentioned above, the demand was greater than the supply. To assure that only personal with the best work programmes and highest motivation participate in trainings, the Agriclutural Academy developed an internal application procedure, which was posted on the institutional web site and was sent to every Erasmus coordinator of the different institutes. Although the procedure was open to every personal from the Academy, the emphasis was put on younger scientists who haven't participated before in trainings abroad.The evaluation of the applications was done by a committee from the Academy, using clear and non-discriminatory indicators. Almost all of the mobilities, which took place in this project, were outbound staff mobilities for training. The personal, which participated in them, was either academic or administrative. Only two student mobilities took place for the period of approximately 2 months each. The main reason was the fact that the grant support for students did not include funding for transport and the students, who have applied for mobilities could not find additional finances. Also the monthly project funding for a student in most of the programme countries is insufficient to cover all of their expenses and the Academy did not have the possibility to co-finance their training. This is a lasting issue from the previous year, which the Academy will try to remedy in order to increase the number of its student mobilities.Due to the nature of the AA, the range of the performed activities was mainly in the field of the agricultural science. However, these include very broad and different educational fields – plant and animal genetics, soil sciences, agro-economics, plant growing, animal husbandry, rural development, viticulture and enology, etc.The types of undertaken activities were different but include mainly skill training, job shadowing, attendance at lectures, visits of libraries, laboratories and other scientific and educational premises, field observation, familiarization with modern equipment and research and education methods, meetings and discussions on current research and educational innovations, direct participation in research and education, discussing future collaboration, preparation of papers, etc."

The new European Commission launched the European Green Deal last autumn as one of its key policies. Among the various strategies, Biodiversity 2030 and Farm to Fork are of tremendous importance for France that has placed sustainability of its agri-food system as one of its priorities. For the past two years, INRAE has brought together the European research community around the vision of an agriculture free of chemical pesticides. This community of now 34 members from 20 European countries joined forces to create the European Research Alliance “Towards a Chemical Pesticide-free Agriculture” (hereafter referred to as “the Alliance”). Through regular exchanges with European Commission services, the Alliance highlighted the need to address this issue that appeared as a target both in the Biodiversity 2030 and Farm to Fork strategies. In order to support the ambition and to strengthen the position of France in this domain, INRAE decided to lead the proposal from the Alliance “” on the call LC-GD-6-1-2020 Topic title: Testing and demonstrating systemic innovations in support of the Farm-to-Fork Strategy, scope C. This project will strongly rely on the implication of actors all across Europe with almost 75% of the members states covered in this project. It will be first based on the identification of pluri-disciplinary innovative solutions, technical (e.g. precision agriculture, robotics…) agronomic (e.g. agroecology, rotation, diversification…), biological (e.g. genetics/varieties, biocontrol, biostimulants…) but also socio-economic (e.g. governance, supply chain organization, willingness to pay by consumers, regulatory …), and their optimization to foster potential synergies. It will then strongly rely on demonstrating the relevance and feasibility of these solutions, i.e. documenting their actual impact on the reduction of pesticides and fertiliser uses, with common metrics such as the methodology created in the French CEPP design (certificats d'économie de produits phytopharmaceutiques), as well as on the monitoring of their impact in real-life situation thanks to the dense network of experimental facilities from the Alliance members as well as their connections with other national or European farm networks. Companies providing new options (varieties with better disease resistance and fertiliser use efficiency, biocontrol, digitalisation, machineries) will be included into the consortium. The precise assessment of the economic impact and the analysis of the barriers limiting the implementation of these solutions and the strong dissemination targeted to relevant actors will allow empowerment of the actors and scaling up alternative protecting methods that will reduce pesticide use. Regular exchanges with local, national and European decision makers will allow supporting the implementation of the identified technical or socio-economic solutions. Ultimately this global approach will give access to new potential solutions adapted to local conditions that could undergo the same optimization, testing, dissemination steps. This approach was built using the backward construction of impact pathways. This ex-ante methodology will be further developed in order to maximize the impact potential of the project. Furthermore, to allow dynamic evolution of the project throughout its life, a real-time analysis of the impact will be conducted (in-itinere) using the recognized ASIRPArt methodology.

"The Agricultural Academy (AA) applied for a mobility project for higher education, training and staff in the beginning of February, 2015. The project proposition was approved by the Bulgarian National Agency (The Human Resources Development Center) and a contract for financial support was signed between the Agency and the Agricultural Academy on the 14.08.2015.The first training mobility for this project for staff from the AA started in January, 2016. The mobility was for a young scientist from the AgroBioIntitute (part of the Agricultural Academy) and the training took place in the Laboratoire de Physiologie Cellulaire et Vegetale in Grenoble, France.The National Agency had approved for this project 27 outgoing educational mobilities for staff with total duration of 493 days and 2 outgoing educational mobilities for students with total duration of 12 months.The main objectives of the project, set by the Governing board of the AA, were the following:• To increase the inflow of scientific and educational knowledge into the structural units of the AA in order to improve the level of key competences and skills;• To strengthen the scientific and educational cooperation between the AA and its current partner organizations from Europe;• To begin new partnerships with other leading educational and scientific organizations from Europe;• To enhance the employability of students and staff from the AA and to improve their career prospects;• To broaden the understanding of innovative educational and scientific practices of the participating students and staff;• To increase the awareness of students and staff from the AA to the ""Erasmus+"" Programme and the different project opportunities it offers.• To improve the language competences of the participating students and staff.The possibility for participation in educational mobilities met with even greater interest from the academic and administrative staff of the AA than the last year.However the number of mobilities was few in number, compared to the last year, but the average duration of the mobilities was longer. To meet the increased interest from scientists to participate in trainings abroad, the administrative personal of the Academy, which coordinates the project, took the decision to reduce the average duration from 18 to 7 days, but to double the actual number of mobilities. Because of this decision 61 mobilities for staff took place in different reputable HEIs and Research institutions, like the Humboldt University, the Agrarian University in Krakow, the Leibniz Institute ofPlant Genetics and Crop Plant Research, Slovak University of Agriculture, the Harper Adams University, etc. Even after the increase of the number of available mobilities, the demand was still greater than the supply. To assure that only personal wilth the best work programmes and highest motivation participate in trainings, the Agriclutural Academy developed an internal application procedure, which posted on the institutional web site and was sent to every Erasmus coordinator of the different institutes. Allthough the procedure was open to every personal from the Academy, the emphasys was put on younger scientists who haven't participated before in trainings abroad. The evaluation of the applications was done by a commettee from the Academy, using clear and non-discriminatory indicators.Allmost all of the mobilities, which took place in this project, were outbound staff mobilities for training. The personal, which participated in them, was either academic or administrative. Only one student mobility took place for the period of 3 months. The main reason was the fact that the grant support for students did not include funding for transport and the students, who have applied for mobilities could not find additional finances. Also the monthly project funding for a student in most of the programme countries is insufficient to cover all of their expenses and the Academy did not have the possibility to co-finance their training. This is a lasting issue from the previous year, which the Academy will try to remedy in order to increase the number of its student mobilities. Due to the nature of the AA, the range of the performed activities was mainly in the field of the agricultural science. However, these include very broad and different educational fields – plant and animal genetics, soil sciences, agro-economics, plant growing, animal husbandry, rural development, viticulture and enology, etc.The types of undertaken activities were different but include mainly skill training, job shadowing, attendance at lectures, visits of libraries, laboratories and other scientific and educational premises, field observation, familiarization with modern equipment and research and education methods, meetings and discussions on current research and educational innovations, direct participation in research and education, discussing future collaboration, preparation of papers, etc."

The overall objective of BIOEASTsUP project is to support the BIOEAST initiative and Action Plan for transition of 11 Central and Eastern European (CEE) to bioeconomy. The specific objectives are: SO1: To trigger strategic thinking at governmental level and transnational peer-to-peer development of national circular bioeconomy strategies in BIOEAST countries. SО2: To emphasize the role of multi-actor approach in developing new value chains to advance bioeconomies. SO3: To develop in a multi-stakeholder driven approach a consolidated BIOEAST Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA). SO4: To set-up and maintain a macro-regional framework in support of the BIOEAST initiative and the SRIA development and sustainability. SO5: To facilitate evidence-based policy making. SO6: To increase the visibility of the bioeconomy within the quintuple helix in the BIOEAST region. BIOEASTsUP methodology was developed to support a parallel setup: the project structure and the structure of the BIOEAST Initiative. Two work packages focus on the national bioeconomy deployment (WP1, WP2), two are dedicated to the impact at the macro-regional and the EU level (WP3, WP4) whereas dissemination activity complements all the components (WP5). The work plan is as follows: WP 1: Framework for National Bioeconomy Strategies Development WP 2: Capacity building for BIOEAST stakeholders WP 3: Establishing macro-regional structures in support of the BIOEAST initiative WP 4: BIOEAST SRIA development and positioning the macro-regional economies WP 5: Communication, Dissemination and Exploitation WP 6: Project Management and Evaluation BIOEASTsUP has been initiated directly by the BIOEAST Initiative’s ministries. In total 26 ministries support the project. In addition associations, industrial chambers, innovation centres, other research organisations and NGOs have committed to the project. BIOEASTsUP will further engage all stakeholders in the bioeconomy value chain to coordinate efforts to maximize the impact.