Agriculture

Friendly cooperation between cities creates a lot of opportunities, and this June held mission to Japan, jointly organized by Krotoszyn (Poland) and Okinoshima (Japan), best friends’ towns since 2016, is another example of successful exchanges and experience sharing.

French and Japanese converge under the theme of sustainable food systems.

Located in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region in Eastern France, the agri-food innovation cluster Vitagora has tied strong relationships with its Japanese partners for more than 15 years. Since the COVID-19 crisis, Vitagora has opened a subsidiary office in Kumamoto, Japan, to deepen these relationships and find out new opportunities that could lead to a better world through food and health.

During the past four months, the Trade Promotion Section of the Italian Embassy in Japan engaged in promoting Italian excellence in several events on multiple fronts, with a significant response from the Japanese audience.

Vitagora, the French agri-food and innovation cluster, has been collaborating with the Japanese Kyushu Bio Cluster Conference (KBCC) for more than 10 years, implementing tangible and long-term actions between the two networks: visiting companies and research centers, discovering the expertise of both networks, signing partnership agreements between their members.

Cooperativas Agro-alimentarias de Andalucía (Agri-food Cooperatives of Andalusia), a federation which brings over 650 cooperatives and more than 290,000 farmers in southern Spain, organised a trade mission to Japan last April to find out about the cooperative model in the country and to expand the frontiers of its production.

This report provides interested European SMEs with a sophisticated insight into the opportunities and key success factors for the Japanese smart farming market.