Promoting Mushroom Farming in Western Balkan through strengthening linkages between VET providers and the business sector: Mush-Link

Programme(s): Erasmus+ (ERASMUS+)
Topic(s): ERASMUS-EDU-2024-CB-VET
Type of action: ERASMUS Lump Sum Grants
Project ID: 101182440

Objective: The EU recognizes the urgent need for a sustainable food system due to escalating climate impacts from nonsustainable agricultural activity. The Farm to Fork Strategy pushes for faster transformation in farming methods, leveraging nature-based and technological solutions to improve climate resilience and reduce input use. While the EU aims to address global food needs, focusing only on food availability ignores the complex problems of food insecurity, which differ a lot between low and high-income countries. In the Western Balkans (WB), agriculture falls behind in productivity and faces escalating challenges from extreme weather events to non-sustainable agricultural practices. This results in crop diseases, yield reductions, and farming profits becoming sensitive to climate change effects, leading to farmland decline, rural population ageing, youth migration, land abandonment, and urban sprawl. Farmers are struggling to make a living in a difficult economic context of falling prices in key agricultural commodities and high agricultural market volatility.
This leads to uncertainties in terms of maintaining a focus towards current on-farm activity or pursuing agroentrepreneurial diversification, as well as differing levels of technology adoption in support of this income stream. The scope of the project is to promote mushroom farming as a sustainable agricultural method for WB countries by strengthening the interlinkage between the VET sector and the business sector. To achieve the scope of the project the following deliverables will be developed: 1 Transnational Research Report on the weak links between VET and the private-public sector; 1 Training Format for building VET Trainers' capacities in CEA approaches for mushroom farming; 1 Capacity capacity-building framework Toolkit for WBL schemes delivered in Bio-Lab platforms; Digital contents: Web Platform integrating e-learning course for interactive digital learning; 6 Video Lectures