The Fundació Centre de Recerca en Agrotecnologia – Agrotecnio has submitted two research projects to the Generalitat of Catalonia’s funding call “Replegar-se per créixer: l’impacte de les pandèmies en un món sense fronteres visibles” (PANDÈMIES 2020). Specifically, this call for proposals is managed by the Ministry of Enterprise and Knowledge, the Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR) and the Secretariat of Universities and Research of Catalonia.
The PANDÈMIES 2020 funding call, whose application deadline was 30 October, aims to award contributions for research projects in different scientific areas of the object of analysis of the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic and of the concept of pandemic, more generally, on our society and to propose new measures, models and performance lines that contribute to overcoming the consequences and define new models of prevention, analysis and treatment. This call seeks, at the same time, to promote the development of joint projects between research groups from different institutions working on the same subject in Catalonia.
Agrotecnio’s proposals
As a CERCA center with 15 research groups, Agrotecnio has been able to submit two projects to the PANDÈMIES 2020 funding call. The first of these is called ‘Development of healthy locally produced ingredients and foods to improve the immune response of consumers’ and is part of the Food Technology knowledge area. The second of the projects presented is entitled ‘Socio-environmental sustainability and valuation of urban agriculture in times of change’ and focuses on the Plant Production area. These two projects address the COVID-19 pandemic from different perspectives in order to improve the population’s health and to promote socio-economic and environmental sustainability in Catalonia.
The execution period of the projects is 18 months after the publication of the definitive resolution; and the amount of funding that could be requested was between 50,000.00 and 350,000.00 euros.