Date: 07 November, 2019
Place: Hotel Gligorov, Strumica, Republic of North Macedonia
Program: Horizon 2020
Event speaker: Executive Director Blagoja Mukanov
Pilot Leader: AgFutura Technologies
Pilot Partner: Green Growth Platform

Polirural is a Horizon 2020 project with main challenge that current rural policy is no longer keeping pace with the changing world as well as it used to. Solutions for this challenge are:

• To Promote the development of rural policy;
• Deliver reliable and transparent solution with significant impact on rural development;
• Bring together all stakeholders (farmers, experts, state and other future farmers) into one place for the same purpose;
• Make rural areas more attractive and accessible to already existing populations and recently relocated people;
• It combines new qualitative and quantitative approaches, as well as previously unused data from other already conducted surveys to obtain innovative and complex rural policy incentives.

For this project there will be a realization of 12 pilots in 5 regions in Europe: South, Eastern, North, Western and Central. Other than Macedonia as one of the countries participating in the piloting with two representing organization, the following countries that are participating are: Belgium, Ireland, Spain, Latvia, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Finland, Greece, Italy and Israel.

On this regional panel, the pilot leader explained how the communication will take place during the piloting phase of the project and what the roles are for every participants.

After the initial presentation of the project, main benefits of the project and roles for each participant, a debate was open regarding the problems in the rural areas and factors that can influence the attractiveness of the rural regions. On this debate all participants expressed their concerns and problems and discussed what is the best way to categorize these problems.

At the end of the regional panel all participants signed a consent form, meaning they accept to be part of this piloting. Additionally, the place for the next meeting was decided to be in Negotino, Republic of North Macedonia.