Enhancing Rural Development in Serbia’s Zaječar District: Focus on Short Food Supply Chains and Tourism

Map of the Living Lab in Zaječar District

The Zaječar district, in eastern Serbia, encompasses four municipalities with around 97,000 inhabitants. Despite distinct economic dynamics, they share challenges like lower wages, fewer employees, and higher aging rates compared to the national average. The district’s economy relies heavily on agriculture, the processing industry, and services, with significant potential for tourism development.

Economic and Demographic Challenges

The primary challenge is demographic decline, which negatively impacts rural communities, the economy, and natural resources. The Rustik Living Lab (LL) aims to restructure the economy towards high-value activities and labor-intensive services, focusing on tourism and establishing short food supply chains (SFSC).

The LL seeks to integrate the agricultural sector into tourism, benefiting local communities and small businesses. The current challenge is the low representation of local producers in meeting tourist market demands, leading to product sourcing from other regions. By collecting field data, the LL aims to enable evidence-based decision-making, policy development, and improved supply chain coordination.

Strategy Alignment

This initiative aligns with the “Strategy for the Development of the Urban Area of the City of Zaječar and the Municipalities of Knjaževac, Boljevac, and Sokobanja,” aiming to enhance business infrastructure, promote innovation, and establish value chains. RARIS, a key tourism development actor, will benefit from new data, improving decision-making and policy evaluation.

The region’s agriculture is dominated by small family farms focused on cattle, fruit, and grape production. Traditional sectors like meat and dairy are in decline. Focus groups identified supply chain problems, including insufficient trust among partners and lack of stable business relationships.

Policy Relevance

Addressing SFSC in agricultural policy and tourism development is crucial. As Serbia aligns its policies with the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), integrating SFSC ensures compliance and addresses local challenges. Promoting local gastronomic identity through SFSC can boost economic growth and enhance tourism.

Research Questions

  • What is the market potential for local sourcing in the Zaječar district tourism food supply chain?
  • Which products should be prioritized for local sourcing?
  • How can networking within SFSC enhance local agriculture and tourism integration?
  • What changes are needed to make SFSC more sustainable and competitive?

There is a lack of comprehensive data on food supply chain participants, their capacities, and tourist demand for local food. The LL will review municipal databases and conduct surveys to gather necessary data.

The Zaječar district’s focus on developing SFSC and integrating them with tourism presents a significant opportunity for rural development. By addressing existing challenges and leveraging new data, the Rustik Living Lab aims to create a sustainable local food system that enhances economic growth and tourism.

Enhancing Rural Development through Innovative Data Experiments: Collaborative Efforts of RUSTIK Living Labs on the Balkan Peninsula

Collaborative Efforts of RUSTIK Living Labs on the Balkan Peninsula

The RUSTIK Living Labs (LLs) are now actively conducting their data experiments, looking at how to provide new data, identify new sources and explore them using innovative methods. The experiments aim to help rural areas better manage key transitions and challenges they are experiencing.

Collaborative Efforts of RUSTIK Living Labs on the Balkan Peninsula

Two of the RUSTIK laboratories – Zajechar and Troyan-Aprilsti-Ugarchin (TAU), both located on the Balkan Peninsula but on either side of the Serbo-Bulgarian border, have identified a similar transitional challenge – the unexplored potential for cooperation between food-related actors as a resource for territorial development.

In order to get to know both territories better and how to conduct a comparative data experiment, the members of the two LLs, namely RARIS – Regional Development Agency Eastern Serbia and the Faculty of Agriculture, University of Belgrade and Local Action Group Troyan-Apriltsi-Ugarchin and the Department of Sociology, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, organised a meeting hosted by Serbian partners.

During the meeting, both LLs presented their key socio-economic challenges with a focus on food-related actors and policies. Identified data sources were discussed together with instruments for data collection (questionnaires and interview guides). Ideas and materials for further conceptualisation of the identified data were discussed, such as social network analysis of short food supply chain collaborations.

Both laboratories have decided to obtain comparable data sets, explore similar data sources and focus on similar target groups when conducting their experiments. The aim is to identify common and different aspects of the ‘Balkan syndrome’ of unexplored potential for collaboration.

RARIS and LAG TAU have presented territorial instruments they use to support local actors, such as the regional brand Balcanica Superior operating in Eastern Serbia and various food-related projects developed on the TAU territory. Both RUSTIK LLs therefore expect to support local actors in rural areas, both public and private, collective and individual, business and policy makers, to learn more about their territories, make better informed decisions and adopt data-driven solutions.

The 14 RUSTIK Living Labs actors meet in Barcelona to foster knowledge exchange

 

The Pilot Region Kick-off was held in February 2023, and it was RUSTIK’s first in-person knowledge exchange, training, and networking event for partners from the 14 Pilot Regions. The event took place over two days in Barcelona and Osona in Catalonia.

During the Pilot Region Kick-off event, attendees had the opportunity to increase their understanding of the RUSTIK project and interact with the project coordinators. They also delved into how the Pilot Regions could add value to the initiative and gained indispensable knowledge for implementing RUSTIK’s approaches. It was also the first opportunity for exchanging ideas and insights with partners from 14 distinct rural regions across ten states.

During the first day of the meeting, the RUSTIK project was introduced, and the attendees learned about the key concepts that will play a key role throughout the project’s duration and began exploring how these concepts could be put into practice in their respective pilot regions. On the second day, the focus shifted from ideas to action. The attendees comprehended what to anticipate and accomplish as they started to put into action a RUSTIK Living Lab in their pilot regions.

The interactive workshops enabled the attendees to have a direct conversation with the leads in charge of each of the upcoming tasks in the Living Lab. They had the chance to ask questions and provide feedback about the topics covered, which included doing background research on their respective pilot regions led by Franco Mantino (CREA), identifying existing data and data needs led by Andreu Ulied (MCRIT), setting up and assessing their Living Lab led by Janet Dwyer (CCRI), and creating a policy panorama for their pilot region led by Petri Kahila and Juha Halme (UEF).

Our hosts in Catalonia

The hosts for the event were MCRIT and the Ersilia Foundation. On the first day, we visited Sant Miquel de Balenyà, one of RUSTIK’s 14 pilot regions. The town had been established after a train station was built in the area in 1875, and it now has 1,353 residents. The nearby Parc Natural de Montseny is a UNESCO biosphere reserve. The wider region, Osona (with a population of 165,229), is renowned for its sausages and has a ratio of over six pigs per person.

RUSTIK will run 14 Living Labs to foster sustainability transitions in rural communities

RUSTIK (Rural Sustainability Transitions through Integration of Knowledge for improved policy processes) is a four-year transdisciplinary research project. The project aims to enable rural communities’ actors and policymakers to design better strategies, initiatives and policies fostering sustainability transitions of rural areas.

The project, funded by the Horizon Europe programme, envisages an analysis of current adaption requirements and the support of effective rural policy-making processes for a better understanding of the different rural functionalities and characteristics as well as the potentials and challenges of rural areas. Environment, climate-energy, socio-economic and digital will be the key transition pathways studied in the project.

Living Labs in 14 European Pilot Regions in 10 European countries will be the central element to generate new insights into rural diversity and societal transformations. RUSTIK’s Living Labs will work on the identification of new data, methods of data collection, combined with current data sources to set up relevant indicators. The project will also focus on data integration and dissemination, to make information and analysis accessible and valuable for actors and policymakers; and to improve rural impact assessment. The final goal is to enhance policy strategies and governance structures. To do so, 3 sequential phases: situational review, data experimentation, and policy learning are envisaged.

This week the academic partners of the project got together for the kick-off meeting organised in Frankfurt by the project coordinator, the Institute for Rural Development Research (IfLS).

A multidisciplinary consortium
The consortium involves 30 partner organisations. Eight universities and four research institutes are providing scientific expertise within the fields of rural development, spatial planning and reporting, policy process, climate change and sustainability; two knowledge-based SMEs contribute to this with ready-to-apply technologies and approaches; and two NGOs act as intermediaries between university resp. SMEs.

Local and regional embedded partners ensure a practice-oriented implementation of the project. This comprises partners from five local or regional public administration, two local action groups (LAGs), three business associations and three regional development agencies.

Two European umbrella organisation representing rural mountainous stakeholders and regions, Euromontana,, and the European LEADER association for rural development, ELARD, are key multipliers towards other European regions and particularly support the dissemination towards the European Union.

The consortium efforts will contribute to enhancing existing European policy tools and approaches, most of all to support the European Green Deal, the European Digital Strategy, the European Pillar of Social Rights and the EU Long-Term Vision for Rural Areas of the European Union, the EU Cohesion policy, the common agricultural policy, and, in particular, the European agricultural guarantee fund (EAGF).

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