In April 2019, the EU Member States signed the declarationon “A smart and sustainable digital future for European agriculture and rural areas” and committed to a number of actions including the creation of an European data space for smart agrifood applications. The European Strategy for Data that was published in February 2020 foresees the rollout of common European data spaces in nine strategic sectors, including agriculture. The development of such sectoral common European data spaces willbe funded under the Digital Europe Programme (DEP).

Last 8th. of September, an online workshop on a Common European Agricultural Data Space in the Digital Europe Programme was organised. The main objective of this webinar was to refine the concept of a common European agricultural data space, answering the specific needs of the agricultural sector in the context of the Digital Europe Programme.

The online event included presentations from the Commission on the EU data strategy and data spaces, the agricultural perspective, and testing and experimentation facilities under the Digital Europe Programme, as well as presentations from external experts in the field.

As it was presened by the Commission, the implementation of a Common European Agricultural Data Space will not be established from scratch but will combine existing data platforms and data sets, as a distributed system comprising different data platforms.

Participants highlighted that no spontaneous integration is going to happen and therefore a regulatory framework is needed to push data sharing mechanisms to get integrated. At the same time, they pointed out the need for clarification on how data-sharing will give access to new added-value.

This workshop was inserted in the need to reach agreements among the key players of the agricultura sector on the definition of the interoperability mechanisms in close cooperation with a support centre, which will be set up, and which will coordinate all relevant actions on sectoral data spaces.

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More information

Workshop report: How to build a common European Agricultural Data Space