The International Congress of Red Fruits has closed its sixth edition today with a clear look at sustainability and the environment as keys to the future of the sector, as has been revealed in the different conferences who have made up the scientific-technical panel of the event today, and as the manager of Freshuelva, Rafael Domínguez Guillén, remarked at the closing.
Domínguez thanked "the effort of all the agents involved for having made this sixth congress possible, in which it has once again been demonstrated that we must all walk together for the future of the sector, which of course involves sustainability and the environment".
The manager of Freshuelva, in this sense, has highlighted that the Congress "began and ended by talking about health", a subject of radical importance for the sector and for Freshuelva, an entity that "is already thinking about holding the Seventh International Congress of Red Fruits, in which, as always, we will address the issues that most concern the sector”.
This path towards the "common challenge" of sustainability has been analyzed in detail and in depth on the last day of the Congress, which has had leading experts in the field to put on the table the solutions to the challenges that the sector faces in this regard.
Good practices Such has been the case of the first of the panels of the day, 'Environmental sustainability and innovation', which has had the participation of María del Carmen Márquez, responsible for good agricultural practices of the Business Association for the Protection of the Plants (AEPLA); and Antonio García, from the export department of Hydroponics Systems.
The head of AEPLA, the entity with which Freshuelva collaborates in sustainability projects, has detailed how to achieve sustainability through good agricultural practices, ensuring that the best way to achieve it is through "science, technology and innovation”.
Márquez has emphasized that agriculture faces great challenges that "will make the road difficult", such as the fact that in the year 2050 60% more food will be needed to feed a population that will reach the 9.3 billion people. Of these foods, 85% will come from agriculture, so production must increase by 1.75% each year in order to feed the world.
In addition to this obstacle to achieving sustainability, there is that of pests, which will require “biosolutions that allow us to reconcile sustainability with the maintenance of agriculture”. In this sense, he detailed the RespBerry project, which promotes the correct use of phytosanitary products to contribute to the sustainability of the system.
In this way, the person in charge of AEPLA has assured that phytosanitary products "contribute to the sustainability of agriculture and help farmers to provide safe and affordable food".
The panel continued with the practical case offered by the export manager of the company Hydroponics Systems, Antonio García, specialized in offering solutions to farmers for hydroponic crops, which are more sustainable than traditional ones.
García has assured that, in this matter, there is still a lot to be done in Spain, whose agriculture is "light years away" from other countries in which this type of crop is "fully integrated". Hydroponics, in the opinion of this expert, offers "numerous sustainability and other advantages" in strawberry cultivation.
Among these advantages, he highlighted the fact that hydroponics allows crops to be grown anywhere regardless of the soil, causes less contamination of the soil and surface water, and enables greater nutritional control of the crop and greater efficiency in the use of water.
This "more technical" production of the strawberry also offers numerous advantages, which include the professionalization of the sector, the improvement in working conditions and the efficiency of operators, greater efficiency in the use of resources and higher yields and crop profitability.
Sustainable Development GoalsThe International Congress of Red Fruits also addressed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) applied to berry companies through a conference given by Francisco José Martínez, professor of Financial Economics and Accounting at the University of Huelva and one of the top experts in the field.
Martínez has affirmed that the SDGs are "the main economic and social project currently underway in the world", therefore their importance "is key to the future of humanity", despite the "obvious delays that still exist with many of them.”
The professor has assured that the berry sector is directly affected by the 17 Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations, "with which it has a lot to gain, since a company aligned with the SDGs is a company that it has a better future.”
How to make coffee without a Coffee Maker #foodnetwork https://t.co/RI8CycsHaJ #redibasecooking FB :… https://t.co/1p5hBK8bue
— Redi-Base Cooking Fri Oct 30 17:01:00 +0000 2020
