The agrifood sector is a strategic asset of all Countries, with particular social relevance: it is of crucial importance to ensure sufficient food production to citizens, and vital to ensure employment, preserve rural public goods, supply healthy and quality products, including sustainable and secure production and distribution chains. It has also to facilitate the enhancement of competitiveness and sustainability approach of SMEs into the food chain, while quality, safety, and traceability being key elements.
It is essential to consider all factors affecting food quality & safety, from farm to fork, thus making health converge into a unicum as a system by applying the “One Health” approach. Well-balanced and sustainable agroecosystems & agrifood systems can highly contribute to the well-being and security of the human-animal-plant capitals, while increasing the capacity of handling and managing their complex system of interdependencies. Sustainable agrifood systems are key to attain the UN SDGs. An important aspect of sustainability is the agroecological transformation of the whole food value chain from farm to fork, as well as to improve resilience of supply chains, the vulnerability of which has been highlighted during the recent pandemic and war crises. In this context, diets must not only be healthy but also sustainable, as the food choices have significant relapses on individuals, the society, and the environment. They can concretely influence the future of humans on the planet. Dietary patterns must therefore interpret health protection and food choices as integrated components of the overall health of the ecosystem. Another key element is the promotion of integrated traceability systems, enhancing the digitalization of the agrifood system in support of transparency. The data infrastructure should comply with the FAIR principle (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Re-usable), should be interoperable with other data repositories, access to data repositories should be federated and data quality must be maintained and improved.

Research Infrastructures (RIs) play a strategic role and have the capacity to assemble resources (equipment, data, knowledge) and services for the agrifood sector (including research communities) on a long-term basis both within EU and globally. In this context, RIs are the best positioned not only to address societal challenges, but also to provide turnkey solutions for citizens, policy makers and industry. In particular, METROFOOD-RI - Infrastructure for Promoting Metrology in Food and Nutrition is a distributed RI aimed to promote scientific excellence in the field of food quality and safety. It provides high-quality metrology services in food and nutrition, comprising an important cross-section of highly interdisciplinary and interconnected fields throughout the food value chain, including agrifood, sustainable development, food safety, quality, traceability and authenticity, environmental safety, and human health.

The session will underscore the role of Research Infrastructure in approaching agrifood system challenges with reference, e.g., to food quality & safety, traceability & transparency, innovation, digitalization, circular bioeconomy, sustainability, and resilience, represent the occasion to debate about the relevance of boosting research, cooperation, innovation, and stakeholder engagement in support to the agrifood.