A NETWORK OF CLUSTERS IN THE FOOD INDUSTRY TO BE SET UP

An international agreement for establishment of contacts in the field of agricultural production and food-processing was signed yesterday by representatives of Bulgaria, Italy, Slovenia, Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The aim is to set up an international network of production clusters under the ADC project, including 13 partners from nine countries in the region. Our representative in the project is the Bulgarian Economic Forum (BEF).

The initiative came from the Veneto region of Italy. Italy as a whole is very advanced with regard to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and these companies are organised in clusters - a kind of cooperation with a legal form, uniting companies from a certain sector. “Cooperation between them results in larger markets and better marketing of their products,” explained BEF’s Chairman Georgi Tabakov. SMEs, for instance, are not able to carry out research on their own. But when united in a cluster, they can organise scientific research and the results become available to all partners. The website of the project has published a catalogue of the companies which have shown interest.