Life Grace will be present at the Workshop "Mountain animal husbandry as a tool for biodiversity conservation: Good Practices, Criticalities and Perspectives", organised by the LIFE ShepForBio project, which will be held on March 1, at the Fortezza di Monte Alfonso (Castelnuovo Garfagnana, Lucca).
The event is part of a broader activity aimed at defining a Regional Strategy for the conservation of mountain pasture and grassland habitats through activities supporting mountain pastoralism: a technical support tool for policies to enhance extensive mountain animal husbandry and protect the biodiversity of mountain pastures and grasslands.
The Workshop will be an opportunity to exchange information on good practices and current experiences between companies, researchers and public administrations on issues related to the promotion and development of an economic activity that is fundamental for the conservation of species and habitats: as Life GRACE, Alba Pietromarchi, FIRAB supply chain expert, will moderate the panel on "The environmental value of mountain production chains, as the right recognition for an activity with high environmental added value".
Extensive livestock farming, if well managed, provides ecosystem services and public goods, i.e. maintains and protects natural and farmed biodiversity, as there is a close interdependence between the management and conservation of flora and vegetation biodiversity and the use of pastures. An example of this is the ecological European network" Natura 2000" concerned by the Life GRACE project, where the conservation of herbaceous habitats is linked to the Apennine pasture systems.
GRACE highlights how important the socio-economic qualification of productions and producers is in order to make grazing an environmental service: only if the constraints that compromise the vitality and conservation of livestock activities can be overcome, there is a prospect of re-qualifying grazing systems, in terms of the social and economic contribution they offer in maintaining rural areas of high environmental value.
All this appears to be little (or not) known by consumers and other actors in the supply chain, especially if this is made up of many intermediaries, while it expresses a greater value when the supply chain is reduced and the producer becomes, individually and/or by joining together, also a retailer and/or restaurateur: the requalification and strengthening of these supply chains can only proceed, at the same time, with the creation of local networks and market niches that understand and appreciate their nutritional, ethical, healthy, economic and, first of all, environmental values.
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