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COFAMI

The EU FP6 project "Collective Farmers Marketing Initiatives" (COFAMIs) aimed to provide an answer to the challenges set to European farmers by changing market and policy ditions. By pooling ideas, experiences and capital they enable farmers to build up market knowledge and linkages, and create a favourable environment for the dissemination of skills and best practices. Also, centration of offer may open up scale advantages, strengthen the collective bargaining power of producers, and make them attractive market partners for retailers operating at larger scales. More generally, COFAMIs demonstrated the potential to reinforce rural incomes and employment, strengthen synergies with other eomic activities, and bring agriculture more in line with the demands set by wider society. This project aims to strengthen the role of COFAMIs by identifying the social, economic, cultural and political factors that limit/enable their development. Additionally, it aimed to formulate viable support strategies to enhance their performance, dissemination and tinuity. By means of national status-quo analyses and a set of in-depth case studies it addressed the existing diversity of COFAMIs in Europe to determine the relative influence of different types of limiting/enabling factors. The project brought together research groups from 10 countries, covering all relevant regions of the enlarged EU. Participatory methods and stakeholder sultation played a key role in the research, to ensure that outcomes were optimally grounded in field experiences and to tribute to policy developments with proposals that meet the support of stakeholder groups. By means of a European Expert Group the expertise mobilised in the project and its geographical coverage was further enhanced. As such, the project aimed to tribute to the development of a European Research Area in the field of collective marketing approaches and their role in promoting sustainable rural development and food production.