Research in Organic Food and Farming. Reports on organisation and conduction of research programmes in 11 European countries

This publication represents reports on the organization and conduction of research programmes in 11 European countries involved in the ERA-NET/1/CA-SSA-B No 011716 ”CORE Organic” (Coordination of European Transnational Research in Organic Food and Farming, Project no 011716). This publication evolved as a comprehensive project output but it is not a deliverable as such. Due to the genesis of research in Organic Food & Farming the present scientific resources in Europe are still scattered. A cross-border aggregation of these resources will help to reach a higher relevance of organic agriculture and a fortifi cation of the involved benefi ts for rural development, environment and consumers. These benefits are more and more acknowledged by policy makers and governments. Therefore, in several European countries publicly funded research programmes regarding Organic Food & Farming were set up. The existence of these national programmes provides a goood opportunity to manage the aggregation of scientific resources as mentioned above: Within the project CORE Organic (“Coordination of European Transnational Research in Organic Food and Farming”) decision makers and research managers from different European ministries, funding bodies andc other programme operating organisations work together for an increased exchange of information, for a coordination of existing research and integration of knowledge, for sharing and developing best practice to evaluate organic research and for the identifi cation and coordination of common research needs. The CORE project is running within the European Commissions ERA-NET Scheme, which intends to step up such cooperations between national research activities. Participating countries are Austria, Denmark (coordination), Finland, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom. Initially, the initiative comprises these eleven countries, but it is open to include all European countries with a national research programme for research in Organic Food & Farming. This book is a summary of eleven country reports and developed as an additional project output to the mapping of existing information about programmes, institutions, projects and facilities within the fi eld of Organic Food & Farming research in the CORE Organic partner countries. During the organisational period of the mapping for the enlarged database Organic Eprints the project consortium realised the limited resources available for this task. Therefore, it was decided to gather the most important data about organic research in a condensed form in individual country reports. All country reports in this publication follow a standardised structure starting with the history of organic farming research. Then the organisational structure or research set up is explained followed by financial details about the different research programmes existing in this field. Furthermore the country reports give an overview about existing national research facilities and describe the national procedures for initiation of research and stakeholder engagement, selection criteria and evaluation procedures. The reports end with the explanation of utilisation of research findings and national scientific education and research schools. After finalising the individual country reports it was a challenge to make this first comprehensive European overview about the status quo of research in organic food and farming available as a publication. The individual country reports were finished between the end of 2005 and the beginning of 2006

Joining up the Dots Employment Study

An Employment Study was recently completed in relation to the Grangegorman Development and the local area. It was carried out in conjunction with several public and community bodies to examine the job opportunities that will arise from the development

The early inhabitants of the Upemba depression, the Democratic Republic of Congo

Includes bibliographical references.This research set out to shed light on the contradiction between the archaeological evidence pointing towards cultural continuity and the Luba’s rejection of ancestral relationships with the human skeletal remains found in the Upemba Depression of Central Katanga, the Democratic Republic of Congo. This was done by assessing the biological variation of the human skeletal remains of the early inhabitants from the Upemba Depression in the southeast of the Katanga Province (DRC) by using metric and non-metric dental morphological traits. Dental analyses of these Iron Age people have revealed homogeneity between the sexes, time periods and sites in Central Katanga. This is in contrast with the oral history from the Luba, who believe that the Iron Age remains are of their enemies who came from the northeast. In support of the archaeology, the dental morphological results from the current research have confirmed that present-day Luba people can trace their origins in Central Katanga as far back as AD 700.The analysis of patterns of dental disease, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen stable isotopes as well as phytoliths demonstrate that the diets and behaviours varied amongst these Iron Age communities. This may have been related to differences in food preparation and hygiene