Meeting 21-22 March 2002 - Conclusions

Conclusions

Michael Constantinides - the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture, Natural Resources and the Environment gave his full support to eForesee saying that he would ‘stand by’ the results of the project. It was clear from his questioning that he is focused on results and that he is interested in the concrete benefits that foresight can provide for this sector in Cyprus.

Short presentations by Guenter Clar of the European Commission, Patrick Crehan of CKA in Brussels - the project coordinator and Nikos Maroulis of Logotech in Greece - representing the recently launched Greek National Foresight exercise, were well received by the directors and personnel of ARI. However it is clear that foresight is an unfamiliar concept for most people, and it will take a little time before it is really understood and before people see either how they can use foresight or how they can contribute to a local foresight exercise.

The advice to the Cyprus team is that they should bear in mind that this is a pilot project, and can be used to demonstrate the role of foresight via concrete results. For this reason it is not necessary to bring everyone on board the project for the pilot, from the beginning. The pilot exercise should be build around early adopters and individuals who are interested in constructive experimentation with the foresight tool. Given the nature and role of a ‘pilot project’ the choice of theme is important in that it should be:

• Sufficiently complex to warrant a foresight approach, and
• Sufficiently limited to achieve a useful result given the available resources and time constraints of the project.

The original concept for the foresight pilots in Cyprus was to use them to provide input to decision making related to accession negotiations in the field of agriculture. It is clear that given the timetable for negotiation, this will not be possible. The opinion of participants from ARI was that the more complex challenges lie in dealing with the consequences of the negotiation - the change management and decision-making that comes afterwards as the impact of decisions become apparent. A number of studies have been carried out on the immediate impact of accession on the agricultural sector in Cyprus. However this has not been accompanied with a vision of what Agriculture in Cyprus could become in the future. Such a vision will provide a guide to managing the immediate consequences of change due to the adoption of the aquis communautaire. Furthermore the moment of change could be used to launch the whole sector on a new trajectory of development towards the future.

The following potential themes were briefly discussed:

• A Vision of Agriculture in Cyprus in the year 2010,
• Cyprus and the Challenge of Genetically Modified Organisms,
• Agriculture as a Knowledge Industry,
• Benefiting from the Introduction of Environmental
• Impact Assessment Laws,
• A Long-term Vision for Water Management in Cyprus,
• The impact of new materials, nano-technology and robotics on agriculture,
• The role of new technologies to boost agricultural productivity,
• Dealing with the impact of accession on agricultural establishments,
• Linking Energy, the Environment and Agriculture in Cyprus.