EUropean REgions of GAstronomy building resilience and creating economic growth (EUREGA)

EUREGA’s main objective is to have food, food habits and gastronomy included and recognised in EU, regional and national strategies and policies both as a cultural asset and strong element in regional cultural identity and as a necessary tool to boost sustainable products and services. This should lead to creating stronger and more resilient regions by protecting and stimulating gastronomy as part of their cultural heritage and also by identifying new opportunities for economic development. As a result of international partners working together for four years the seven Action Plans, each region is to produce as main outcome will introduce significant improvement to the targeted policy instruments (Operational Programmes or Regional Development Strategies) leading to economic revival of the food and gastronomy sector as cultural heritage in the regions involved. EUREGA wishes to focus on the following sub-themes of “Gastronomy AND:
- support for SMEs (including SMEs in strengthening and developing short regional food supply chains)
- education (increasing the representation of gastronomy and creativity in educational programmes)
- sustainable tourism (improving policies to meet sustainable tourism objectives)
- linking urban and rural (linking urban and rural development strategies as relates to gastronomy)
- health (exploiting cultural heritage in relation to well-being, education, tourism and hospitality)