Toulouse-Purpan, the engineering school wins a regional call for projects
Researcher Hichem Amichi and his team developed the FAVA (High Value Added Agricultural Sectors) initiative, which won the region’s call for “Research and Company(ies)” projects.
Hichem Amichi is a teacher-researcher in agricultural economics at the Purpan engineering school. With his team, he imagined the FAVA project, an initiative that aims to revitalize the wool and leather sector in Aveyron, and hemp in the Lot. It aims to question the capacities of these three agricultural sectors to develop via an agroecological and solidarity economy.
For Hichem Amichi, this award is “double recognition” of his work. “First of all because other research teams were in lice and were not selected”, he recalls, and also because the FAVA project has a “very operational aim”. The purpose of this is in fact to solicit companies already existing in the territory and to imagine with them the best way to promote their productions. “Le Sac du Berger” and the “leather division, the “Filature Colbert de Saint-Affrique”, VirgoCoop and Chanvre Cccitan” were respectively selected by the researcher for their work on leather, wool and hemp.
“On the ambition to create local collectives, which bring their values directly to consumers,” explains Hichem Amichi. By relying on the existing links between hemp and wool in the field of textiles, for example, the researcher hopes to “diversify the income of producers, without doing the same things as before”. These sectors in fact experienced a sharp decline in the 1960s to 1980s. local actors. A meeting bringing together all the partners should take place in March.