D7.2 – Analysis of Good Practices

During the last decade, the concept of marginal land have received high attention both in research and policy formation. The Magic project aims to improve scientific evidence and create new knowledge based on the extensive experience of the project partners with the cultivation of industrial crops in land facing a range of biophysical marginality constraints across Europe.
Within this research framework, the work presented in this report, analyses success stories of selected industrial crops in European regions addressing biophysical/ environmental, economic, and social issues. The methodological approach provides a conceptual link of Value Chain Analysis (VCA), and a two- dimensional perspective (value chain’s key attributes in the form of competitive priorities (CP) and their performance in the different development stages) to analyse a set of Good Practice cases that cultivate industrial crops in marginal land.
The work presented here, uses a set of indicators, and evaluates the performance of the understudy Good Practice cases in the land use and biomass production stages. Following it discusses the relevance (in terms of creating competitive advantages once applied properly) of the under study competitive priorities across the development stages.
Results from this analysis illustrate how the cultivation of industrial crops in land with low soil fertility, high salinity, sandy soils, unfavourable texture and stoniness, contamination, etc. can help overcome both the biophysical challenges but also the socio-economic ones with providing outlets to rural communities for supporting the provision of raw materials to the biobased sectors.
The findings aim to inform on performance of industrial crops in land with biophysical marginality and facilitate the development of policy recommendations and Good Practice guidelines to promote the appropriate sourcing of renewable materials from marginal land at local/regional level.