Workshop: Issues and prospects for the successful linkage of local gastronomy and rural tourism

Under the EBRD/FAO cooperation, the project “Montenegro: Promoting sustainable agrifood value chains through linkages with tourism” has been designed to enhance food producers’ market connection with tourism and HORECA markets, building  lessons learned from other EBRD-FAO projects related to promotion of sustainable value chains. The project is being implemented in collaboration with the Ministry of Sustainable Development and Tourism and Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.

Gastronomy and traditional food products play a major role in promoting a country’s national identity and culture, and has become an aspect of increasing importance in the quality of the tourist experience.  Having an untapped local gastronomic culture and traditional food production that uses local resources in sustainable and practical ways, Montenegrin smallholders can exploit the high growth potential from linking the agriculture and tourism sectors through two avenues:  rural hospitality activities and high-quality foods specific to Montenegro placed in hotels and restaurants. In this perspective, agrifood producers willing to engage in activities related to tourism and gastronomy have just established the Rural Tourism Association (RTA) to facilitate such development.

Objectives

In the frame of the series of workshops aiming at building a roadmap to link agriculture to tourism, the main objective of this third workshop is to address the issues and prospects in linking the sectors from the rural tourism and gastronomy perspective. The specific objectives are to:

• Provide a clear picture of the issues and existing solutions, highlighting what remains to be done in the context of implementing the Rural Tourism Programme to 2021.
• Transfer knowledge to Montenegrin public authorities using successful experiences in EU countries with a similar context and the experience of Slow Food International
• Identify the activities to be included in the roadmap that can link agriculture and tourism and how these can be supported and promoted by the different sector stakeholders.