Vitartis and Cajamar have presented this Wednesday an ambitious strategy to strengthen the food industry in Castilla y León that aims to be a “road map” for the sector, whose main potential is exports.
“This is one of the most important contributions that we can make to the sector as the Association of the Food Industry of Castilla y León: we want to share our roadmap for the coming years with the entire sector,” stated the president of Vitartis, Santiago Miguel. , during the presentation of the strategic report ‘Grow by growing’, which began with a minute of silence for the victims of Dana in the Valencian Community, Andalusia and Castilla-La Mancha.
Santiago Miguel expressed Vitartis’ “deep gratitude to Cajamar, whose collaboration has been essential when developing this strategy,” he said, addressing the president of the entity, Eduardo Baamonde, with whom he co-chaired the presentation of the study held today in Valladolid. .
Transformation time
For his part, Baamonde recalled that “Vitartis and Cajamar maintain a permanent and close relationship, sharing a way of doing things, seeking efficiency and effectiveness, with a strong vocation of service towards companies and people.” And within the framework of this relationship, “this prospective work responds to the fact that we are living in a moment of profound transformations in society, in the economy, in politics and in technology. , which should make us reflect in the agri-food sector”.
The president of Cajamar highlighted the need to identify the challenges as well as the opportunities, and to strengthen relationships between the different operators in the sector: “It is timely to analyze where we are and, above all, where we want to be.” in the coming years and see what we have to do to achieve it.
In this sense, Baamonde has highlighted that the agri-food products of Castilla y León enjoy a good image, something that the Community had to take advantage of because its productions are fundamentally oriented towards the national market and could have great development opportunities in international markets beyond the proximity ones in which it already exists”.
Cristina Ramírez de Lara, director of Vitartis, also participated in the event, explaining the origins of this project, the business concerns that motivated it and the itinerary that the initiative has followed until its presentation, today, in society; and the director of Studies and Publications of the Grupo Cajamar Foundation, Ignacio Atance, who developed the main ideas of the diagnosis of the sector. The territorial director of Castilla y León, José Antonio Benavides, also acted as host of the presentation.
Regarding the purpose of the analysis carried out, Cristina Ramírez assured that “working for the growth of the food industry we are promoting the entire value chain: “it increases employment and the economic and social well-being of citizens, with the added conviction that this sector contributes like no other to the establishment of the population in our rural world.”
Along these lines, Ignacio Atance announced that the study is based on a deep diagnosis of the food industry, based on its strategic nature, and its weight in terms of value and employment for the region. “The regional food industry, despite the smaller size of its companies, presents economic and a better financial state in Castilla y León than in Spain as a whole, fundamentally supported by the high productivity and competitiveness of their companies”.
The close collaboration between Vitartis and Cajamar, with the contribution of the Ivie economic analysis and research center, has made possible the design of a specific methodology, which combines qualitative and quantitative analysis elements, with the reflections of 40 businessmen in the sectorrepresentatives of the university and technology centers, as well as heads of different entities and organizations linked to the activity.
The result of this is the diagnosis of the sector, which is described in the first part of the report, which details the concerns and concerns of the food industry, both currently and over the next five years.
Among them, the first three concerns refer to the negative impact of the current regulatory framework in the activity, to the enormous difficulty in incorporating the talent they need, as well as the concern generated by the general economic context itself.
Third place in the national ranking
The president of Vitartis recalled that the food industry of Castilla y León is in very good health. It has almost 2,900 active companies, which employ around 50,000 people and generate a production volume of 14.3 billion euros, the third highest figure in the regional ranking.
Currently, the food industry of Castilla y León contributes 5.2% to the regional GVA, more than double that of the national sector to the GVA of Spain (2.4); and represents 4.1% of employment in the Community, two points above the national sector.
In any case, said Santiago Miguel, “what we want to convey to the entities and institutions, and to all our residents of Castilla y León, is that the food industry can and should contribute more to the regional economy; and particularly to the progress and modernization of our people.
And after ensuring that this has been “the argument why Vitartis has insisted on carrying out this strategy, together with Cajamar”, Santiago Miguel has called on the “necessary collaboration between institutions and entities, each from their area of responsibility, to make the growth objectives of this sector possible, because they are good for Castilla y León, and especially for the rural environment.”
“Only in this framework of collaboration and trust will it be possible to achieve maximum performance of the seven axes in which our strategy to strengthen the sector in the short and medium term is specified,” added the president of Vitartis, who then referred very briefly to each of them: stimulate companies to increase their own size; explain the attractiveness of the sector and our environment to attract the talent we need; assume sustainability criteria to differentiate the product and compete better; reinforce investment in innovation and digitalizationopen the activity of companies to new markets; improve communication, transportation and logistics infrastructures in anticipation of future needs, and manage instability: contribute to the generation of a climate of trust in a complex regulatory and economic context.
Santiago Miguel insisted that, “in a collaborative context, adding public-private efforts, The number of people employed in the sector could increase by 12,000 or 15,000 people until 2030″.
Likewise, he added, there is a high margin for growth in foreign activity. “Currently, 71% of the food industries in Castilla y León make some sales in third countries; however, more than 55% of them invoice below 50,000 euros per year.”
The presentation of this strategy is part of the ‘Growing’ project and has direct help from the Ministry of Economy and Finance of the Government of Castilla y León, as a singular action of special interest carried out by Vitartis to strengthen the business fabric, which pursues the attraction of talent to the sector in the Community.
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