The Minister of Agriculture, Eng. Khaled Hunaifat, patronized the signing ceremony of six agreements in the Agricultural Innovation and Entrepreneurship Incubator at the National Agricultural Research Center (NARC).

During the ceremony, Hunaifat commended the trend NARC is adopting to employ creativity and innovation, in line with the royal vision to encourage innovation, leadership and creativity in the agricultural sector.

Hunaifat also called for the need to promote partnership between the public and private sectors to employ innovation in all agricultural aspects to reduce the challenges facing the agricultural sector, especially production, climate change, marketing and water, emphasizing that these aspects are a basis to enhance food security and achieve agricultural sustainability.

Dr. Nizar Haddad, the Director General of NARC, stated that these agreements play a vital role in promoting innovation and creativity and transforming ideas into real and pioneering projects on the ground, in addition to their ability in creating job opportunities for agricultural engineers and graduates, and adopting pioneering modern technologies that would develop the agricultural sector.

Haddad addressed that the climatic, environmental and water challenges facing the agricultural sector require concerted local and international efforts to employ innovation and creativity in the sector to support smallholder farmers in cooperation with partners and donors; which will reflect positively on the agricultural sector and create an environment that can embrace innovation and creativity, in addition to raising the added value on the product and enhancing the role of e-marketing to reduce marketing constraints. On this, he added that NARC is in the process of signing a cooperation agreement with the Agricultural Credit Corporation (ACC) in order to support agricultural innovation and entrepreneurship incubator projects by providing interest-free loans to enable those projects.

The Director of the Institutional Development and Knowledge Management Directorate, Eng. Ammar Hattar, expressed that the agreements included six pioneering projects, whose work focuses on dedicating technology to alleviating climatic and environmental challenges, promoting mushroom cultivation and creative laboratories for mushroom science and tissue culture, sustainable agriculture, cultivation of pistachios, chestnuts and walnuts, in addition to hydroponics and soilless agriculture.

Dr. Raed Khreis, Director of Ibda'a Laboratories for Mushroom Sciences, said that this agreement is a base for enabling creativity and innovation to move towards implementation through the exchange of ideas and information among entrepreneurs, benefiting from laboratory services and employing the stations of NARC to disseminate their results. He commended the role played by the agricultural innovation and entrepreneurship incubator at NARC as a platform for transferring and adopting ideas to develop agricultural production tools and achieve comprehensive agricultural development.

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