Good afternoon, it is a pleasure to inaugurate this new OPINION section on the website open to any of the members and collaborators of the Forums.
So, every time you see the picture that is above this piece, will mean that a member of the Forum has writen something for you.
Hope you enjoy it.
The Intangibles
Back in 2012, when we started, it is possible that the Forums meant, for all of us who attended, simply annual meetings in which we learnt and discussed interesting topics that affected our daily work and the working conditions in the sector. We already know that this is paying off. Without going any further, many of the examples of good practices that are shared in recent meetings have their origin or were inspired by experiences shared in the Forums.
But perhaps it is more important to review that with the passing of the seasons and the years, in those meetings adequate conditions were created so that collaboration and exchange links were built, invisible to many, but very useful for those who were building them, for their companies and therefore for their workers. People who have the same difficulties and challenges in their jobs when hiring, managing or facing issues related to their work teams, with the Authorities or with the organization of their company, began to help each other inside and outside the Forum events. Those invisible links are there and are part of the results that will last because for some they have already become true friendships.
Through those links, which are still being created today, the Forums added new ingredients to the pot. Experts, labor authorities, trade union representatives and social organizations joined the initiative and I think that without the existence of all these linkss, the Working Groups would find much more difficulties to prosper. And I have just reached to the Working Groups.
At the Working Groups links are created with much greater ease and speed. And we speak at this time of more than 50 people participating in 7 different work streams after less than two years since we decided to launch them. Of course, there are some work groups that are slower and others that may run too much, but I think we need very little to consider them completely sustainable. At least that is the target and, although from here we try to encourage discussions and provide all possible technical and logistical support, the goal is to break moorings, and become actively and autonomously transforming elements of the agri food industry, which definitely needs inventors of new management models, in a world that is moving at vertiginous speeds.
As a sector, without collaborating with each other or without communicating, it is impossible to move forward. As Harari wrote in his book Sapiens talking about the evolution of the human being, the unique feature of our language is the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all… and that is what we try to achieve in the Forums, evolve towards management models that do not exist today and that together we can invent….
Let’s do it.
