ARIA 2024 prize winners showcase LEADER’s inspirational value
LEADER co-financed ten out of the 24 finalists of ARIA 2024 across all the award categories, including some of the winners, thus showing its potential to support a wide range of CAP objectives.
LEADER’s potential for inspiring new good practices in Community-Led Local Development (CLLD) was once again highlighted by the number of LAG-supported projects that won prizes and were finalists at the 2024 Agricultural and Rural Inspiration Awards (ARIA24).
The ARIA 2024 ceremony took place in December last year, and, as in previous editions of the Awards, Member States nominated a significant number of LEADER projects for the prestigious EU prizes.
LEADER co-financed ten out of the 24 finalists of ARIA 2024 across all the award categories: smart and competitive agriculture, environmental protection, the socio-economic fabric of rural areas, rural youth, as well as in the popular vote and the special gender equality award. Two of the six category winners and two of the five highly commended projects were funded by LEADER. Such esteem highlights the broad scope of LEADER’s cross-cutting potential for supporting a wide range of CAP objectives.
LEADER winners
In the Socio-Economic Fabric of Rural Areas category, France’s LEADER funded La petite conserverie (The little conserve factory) was judged to be the winner. The project collects agricultural surpluses and transforms them into preserves, with the active involvement of local people. Its contribution to the circular economy is considered highly transferable, and such an initiative can reinforce rural resilience by tackling risks from food waste as well as agricultural surplus.
A new category in this year’s ARIA ceremony was the Gender Equality Award, won by Austria’s LAG-funded FRAU iDA – Space for women entrepreneurs, which offers coworking spaces, networking and professional development opportunities to working women in rural areas. The project stood out for its approach to promoting female role models, which can be replicated in any community seeking to improve the visibility of women’s wide-ranging achievements by addressing specific challenges.
LAG support was also the source of CAP funding for two Highly Commended projects. Ireland’s Galway Wool Co-op, a finalist in the socio-economic fabric category, has helped improve the commercialisation of natural fleece fibre; and the Dutch Food station, which was recognised within the ARIA Youth category as an “innovative learning lab for fruit growers to become sustainable food entrepreneurs and regional stakeholders of the future”.
Innovative inspirations
Other LEADER finalists nominated by the ARIA 2024 jury included the Bananika banana beer brewery from Portugal’s Azorean islands, which is tackling food waste in a creative and profitable way - and was entered in the award category for Smart & competitive agriculture projects.
LAGs' ability to help sustainable food systems featured again among contenders for ARIA’s Environmental Protection category. Here, Portugal’s Utopia Space project, combining a sustainably built co-working space with an organic farm, was accredited as a finalist for putting resource efficiency in practice and creating five new local jobs in the process.
Three of the four finalists for ARIA’s Socio-Economic Fabric of Rural Areas category achieved their rural development successes thanks to LEADER. These were: Poland’s Creation of an educational farm – Pszczelandia, Portugal’s Quinta da Moscadinha hotel, restaurant and cider distillery on Madeira, and the aforementioned Galway Wool Co-op project.
Last, yet far from least, LEADER’s potential for supporting rural youth skills was acknowledged by two finalist nominations in ARIA 2024’s special Rural Youth category. These inspirational EU examples of Community-Led Local Development were Estonia’s Mobile youth centre project and Hungary’s CTAY youth centres initiative.
The latest EU CAP Network's Projects Brochure reviews all the finalists of the 2024 competition. The EU CAP Network team recorded exclusive backstage interviews with the winners of each Award category. The interviews are now available on our YouTube channel and the page of each project (in the description section), which you can access from the ARIA 2024 page. Here, you can also watch the ARIA after-movie and re-live the emotions of the ceremony.
Follow the EU CAP Network database of LEADER good practice projects for a regular supply of new LAG success stories.
