The IntercropValuES project is a four-year project (2022-2026) carried out with 27 partners in 15 countries. Mozambique and Zimbabwe are involved in the project, with Eduardo Mondlane University, University of Zimbabwe, Department of Plant Production Sciences and Technologies, and Cirad research unit AIDA.

Food production is a resource-intensive activity with profound impacts on the environment. These well documented negative impacts of agriculture combined with climatic and global changes means more sustainable agricultural systems are needed. Despite its benefits, crop diversification in agriculture is hindered by various technical, organizational, and institutional barriers along value chains (input industries, farms, trading and processing industries, retailers and consumers) and within sociotechnical systems (policy, research, education, regulation and advisory). Intercropping is an agroecological practice for crop diversification corresponding to mixtures of arable crop species and has long been recognized as a way to improve the sustainability of crop production. Intercropping has a history of thousands of years in China and is an ancient farming system that is still widely practiced by smallholders in China, India, Africa. Nevertheless, intercropping is not widely used in European agriculture, as growing sole crops systems was the main model of agriculture developed after World War II. Of course, intercropping may increase the complexity of agricultural operations and the labour intensity at farm level, as well as contradict the current market which requires standardized products and processing, and simplified modes of marketing.

The goal of IntercropValueES is to exploit the benefits of intercropping to design productive, diversified, resilient, profitable and environmentally friendly agro-ecological cropping systems less dependent on external inputs than current systems and acceptable to farmers and actors in the agri-food chain. This goal includes analysing the conditions needed to increase yield and economic performance, but also soil health and ecosystem services, as indicators of the value of intercropping. IntercropValueES will then develop a detailed analysis of lock-ins and levers at the value chain level in order to identify credible solutions that can be adopted by farmers and actors of the value chain. The project will implement a participative and multi-actor approach to overcome such barriers and lock-ins identified by the key actors of the local value-chain by providing multiple services of intercropping.

The main objectives of the project are to:

1. Support the design of locally relevant, legitimate and innovative agrifood chains, through 13 Co-Innovation Case Studies (CICS).
2. Understand, through 15 meta-experiments, the functioning and interactions of intercropping to maximise productivity and the provision of ecosystem services.
3. Generate knowledge, methods and tools for the management of associated crops and the evaluation of their performance and profitability.
4. Understand intercropping performance by modelling (simulation studies providing novel information).
5. Generate novel knowledge on the quality of grains harvested from cereal-legume intercrops in comparison with those of sole crops.
6. To uncover key barriers and levers at the value chain level to boost the transition towards intercropping practices throughout EU agriculture.

Mozambique is involved in specific objectives 1, 4, 5 and 6, Zimbabwe in specific objectives 2, 3, 4, 5.