Horizon Europe, a European Union funding program for research and innovation, announced today that it has €32 million in funding available for research into more sustainable protein options such as cultivated meat and plant-based alternatives. The program works to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and this is the largest funding package set aside specifically for sustainable proteins to date.
There are three project categories supported by Horizon Europe’s funding for researchers to take on:
- Fill in the gaps of nutrition, safety, and allergenicity of alternative proteins, and then assessing the environmental footprints of these products. Budget – €11 million.
- Develop sustainable protein crop systems and value chains with the facilitation of best practices between farmers
Budget – €9 million - Focus on food environments and aim to ensure that consumers are able to make healthy and sustainable food choices when at restaurants and supermarkets. Budget – €12 million
Food security is a global issue because of a continuously expanding population and climate change. By 2050, it is estimated that 9.7 billion people will inhabit the planet, yet the resources and land available for food production on Earth are finite. To feed this many people, we would have to double the current amount of food production. According to the Good Food Institute, plant-based meat alternatives use 47-99 percent less land than conventional meat. The same report by GFI stated that 77 percent of all available agricultural land is used for animal agriculture, yet animal agriculture only supplies 17 percent of the world’s food supply. This type of inefficiency would make it challenging to achieve the food requirements needed by 2050.
The Good Food Institute Europe, along with 21 other organizations, sent a letter to the European Commission imploring them to consider allocating funding for the research and development of more sustainable proteins. This isn’t the first time governments have stepped up to provide funding for this type of research. The Spanish government granted BioTech Foods €5.2 million ($6.3 million USD) at the beginning of 2021 for the company’s cultured meat project, which consisted of investigating the health benefits of cultured meat. NovaMeat also received €250,000 (~ $307,500 USD) in funding from the Spanish government, at the beginning of the year to further develop its 3D printed meat alternatives. In the U.S., UC Davis received a $3.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to research cultivated meat last September.
The Horizon Europe program will run until 2027, and those interested in applying for grant money through Horizon Europe for these three projects can apply here.
