1. Healthy, safe and sufficient food and feed; with a focus on developing and producing safe and high qualities food; creating food products targeted at specific consumer groups and needs; and producing safe, high quality, sufficient and sustainable feed.
2. Plant-based products, chemicals and energy; with a focus on enabling research; biochemicals; industrial feedstocks and biopolymers; and bioenergy.
3. Sustainable agriculture, forestry and landscape; with a focus on improving plant productivity and quality; optimising agriculture to further reduce its environmental impact; boosting biodiversity; and enhancing the aesthetical value and sustainability of the landscape.
4. Vibrant and competitive basic research; with a focus on advanced genome resources and plant breeding; novel uses of genomic diversity; improved GM technologies; multi-level precision phenotyping, systems biology; computational biology and modelling; and basic plant processes.
5. Competitiveness, consumer choice and governance; with a focus on public consumer involvement; ethical issues; safety and legal issues; and financial environment.

These five pillars fully support the development of a Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy (KBBE) that will help to maintain European economic competitiveness and provide the means to secure future fuel and food supplies in an environmentally sustainable way. The SRA will be updated every 5 years.

Impact of the SRA

Twenty-five percent of Theme 2 funding for the 2007 Work programme of the Seventh Framework Programme was dedicated to Plant Research. In addition, national funding programmes in a growing number of Member States now refer to the SRA and to the ERA-NET Plant Genomics for closer collaborations with future technology platform activities.

Plant ETP, as other ETPs, is invited by the European Commission to provide input to the annual FP7 Work Programmes. For information on FP7, visit DG Research’s website.

The Plant ETP's input is based on its Strategic Research Agenda, a survey of current and possible future transnational collaborative research activities in Europe relevant to plant science conducted in 2006 by EPSO for Plant ETP, and on prioritisation by the ETP members.