Project Overview

Location: Mongolia

Dates: Late 2007 - 2008 (18 months)

Funded by: Asia Invest

Project Aims

The agriculture and food sector constitutes one third of Mongolia’s total GDP according to the last EU Mongolia Country Strategy Paper (2002‐2006) and involves over 1700 small and medium enterprises. The predominant companies produce products such as meat, milk and cheese, cashmere and camel wool, leather, sweets, beverages, spirits and beer. Mongolia has valuable natural resources, but these are difficult to exploit due to the extreme winter conditions, lack of infrastructure and quality issues which are problems that also adversely effect the production of all the key products mentioned above. For example, the livestock industry is the mainstay of the Mongolian economy and contributes to approximately 90% of the country’s agricultural GDP. Mongolian meat products have unique competitive properties as a result of the unique natural conditions of production. However, the poor quality supply chains prevent the meat from reaching international standards to catch up with export potential opportunities and current export prices of meat (mostly to Russia) do not reward Mongolian potentials.

The primary aim of the project is to support the institutional strengthening of Mongolia business intermediary organisations such as agriculture and agro‐processing associations and local chambers of commerce in the area of Geographical Indications (GI). The project created added value to agriculture products of typical local Mongolian origin, through quality improvement and the use of GI as a protection and marketing tool. This resulted in access to new markets and lead to long term benefits all along the GI supply chain from the Mongolian farmers to the European and local consumers. The project was coordinated by CCFRA with technical and administrative participation from the European partners OriGIn and SDA as well as from the Mongolian MNCCI. The 18 months project built on a need assessment phase to develop a series of capacity building activities (workshops/ EU study tour and technical manual) and communication and networking activities ( website/ press release/ online database).

Project Consortium