CIHEAM Bari and Italian state funding

CIHEAM (the International Centre for Advanced Mediterranean Agronomic Studies) was founded in 1962 at the OECD headquarters with the signatures of seven countries; Türkiye was a founding signatory. It has 13 members, and each state has one representative on its Board of Directors. Whether the Bari institute was founded in 1961 or 1962 is unclear in the sources.

Italy is the main funder. Its mandatory contribution to Bari in 2015 was €6,282,120. Its voluntary core contribution was €3.14 million in 2022 and €1.75 million in 2023, recorded as official development assistance with the recipient listed as developing countries, unspecified. Italy's Foreign Ministry funded an Africa-focused training centre at Bari at €6.5 million, and a Deputy Foreign Minister described the institution as a key partner in Italy's Africa plan (the Mattei Plan). The Agriculture Ministry funded 30 projects worth €10 million, mainly monitoring the Italian organic sector, and the Foreign Ministry funded about 20 projects worth €35 million over seven years. The stated aim of programmes run for the Interior Ministry was to train people in source countries according to the needs of Italian agriculture and so regulate labour migration; this is the institution's own description.

The institution reports more than 14,000 students and trainees from over 100 countries since 1962, 60% of the students from Africa, and 31 research projects and 44 cooperation projects in 40 countries. These figures come from the institution and were not independently verified. It launched the Mediterranean Organic Agriculture Network (MOAN) in 1999; it became a network of ministries in 2006 with its secretariat at Bari, and by 2019 had 24 countries, including Türkiye. The network pages show no measured results. In CIHEAM members outside the EU, organic area rose from 176,329 ha in 2004 to 744,898 ha in 2014 and the number of producers from 26,405 to 71,733; the figures were presented alongside CIHEAM actions, and CIHEAM's share of the change is not stated.

The only independent evaluation found, from 2017 for the Italian Foreign Ministry, covered an olive oil project in Lebanon (2009 to 2012). It found relevance high and producers' knowledge increased. It also found the indicators focused on outputs, the logical framework 'self-referential', effectiveness impossible to estimate accurately for lack of baseline data, impact 'expected' rather than shown, and cooperatives not transformed. It recommended that baseline data be a binding condition for project approval; the institution's response was not found.

In 2022 CIHEAM Bari signed a memorandum with the Med-Or Foundation, set up in 2021 on the initiative of the defence and aerospace company Leonardo. A 2015 investigation by prosecutors in Lecce into nine scientists and an emergency commissioner over the Xylella outbreak in Puglia olive trees examined a hypothesis linking the bacterial strain to a 2010 workshop at the Bari institute; the investigating judge dismissed the case for insufficient evidence of causation.