Brokering shorter food supply chains (original) (raw)
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The Challenge of Brokering Shorter Food Chains - experience from Malopolska (Poland)
Eat Wisely, Know What You Eat Campaign, 2018
How can we meet the growing demand from consumers who want lower cost, quality and tasty food and want to know where it comes from and how it is produced? One solution is to cut out intermediaries and shorten the social and geographical distance between consumers and food producers. This raises the important challenge of working out ways of organizing geographically dispersed smallholders and family farms into food systems, which can provide quality food at scale and in a systematic and sustained way. The need is to organise collaborative arrangements with farmers in order to access markets, mobilise resources and gain political influence in ways which engage them as partners for consumers and other stakeholders in co-creating food systems. Partnership brokering is key to this co-creating process, which is always unfinished. In recent years, partnership brokering approaches have been applied in the Malopolska region in Poland by the Polish Environmental Partnership Foundation. The experience illustrates the partnership brokering challenges involved in efforts to shorten the food supply chain by organising geographically-dispersed farmers and small food producers into a collaborating and self-organising partnership aimed at increasing access to locally-produced food.
Partnership brokering for local food systems in Poland
Shaping Sustinable Change: the role of partnership brokering in optimising collaborative action, 2019
The paper presents a case study of partnership brokering aimed at reconfiguring Poland’s food system. In its partnership brokering role, the Polish Environmental Partnership Foundation sought to establish a local food system as a self-organising and self-sustaining cross-sector partnership arrangement called Local Product from Malopolska (LPM). This focus has necessitated actions aimed at awareness-raising, support and reinforcement for stakeholders participating in four key areas: partnership brokering for partnership impact; reinforcement of partnering as a journey; partnership brokering as learning, and partnership brokering for transformation. The LPM project example suggests that partnerships are often established as part of the conception and delivery of a predefined set of actions, which are supposed to lead to a predefined result. But the reality of partnering is that – whatever may be contained in a project document, log-frame or partnership agreement - partnerships are about individuals and organisations seeking to achieve their own objectives and goals. Partnership brokering is thus about intervening responsibly in both informal (potential partnership arrangements) and formal partnership situations where a document or agreement of some kind is already in place to deploy partnership action. In both situations the task for the partnership broker is to try to understand not just the social nature of the partnership involved and the context within which it operates, but also how this intervention (or non-intervention) might affect that social dynamic.
Short food supply chains for local food: a difficult path
Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, 2018
Agri-food globalization is having a serious adverse impact on small- and medium-sized family farms in the province of Málaga (southern Spain), 43% of which have disappeared over the last 10 years. Short food supply chains (SFSCs) are emerging as a potential option for this type of farm, but as a strategy it is apparently not being implemented strongly enough over the region as a whole. The current case study sought to explore the initiatives carried out by local producers to date in implementing SFSCs throughout the province and to examine, from the standpoint of the production sector, the constraints hindering its development and the strategies currently being adopted with a view to addressing them. The analyses carried out under local producers perspective shows us that although SFSCs are interesting for family farms, in terms of prices, economic profit and social recognition, the abilities and capacities these channels require to producers, jointly with technical, flexibility and...
Improving Local Food Systems through the Coordination of Agriculture Supply Chain Actors
Sustainability, 2022
A local food system is an alternative food network that shortens and more effectively structures the supply chain system. An intermediary actor functioning as an aggregator is needed in the local food system. The food hub is one such intermediary actor with an essential role in strengthening the local food system and increasing the competence of small farmers to compete with large-scale food distribution. Many studies have been conducted on the effectiveness and efficiency of food hubs; however, changing the supply chain system to one that is based on a local food system is challenging. This study aims to build a conceptual model that describes the activities and coordination of the actors involved in a food hub to achieve a local food system. In this study, a soft system methodology and case study approach are used to answer the research question. The results show that two transformations are needed to achieve a local food system: changing the supply chain system to one that is sho...
The Estey Centre Journal of International Law and Trade Policy, 2013
An important condition for the efficient production and marketing of local food products in mountainous regions is broadly recognised in cooperation between different partners along the food supply chain. Cooperation between different actors, organisational forms and sectors is especially important in mountains and less favoured areas characterised by limited conditions for agriculture and, consequently, where few raw materials are produced. This article presents a study aimed at identifying the positive effects of cooperation between actors, organisational forms and sectors in the production and marketing system of local food products in the Slovenian mountains. Ten products were included in the study. The results indicate that the presence of the private sector both in the production and marketing system is an important condition for creating a successful and solid food supply chain.
Novelty with Traditional Twist: Food Co-Operatives as Short Food Chains in Global Network
For several decades, Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) have been the subject of research and analysis by scholars of various disciplines, and they have also become an important aspect of development policies during the past twenty years (Goodman / DuPuis / Goodman 2014; Maye 2010). Today, as a response to the threats against, and the weaknesses of, industrial food production, a variety of organisations, associations, social movements, market entities, and individual enterprises, have sprung up en masse, with the objective of forming new, alternative food patterns. The two forms I have researched -farmers' markets and food co-operatives -are examples of alternative food networks. The consumers' food co-operatives represent a new kind of a food supply chain, something which has existed in certain countries of Western Europe and the USA since the 1970s (Katchova / Woods 2011). It is only in the last few years that these food co-operatives also came to be set up in Poland. In this article, I aim to focus on the values and social networks of food co-operatives, as well as on the channels and types of communication which they employ. Since co-operatives refer to tradition, direct exchange and locality, I compare them to old and traditional forms of farmers' markets in order to reveal and to clarify cooperative ideas. The theoretical framework of AFNs is linked in particular to the context of developed capitalist Western economies. When locating the research in Central and Eastern Europe, it is thus necessary to take into account the specific nature of food chains in the countries concerned. These include widespread informal food provision (Alber / Kohler 2008; Round / Williams / Rodgers 2010), traditional agriculture based on family households (Gilarek / Mooney / Gorlach 2003), "quiet sustainability" (Smith / Jehlička 2013), and small-scale food production involving procedures which often differ from those set out in European Union guidelines in this regard (Master 2012).
Agriculture and Human Values
The research described in this paper was designed to identify the factors that influence the importance small-scale farmers place on different marketing channels of short food supply chains. The focus concerns two entirely different types of market that are present in the bigger cities in Hungary: 'conventional' markets where there are no restrictions on locality but the farmer-market relationship is based on binding contracts, and newly-emergent farmers' markets at which only local growers can sell ad hoc, using their own portable facilities. Results are based on a survey that was conducted in 2013 among 156 Hungarian market oriented farmer-vendors at different types of market and confirm that different markets are visited by different types of farmers. Farmers who favour conventional markets are typically less educated, operate on smaller scales and are more committed to their chosen markets via long-term contracts (which reduce the probability of their trying other outlets). The preference for farmers' markets is stronger with farmers who are more open to cooperation, have specific investment plans for developing their farms and among those who are specifically looking to directly interact with their customers to avoid middlemen. The relevance of the findings is highlighted by the ongoing Short Food Supply Chain Thematic Sub-programme in the present European Union financing period; farmers' profiles in any given marketing channel must be understood if short food supply chains are to be effectively promoted. Different types of small-scale farmers will benefit from different supporting frameworks, interventions, and initiatives.
Working Co-operatively for Sustainable and Just Food System Transformation
Sustainability, 2020
Cooperative ways of working can be understood as people-centred approaches. This article considers how cooperative ways of working have the potential to support the scaling-out of sustainable and just food systems in the context of Wales through people-centred change. Drawing upon a series of interviews with stakeholders involved in the sustainable and the cooperative food sector within Wales and international case studies, opportunities and challenges facing the scaling-out of sustainable and just food systems are considered. Findings demonstrate the potential of cooperative and community-based approaches to sustainable production, processing, distribution, and trading of healthy food that is a↵ordable, culturally appropriate, and based upon an ethic of justice and care for land, workers, and animals. Community supported agriculture, incubator farms, food hubs, and platform cooperatives are identified as key mechanisms for sustainable and just food systems. Capacity building throug...
2020
There is a growing scientific interest and public debate on the potential contributions that Local Food Systems (LFS) and Short Food Supply Chains (SFSCs) can make towards overcoming sustainability challenges and creating societal impact. In the case of Turkey, where local agricultural systems are particularly vulnerable, lacking of resilience and innovative capacity, understanding the governance mechanisms of SFSCs would have strong implications for policy making. To this end, our aim in this study is to explore the mechanisms through which civil society driven SFSCs are governed in the city of Izmir (Turkey), referring to the actors involved in the process, institutional frameworks that are adopted and challenges experienced, that could inform policy discussions towards establishing more sustainable local food systems. In this direction, the questions we aim to answer are: (1) what are the mechanisms through which community level SFSCs are initiated and governed, (2) how collaboration takes place within these groups and through which processes, and finally (3) what the outcomes of these processes are, with respect to individual, community and local impacts experienced on the ground, and challenges associated with them. We use a descriptive case study methodology, to study seven SFSC initiatives (four food community networks, two farmers' markets and a local shop) in the city of Izmir; and collect data through qualitative semi-structured in-depth interviews (41 with producers, 32 with consumers, 11 with coordinators and 5 with experts). Our findings suggest that different mechanisms are at play within our cases, depending on aspects including their governing structures and their way and purpose of operation. While farmers had difficulties relying solely on their income from these initiatives for their livelihoods, organizational challenges experienced by food communities were mainly related to difficulties associated to managing tasks on a voluntary basis. Moreover, arriving at a shared understanding about mutual goals, in addition to finding a way to include stakeholders in the process, were among the most prevalent challenges of all initiatives.