WP 3: Drivers and data - food supply chains

General Information

The purpose of WP3 is to improve understanding of determinants of private food standards, where do they come from, what drives their implementation and what is the interaction of private/public standards. It will look into supply chains not only in economic models, standards and analyze the role of market power and institutional constraints. It will analyze the role of the post-farm food chain for environmental sustainability metrics, and analyze firms’ strategies in food innovation and reformulation and their responses to nutritional policies.

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Deliverable 3.4: Firms’ strategies in food innovation and reformulation and their responses to regulatory nutritional policies

To deal with health issues related to food consumption, governments are implementing partnerships with the food industry to generate changes in the quality of foods, based for instance on the decrease in salt or fat contents. Some governments employ also more coercive policies, based on the ban of some ingredients, the implementation of quality standards, or advertising regulations. Are these policies focused on the supply side more promising than policies focused on consumers? Are market incentives sufficient to induce voluntary changes by firms or is public regulation of food quality needed to reach public health objectives? The goal of this task will be to deal with these questions, by combining conceptual models and empirical data collection.

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Deliverable 3.6: The role of market power in the EU food supply chain

There is extensive debate on the position of farmers in the food chain and how global price volatility and increasing concentration up and down the value chain is affecting famers, taking into account increasingly complex vertically-related markets. Market concentration and technological advances are claimed to have shifted the balance of power in the food system to global retailers and other concentrated sectors.

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Deliverable 3.3: The role of the post-farm food chain for sustainability indices

The analysis of post-farmgate biomass streams is crucial for accurately quantifying the environmental impact associated with the food that we eat. It is also the pre-requisite for identifying opportunities to move into the direction of an agri-food system with low emissions and with closed nutrient circles. We identified a few areas where a full chain life-cycle assessment was not yet possible with the tools available: slaughterhouses, cereal processing, waste management systems and consumers. In this report we perform a literature review for each of these ‚pools‘ and compile data that can be used in ‚modules‘ that will be implemented for the SUSFANS toolbox. The assessment is based on – and further develops – the framework developed by the UN-ECE for the quantification of national nitrogen budgets.

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Deliverable 3.2: The role of different food chain actors on setting private food standards

Consumers, retailers and producers are giving increasing attention to ensure that production and processing activities are sustainable from an economic, social and environmental point of view. The goal of this task will be to analyze the role different actors in the food supply chain play in the establishment of food standards and their impact on the sustainability of the food supply chain. The analysis will consist of theoretical modelling and an empirical analysis.

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