EU4Advice: Building a better network for short food supply chains

The big challenge in our current food system is producing sustainable, affordable, tasty, and healthy food. Climate change, urbanization and population growth, combined with the depletion of natural resources and pressure on biodiversity, create major societal challenges that call for more understanding to design a food system, particularly an urban food system, with more connection between producers and consumers.

One of the aspects of the food system is the need to have more local food production with as few supply chain parties as possible. We call these Short Food Supply Chains (SFSC). SFSC is intended to promote the most sustainable and empowering SFSC models, which constitute a promising and emerging sustainable alternative to globalized food systems, with strong potential to empower both producers and consumers while reducing the environmental footprint and enhancing the competitiveness of the agri-food system. The understanding of these SFSC is part of the EU Farm 2 Fork strategy and the Green deal, but also more locally implemented in the food strategy of the city of Amsterdam and the Amsterdam Metropolitan Region.

The EU4advice project is a Horizon Europe funded project to better understand the effective capacity building of SFSC’s and set the foundations and structures for a learning ecosystem for all SFSC actors. In this way, we want to be able to 1. identify and characterize SFSC advisors across Europe, 2. Connect SFSC advisors from the 27 member states in a European network, 3. Improve the understanding and challenges of European Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems (AKIS), 4. Integrate SFSC advisors and content into national AKIS, 5. Interact with relevant national/regional/local policy-makers, 6. Replicate and disseminate innovations on SFSC.

Four distinctive Living Labs will be established to catalyze knowledge flow from research to practice and to test innovative methodologies, contents, and novel governance models: Ireland, Spain, Hungary, and the Netherlands. We will create a network of these four Living Labs for collaboration and involving various SFSC actors (advisors, researchers, policy-makers, farmers, and consumers).

Partners
EU4advice is a Horizon Europe funded project with 20 partners from 11 EU countries and one EU-associated country (Norway), and one associated partner from a non-EU country (UK). The project is funded under the topic: HORIZON-CL6-2021-GOVERNANCE-01-27 – Developing EU advisory networks on consumer-producer chains all about Short Food Supply Chains (SFSC).