A case study on the barriers and opportunities for the upscaling of short food supply chains : the perspective of stakeholders in Wallonia, Belgium.

Abstract

Despite an increasing interest in short food supply chains in the last years, these have failed to go beyond niche market and are mostly reaching wealthy consumers and small scale farming holdings. In our industrialized agriculture systems, the scaling up of these alternatives to mid- and large-scale farming holdings and to larger groups of consumers is a main issue to spread the benefits of SFSCs. Nevertheless, important logistical and structural barriers are restraining them to access these markets. To find these out, we conducted in-depth interviews in a case study of representative stakeholders in Belgium to study the issues related to the creation of direct cooperation between mid- and large-scale farming holdings devoted to field crops and institutional catering.

Our results show that on the one hand the mediation issues - the difference between the offer and the demand - are important barriers. To overcome these, stakeholders have to increase their understanding and communication of each other to federate around common projects, farmers would have to cooperate among them to offer a more stable and diverse range of products and institutional catering would have to become more flexible by training their staffs to new practices and invest in transformation material. On the other hand a certain context should also be in place; external actors should be involved to facilitate the process and governmental bodies could impose scope statement to create new markets.