System Innovation for Sustainability 3

Case Studies in Sustainable Consumption and Production — Food and Agriculture

Ursula Tischner, Eivind Stø, Unni Kjærnes, Arnold Tukker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351279345
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Focuses on providing answers to the question of how food production and consumption systems can stay within the limits of the carrying capacity of our natural environment. This work also considers the challenges of food security and nutrition in the context of sustainability and a growing world population.

Part I
Overview and introduction

1
Introduction

Ursula Tischner
econcept, Agency for Sustainable Design, Germany
Eivind Stø and Unni Kjærnes
National Institute for Consumer Research (SIFO), Norway
Arnold Tukker
TNO Built Environment and Geosciences, The Netherlands; Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Department of Product Design

This publication is a result of the European project Sustainable Consumption Research Exchanges (SCORE!)¹ and summarises the findings of the working group on Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP) for the domain ‘food and agriculture’. Food is of great significance in people’s social life and welfare—on the supply side as well as on the consumption side. At the same time, food and its connected (agricultural) production systems have received considerable attention in recent years regarding their sustainability. Food and the domains ‘mobility’ and ‘energy and housing’ are consumption areas associated with the greatest negative impacts on the environment (Hertwich 2005; Tukker and Jansen 2006; Tukker et al. 2006). This is why these three consumption domains were selected in the SCORE! project as the areas to be tackled in case-study research and expert exchange activities to understand how a shift to more sustainable consumption and production can be organised and supported in the three domains.

Experts estimate that close to half of human impact on the environment is directly or indirectly related to food production and consumption (Jongen and Meerdink 1998). Indeed, food production, distribution, consumption and disposal are important in terms of the use of land and resources, pollution and emissions, biodiversity, landscape design and so on. Consequences are to be found in the external environment as well as ‘internally’, in health hazards and in the satisfaction of the basic needs of citizens. More than 200 million adults in the European Union are overweight or even obese (CEC 2005) as a result of unhealthy diets and too little exercise.

Sustainability issues are on the agenda for food producers and market actors, for politicians and regulators, and for ordinary people as citizens—in public discourse and as a subject of collective mobilisation—as buyers and eaters of food. The issue has also received considerable attention from experts and scientists of various kinds. Many attempts in a variety of forms to reduce environmental threats and increase sustainability have been instigated, and numerous studies, research programmes and publications have addressed such issues. Agri-food issues have also been prominent in the evolving definition of what ‘sustainability’ means, including what should go under the umbrella terms ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’.

One significant difference between the area of food and other consumption domains is that, whereas people are able to live without private cars or holidays, people cannot live without food. In this domain it is more a question of what we eat and how much of it. The availability of sufficient healthy food constitutes a basic human need still not met for all people worldwide. In 2008, the overall number of undernourished people in the world increased to 963 million, primarily because of higher food prices, compared with 923 million in 2007. The vast majority of the world’s 907 million undernourished people live in developing countries.² Thus for the field of agriculture and food under the sustainability umbrella we need to discuss two basic questions: (a) how can we secure access to enough healthy food for all inhabitants of planet Earth even with a growing world population and (b) how can the systems of food production and consumption stay within the limits of the carrying capacity of our natural environment (e.g. in relation to availability of land, resources, water, global warming issues and so on)? This book focuses more on question (b) as it summarises the results of a European project with a perspective on sustainable consumption and production (SCP) in Europe, but the challenges of food security and nutrition for all is of high importance and has to be dealt with urgently. Solutions cannot be suggested that overlook such needs.

1.1 The SCORE! project

SCORE! (Sustainable Consumption Research Exchanges) is a network initiated with EC funding supporting the development of the UN’s 10 Year Framework of Programmes on SCP. The mission of SCORE! is to organise a leading science network that provides input to this framework. The EU funding for SCORE! ran between 2005 and 2008, engaging 28 institutions; however, through the organisation of various major workshops and conferences the project engaged and structured a larger community of a few hundred professionals in the EU and beyond.

The SCORE! philosophy assumes that SCP structures can be realised only if experts that understand (1) business development, (2) (sustainable) solution design, (3) consumer behaviour and (4) system innovation policy work together in shaping those structures. Furthermore, this should be linked with the experiences of actors (industry, consumer groups, eco-labelling organisations) in real-life consumption areas: mobility, agri-food, and energy and housing. Broadly, this gives the following approach to the project.

The first phase of the project (marked by a workshop co-organised with the European Energy Agency [EEA] in Copenhagen, April 2006) aimed to arrange a positive confrontation of conceptual insights developed in the four aforementioned science communities of how ‘radical’ change to SCP can be governed and realised. The results of this phase have been published in the first book in the ‘System Innovation for Sustainability’ series (Tukker et al. 2008). The second phase put the three consumption areas centre stage. SCORE! work package leaders inventoried cases ‘that work’ with examples of successful switches to SCP in their field. In a series of conferences and workshops, these cases were analysed in terms of their ‘implementability’, adapted where needed, and policy suggestions were worked out that could support their implementation. The results of this phase are published in this book and in two parallel books covering the areas of mobility and housing and energy-using products (Geerken et al. 2009; Lahlou et al. 2010).

1.2 The structure of this book

After this introduction first Tischner and Kjærnes summarise the state of the art of sustainable agriculture and food in Europe. Then ten case-study chapters present different approaches, strategies, concepts and opinions about SCP in the agricultural and food system, as follows. In Chapter 3 Dewick, Foster and Webster describe strategies for the ‘greening’ of mainstream agri-food business and policy, focusing especially on the dairy industry in the UK. In Chapter 4 Cooper discusses the issues of self-sufficiency and localisation, reflecting on sustainability and ambiguity in Britain’s food policy.

The question of how organic farming and food can be found in niches in Europe is discussed in Chapter 5 by Jørgensen, who deals with the development of production and consumption of organic food in Denmark.

After this, different local food production and distribution systems are presented. In Chapter 6 Nilsson and Mont discuss the socioeconomic aspects of farmers’ markets in Sweden, in Chapter 7 Vadovics and Hayes discuss the Open Garden concept (a local organic producer–consumer network in Hungary), and in Chapter 8 Kjørstad presents the state of the art of Slow Food in Europe, especially in Poland.

The global–local and fair trade perspective of the food and agricultural system is discussed in the next three chapters. In Chapter 9 Tunçer and Schroeder introduce the Sambazon concept of marketing the açaí berry from the Brazilian Amazon. In Chapter 10 Osmundsvåg discusses the Fairtrade concept of Max Havelaar in Norway. In Chapter 11 Wille, Aerts and Geier present the ‘verified sustainable agricultural system’ of the Rainforest Alliance.

In the final case study, by Schäfer, Herde and Kropp, in Chapter 12, the authors discuss how ‘life events’ can serve as turning points in consumer behaviour towards more sustainable nutrition.

The book is concluded by the summary of Tischner, Stø and Tukker, who merge the learning of the food working group in the SCORE! project with the findings of the case studies in this book. This final chapter includes the summary by Tukker of overall conclusions of the SCORE! project about SCP, cross referencing the outcomes of the other two SCORE! working groups on SCP in the mobility and energy and housing domains.

1 See Section 1.1 and www.score-network.org, accessed 17 July 2009.

2 Source: www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/8836/icode, accessed 17 July 2009.

References

CEC (Commission of the European Communities) (2005) ‘Kampf gegen Fettsucht in Europa’, Ernährung im Fokus 5.5: 145.

Geerken, T., and M. Borup (eds.) (2009) System Innovation for Sustainability. 2: Case Studies in Sustainable Consumption and Production—Mobility (Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf Publishing; www.greenleaf-publishing.com/SCP2).

Hertwich, E. (2005) ‘Life-cycle Approaches to Sustainable Consumption: A Critical Review’, Environmental Science and Technology 39.13: 4673.

Jongen, W., and G. Meerdink (1998) Food Product Innovation: How to Link Sustainability and the Market (Wageningen, Germany: Wageningen Agricultural University).

Lahlou, S., M. Charter and T. Woolman (eds.) (2010) Case Studies in Sustainable Consumption and Production. 4: Housing/Energy Using Products (Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf Publishing; www.greenleaf-publishing.com/SCP4).

Tukker, A., and B. Jansen (2006) ‘Environmental Impacts of Products: A Detailed Review of Studies’, Journal of Industrial Ecology 10.3: 159-82.

—, G. Huppes, S. Suh, R. Heijungs, J. Guinee, A. de Koning, T. Geerken, B. Jansen, M. van Holderbeke and P. Nielsen (2006) Environmental Impacts of Products (Seville, Spain: European Science and Technology Observatory/Institute for Prospective Technological Studies [ESTO/IPTS]).

—, M. Charter, C. Vezzoli, E. Stø and M. Munch Andersen (eds.) (2008) System Innovation for Sustainability. 1: Perspectives on Radical Change to Sustainable Consumption and Production (Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf Publishing; www.greenleaf-publishing.com/SCP1).

2
Sustainable consumption and production in the agriculture and food domain

Ursula Tischner
econcept, Agency for Sustainable Design, Germany
Unni Kjærnes
National Institute for Consumer Research (SIFO), Norway

This chapter summarises the state of the art and research on consumption and production in the agriculture and food domain.

The subject of food is connected as much to individual well-being and economic issues as it is to North–South divide and sustainable development topics. Agriculture and the food industry are still very important sectors for most countries. Furthermore, food is important in societal and political issues such as public health or the self-sufficiency of individual nations.

As we will see below this also makes the agri-food domain a very diverse field to discuss, with a lot of different influences and complex relationships between several actors. Thus we can give only a broad overview in this chapter, concentrating on the most important issues related to the agri-food production and consumption system and sustainability issues.

In Section 2.1 of this chapter we describe trends and sustainability issues of the agri-food domain; in Section 2.2 we introduce the agri-food production–consumption system with its main actors and conditions; Section 2.3 draws preliminary conclusions about typical sustainable production and consumption (SCP) strategies in the agri-food domain.

2.1 Trends and sustainability issues in the agri-food domain

Which trends are influencing the agri-food domain and what are the sustainability issues and problems connected with the production and consumption of food? These questions are discussed below; first we introduce the larger context of the agri-food system, including societal megatrends (Section 2.1.1), then more system-specific boundary conditions that emerge from these megatrends (Section 2.1.2), followed by sustainability problems and issues (Section 2.1.3).

2.1.1 Context factors and megatrends for the agri-food production-consumption system

There are some general societal, economic and technological developments influencing the food production and consumption system.

2.1.1.1 General societal trends

2.1.1.1.1 An ageing population in Europe

Today about a third of the European population is senior and the population in Europe is ageing faster than in any other continent (Drudge Report 2006). The average life expectancy in Europe is 82 years for women and 76 years for men (Eurostat 2007). This has implications for the agri-food domain in two ways: (a) the population of farmers is ageing as well, and few young people have the desire to become farmers,¹ and (b) the consumer group of elderly people has specific food and nutrition demands, including more food services.

2.1.1.1.2 Decreasing household size and individualisation

Fewer couples in Europe are having children. Since 1965 the overall fertility rate in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Overview and introduction
• Part II: Case studies
• Part III: Conclusions
• About the contributors
• Index