Societal Challenges are the big aspects associated with food systems. In SUSFANS 4 such challenges are defined, on which the food systems are measured. To address these societal challenges, policy makers define policy visions to agree upon a general direction for progress concerning each challenge.
For SUSFANS challenge areas, it would be ensuring balanced and sufficient food for EU citizens; reducing environmental impacts of the food system; improving the competitiveness EU agri-food businesses; and promoting a more equitable distribution of costs and benefits emerging from food systems. A policy vision is often accompanied by a policy goal, i.e. a certain target that needs to be reached.
To assess the status of the food system in respect to a certain policy goal, SUSFANS has come up with indicators that aim to measure the status of this policy goal. This is done by building up performance metrics; the four components that make up this policy goal.
The following section describes policy goal Viable EU agri-food business that was embedded in Deliverable 6.3.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Profits: Viable EU agri-food business
This section presents a substantial revision on the metrics related to the economic dimension of sustainable food systems, compared to previous publications. In previous work, this policy goal was to attain maximum “competitiveness of EU agri-food business”. This was reassessed. For individual firms, the economic dimension of sustainability implies that those who produce food at different stages of the value chain should be able to run a competitive business. Sustaining the economic system as a whole may require another, more balanced approach. This is suggested as the vision towards viable agri-food business. In addition to competitiveness, thriving business needs innovative capacity. Also, in view of the inherent feedback from business on resource use and social outcomes in the food system, the ability to incorporate environmental and social spillover effects (externalities) into mainstream decision-making can be considered part of the vision.
At the 1st and 2nd stakeholder consultations suggested better indicators on the competitiveness of the agri-food sector, such as revenue/turnover, rate of productivity growth or the number of people employed across a particular value chain. Stakeholders also mentioned the need for indicators to assess the political economy dimension of the food system, if needed. They also suggested to think of a few parameters for important drivers of the food system and to think about how to include issues such as marketing or labelling into the set of metrics to describe the food system. Recommendations were also made regarding the (geographical) resolution of the indicators. Further input into the economy metrics were acquired from multiple technical discussions with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. A clear preference was stated for business actionable indicators, which allow to express the growth of productivity in operations.
Unlike balanced and sufficient diets and reduced environmental impacts the policy goals for business viability are not uniformly defined for EU members. This absence of policy goals and targets has also to do with the concepts of competitiveness/viability themselves. For competitiveness therefore we first need to define the concepts as used in SUSFANS.