The EU’s Farm to Fork Strategy (F2F) and EU Green Deal look to SFSCs as an opportunity to rebuild a fairer, more resilient, sustainable and food-secure economy with family farming, small-scale food processing, agroecology and locally produced food for local markets.
The Covid-19 pandemic prompted interest in developing new SFSC models based on IT-enabled solutions, social solidarity and a sharing economy in line with the ambitions of the F2F Strategy. Yet SFSCs remain of marginal importance in a food system that needs to be reformed due to variety of factors.
These include: information and knowledge gaps; institutional and regulatory barriers; weak position of farmers in the value chain; logistics and distribution barriers; no customized policy and related advisory or support in most member states.
The activities aim to promote the creation of a EU Short food supply chain advisors’ network and the exchange of good practices related to this field and to structure an European network of actors advising the development of efficient and sustainable short food supply chains. Some of the outputs are: Online database of SFSC models, golden cases and possibility to replicate them into lighthouse projects, a permanet advisors network specialised on SFSC developed in cooperation with the sister project EU4 Advice.