Workshop Report: Consultative workshop on sustainable food value chain focusing on Individual Consumption of Food
Workshop objectives:
• Introduce the value-chain approach as adopted by the One Planet-International Resources Panel
Task Group.
• Provide key findings of the analysis of the food value chain with the focus on individual
consumption.
• Understand the role of the individual consumption stage in the food value chain and its
dependencies on other stages.
• Understand what initiatives/solutions currently exist at this stage of the food value chain to:
o define the opportunities for their scale-up and replication;
o identify gaps and challenges to be addressed;
o identify actions needed by stakeholders at other stages of the food value chain to improve resource efficiency of food sector.
• Introduce the value-chain approach as adopted by the One Planet-International Resources Panel
Task Group.
• Provide key findings of the analysis of the food value chain with the focus on individual
consumption.
• Understand the role of the individual consumption stage in the food value chain and its
dependencies on other stages.
• Understand what initiatives/solutions currently exist at this stage of the food value chain to:
o define the opportunities for their scale-up and replication;
o identify gaps and challenges to be addressed;
o identify actions needed by stakeholders at other stages of the food value chain to improve resource efficiency of food sector.
This workshop delivered several messages, including:
The application of the ‘Value-Chain Approach’ to analyse the food sector showed that the middle stages of the food value chain -- controlled by food companies across trading, processing and packaging, retail and food services -- are structurally powerful and have a disproportionate influence across both primary production and final consumption. Actors at these stages have a huge impact on the activities at either end in determining both what food farmers produce and what food consumers buy.
While crucial, information dissemination and consumer awareness raising alone are not sufficient to lead the changes in practices and behaviors that are needed for sustainable consumption and production (SCP). They need to be accompanied by more structural changes at different levels
including more equitable and inclusive long-term policies and regulations, to trigger this change
and shift in the underlying consumption preferences.
Furthermore, this needs to be complemented with science-based behavior change techniques. Particular opportunity for long-term behaviour change in consumption patterns lies in school feeding programmes (public procurement as an enabler) and education, ensured through government-led efforts. These provide a captive setting where changes in consumption practices can be triggered through the nurturing of core values related to sustainability of food from the young age.
Consumer voice, including that of the most vulnerable, needs to be properly included in research, policy discussions, solutions development and decision-making processes. Consumers can be empowered to manifest their demands in different ways – such as by advocating for consumer rights, and by helping shape regulation.
Key success factors of the most important food movements and trends today include a strong engraining into people’s core values (which are powerful triggers for action), strong leadership, cooperation with local government structures and, in many instances, robust engagement and buyin from producers. On the other hand, there are important barriers for the impact size and duration of such movements, including having considerably less power than entities with political or economic interest to maintain the status quo, competing values and constraints within consumers, the wide range of possible issues to be addressed, availability of resources, and regular access to communication channels.
