Mapping agroforestry value chains with Living Lab participants across Europe

Oral presentation – EURAF2024 – 28-31 May 2024 – Brno

Professor Paul Burgess¹, Laura Cumplido-Marin¹, Margherita Tranchina², Alice Ripamonti_³,
Fabrizio Giuseppe Cella³, Alberto Mantino³, Victor Rolo Romero⁴, Lojka Bohdan⁵,
Michael den Herder⁶, Rico Hübner⁷, Evert Prins⁸, Waas Thissen^8
1 Cranfield University, Cranfield, United Kingdom
² Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy
³ University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy
⁴ University of Extremadura, Extremadura, Spain
⁵ Czech University of Life Sciences, Prague, Czechia
⁶ European Forest Institute, Joensuu, Finland
⁷ Deutscher Fachverband fur Agroforstwirtschaft (DeFAF), Germany
⁸ Louis Bolk Institute, Bunnik, The Netherlands

Introduction
The European food system faces the triple challenge of how to enhance food security whilst maintaining the livelihoods of food producers and addressing the challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss. Whilst the current food system is able to produce high quantities of high quality food, there is a need to reduce the climate change and loss of biodiversity associated with food production. This seems to imply that additional safeguards and higher standards are needed. By contrast, political leaders are under pressure to ensure that food is supplied at the lowest cost, particularly during a ”cost of living crisis”, and supermarkets in the pursuit of providing the lowest cost food to consumers cut the margins received by food producers. Is there a way forward to solve the trilemma?

Objective
The DigitAF research project (GA number: 101059794; July 2022 – June 2026), funded by the EU, aims at high-quality implementation of agroforestry to foster climate change mitigation and adaptation in agriculture and to ensure sustainable management of natural resources. Some components of DigitAF focus on policy makers and practitioners, but a third part focuses on how the value of agroforestry can be accounted for and valued in value chains. The objective of this paper is to describe the method and results for some initial work on improving our understanding of agroforestry value chains.

Methodology
The value chains related to six agroforestry systems were examined using facilitated workshops with six
“Living Labs” engaging with policy, practitioner, and value chain stakeholders in Czechia, Germany, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, plus an additional workshop in Spain. In some locations, “ice-breaking” activities, suggested by researchers at the University of Pisa, were used to encourage collaboration. The next stage was to identify a suitable case study. Silvopastoral systems were selected in Czechia, Germany and Spain, and silvoarable systems were chosen in Finland and the UK. The beef and dairy sectors were the focus in Italy and the Netherlands respectively. Next, using a workshop or interviews a schematic map of the flows of products, services, finance and information was developed for the selected case study with a discussion on opportunities and challenges (Tranchina et al. 2023). The next stage was to digitise the resulting maps using MindMaple (https://www.mindmaple.com) and to synthesise the main insights.

Results and discussion
In preparing a synthesis of the results, we found very few reports that map the value chains of food in
Europe. This may partly be due to the commercial sensitivity of such information and power dynamics that may constrain information flow. An interesting data source from the United States of America is an nationally funded study of the proportion of the “food at home dollar” that is captured by farm producers and others (Fig 1) (USDA 2023). Between 1993 and 2022, the reported proportion captured by farm producers varied between 10.4 and 15.4%, with some farm income spent on the purchase of upstream inputs and advice (labelled agribusiness). Such figures can be fruitful in opening a discussion on value chains.
A first observation from the workshops was the unexpected benefits of serendipitous outputs from
bringing people together. This can range from new insights for government advisors to farmers sharing
experiences and concerns. A second observation is that the need to improve our understanding of value
chains is only likely to increase. For example many UK supermarkets have targets for net zero supply chains by 2050 and the EU has issued a recent directive 2023/1115 to ensure that selected products are not related to deforestation. A major digital challenge is how to enable the robust calculation and verification of such system properties in a cost-efficient way.
A common theme was how farmers could capture a greater proportion of the final price for the retail
product. Across the Living Labs, the following five practices were observed:

1. To maintain a short supply chain from producer to consumer, for example through the use of a farm
   shop.
2. To enable on-farm processing, be it apple processing or local mobile abattoirs,
3. To increase a farmer’s bargaining power through co-operatives, associations, or networks, or to establish equitable longer-term contracts between sellers and buyers.
4. Capturing the value of “agroforestry services” through product certification or publicly funded agri-
   -environment schemes.
5. Improving the quality of products through innovation and sound advice.

Conclusion
The facilitated workshops and interviews on value chains increased connectivity between stakeholders and built relationships. Many farmers feel isolated and methods to strengthen their bargaining power within the value chain are needed. There was particular interest in short value chains, on-farm processing, network and long-term relationships, certification, and the improvement of product quality.

Acknowledgement
The DigitAF project is supported by the European Union Horizon programme (101059794).

Keywords
Value chain analysis, participatory research, Agroforestry, food labelling, business opportunities

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