Periodic Reporting for period 2 - FOODLAND (FOOD and Local, Agricultural, and Nutritional Diversity)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2022-03-01 do 2023-08-31
Recent years have been characterized by significant changes in food systems and, especially, by a progressive decoupling between consumers’ needs and producers’ answers.
Together with persistent conditions of food insecurity and hunger, new evidence shows an increase of specific forms of malnutrition. In some areas of the world, stunting and wasting are still widely present and critically high, especially among children, while obesity, overweight, and under-nutrition coexist in many countries. These different stages of the nutrition transition are evident in African countries as well. The diffusion and worsening of unbalanced diets and malnutrition in Northern and Eastern Africa signal an inadequate progress towards the SDGs and highlight the need of ensuring that nutritious foods are accessible, affordable, and desired especially for children and mothers.
On the other hand, the nutrition-responsiveness of the African food supply suffers from lack of coordination among smallholder farmers, inadequate resource access and use, high vulnerability to climate change, low integration of supply chains, and scarce market orientation. Moreover, it is expected that, in the next future, this set of conditions will further hinder the producers’ capacity to meet the consumers’ needs for balanced diets, thus enlarging the gap inside the food systems between these two domains.
The four-year project FoodLAND ultimately aims at bridging local food operators with consumers and contributing to closing this gap.
Accordingly, the project research and innovation activities support the producers’ and consumers’ food-related behaviours that favour the diversity of food supplies and diets whose interrelations have been given little attention to date. Namely, its overall objective is to develop, implement, and validate innovative and sustainable technologies aimed at enhancing the nutrition performance of local food systems in Africa, while strengthening agro-biodiversity and food diversity as well as diversity of healthy diets.
Together with persistent conditions of food insecurity and hunger, new evidence shows an increase of specific forms of malnutrition. In some areas of the world, stunting and wasting are still widely present and critically high, especially among children, while obesity, overweight, and under-nutrition coexist in many countries. These different stages of the nutrition transition are evident in African countries as well. The diffusion and worsening of unbalanced diets and malnutrition in Northern and Eastern Africa signal an inadequate progress towards the SDGs and highlight the need of ensuring that nutritious foods are accessible, affordable, and desired especially for children and mothers.
On the other hand, the nutrition-responsiveness of the African food supply suffers from lack of coordination among smallholder farmers, inadequate resource access and use, high vulnerability to climate change, low integration of supply chains, and scarce market orientation. Moreover, it is expected that, in the next future, this set of conditions will further hinder the producers’ capacity to meet the consumers’ needs for balanced diets, thus enlarging the gap inside the food systems between these two domains.
The four-year project FoodLAND ultimately aims at bridging local food operators with consumers and contributing to closing this gap.
Accordingly, the project research and innovation activities support the producers’ and consumers’ food-related behaviours that favour the diversity of food supplies and diets whose interrelations have been given little attention to date. Namely, its overall objective is to develop, implement, and validate innovative and sustainable technologies aimed at enhancing the nutrition performance of local food systems in Africa, while strengthening agro-biodiversity and food diversity as well as diversity of healthy diets.
The work conducted during first project period was characterized by the leading project strategy aimed to build a responsible engagement of local smallholder farmers and food processors according to the bottom-up and participatory approaches. These approaches shaped a series of first preparatory activities essential to the local stakeholders involvement such as the organization of local kick-off meetings in all the 14 target rural areas, creation / implementation of local Food Hubs (14 multi-actor centers of innovation sited in rural areas and paired with 14 separate cities), conduction of training sessions with farmers, and the jointly refinement and undertake of the technological innovations to be developed and tested.
In addition, the work performed in this reporting period focused on the realization of a background research aimed at providing the R&I tasks with a comprehensive and updated understanding of the contextual and individual conditions currently affecting the consumers’ and farmers’ decision-making processes relevant to food consumption and production, respectively. The surveys and behavioral economic experiments conducted with urban consumers and smallholder farmers in the target areas (Food Hubs and cities) produced two consolidated and complementary datasets of 11,400 observations with information on local producers’ propensity to innovate their farming model and on urban consumers’ propensity to purchase novel nutrient-dense and/or locally sourced food products. These key variables were associated with socio-economic and socio-demographic determinants to derive detailed insights aimed at further orienting the R&I tasks toward the production of healthier, more nutritious, sustainable, local foods.
Moving from this background knowledge and from the organized local Food Hubs, the work focused on the development and test of a series of jointly undertaken technological innovations and the production of relevant guidelines / practice abstracts to be used for running the operational trainings and validating the innovations on an appropriate scale.
In addition, the work performed in this reporting period focused on the realization of a background research aimed at providing the R&I tasks with a comprehensive and updated understanding of the contextual and individual conditions currently affecting the consumers’ and farmers’ decision-making processes relevant to food consumption and production, respectively. The surveys and behavioral economic experiments conducted with urban consumers and smallholder farmers in the target areas (Food Hubs and cities) produced two consolidated and complementary datasets of 11,400 observations with information on local producers’ propensity to innovate their farming model and on urban consumers’ propensity to purchase novel nutrient-dense and/or locally sourced food products. These key variables were associated with socio-economic and socio-demographic determinants to derive detailed insights aimed at further orienting the R&I tasks toward the production of healthier, more nutritious, sustainable, local foods.
Moving from this background knowledge and from the organized local Food Hubs, the work focused on the development and test of a series of jointly undertaken technological innovations and the production of relevant guidelines / practice abstracts to be used for running the operational trainings and validating the innovations on an appropriate scale.
FoodLAND is explicitly driven by transdisciplinary and holistic principles aimed to tackle nutrition, farming, and food processing issues in a coordinated way and will produce specific advancements on the state-of-the-art in different branches of knowledge including behavioural economics, plant breeding, precision farming, horticulture, aquaculture, and food processing systems.
The overall objective will be achieved by addressing three types of needs constraining the African food systems that identify relevant expected results (ER):
1. Organizational needs (i.e. inadequate coordination among food operators and scarce market orientation):
ER1: Map of consumers’ and producers’ preferences and behaviours to detect food-related decision-making processes, describe current choices and practices, and identify propensities for dietary diversity and for adopting innovations and establishing collaborations.
ER2: Network of #14 local Food Hubs enabling coordination of local smallholder farmers, food processors, researchers, NGOs, and food supply chain organization.
2. Technological needs (i.e. poor performances in local agro-food farming and processing systems):
ER3: New models of precision agriculture exploiting digital farming systems.
ER4: Methodological and technological innovations enhancing agro-biodiversity, productivity, and resilience in (crop and fish) farming systems.
ER5: Methodological and technological innovations enhancing primary processing of food raw materials.
ER6: Methodological and technological innovations enhancing secondary processing of novel food products.
3. Nutritional needs (i.e. unbalanced and unhealthy diets):
ER7: Training courses and innovation networking boosting knowledge, scientific cooperation, and dissemination of result.
ER8: Consumer awareness raising campaigns on nutritional recommendations and FoodLAND novel food products, enhancing diversity of healthy diets and reducing malnutrition.
The expected project impacts are the following:
• Empowerment of local smallholder farmers and food operators (SMEs) in the 14 Food Hubs with special attention paid to gender equality.
• Enhanced coordination among producers and fostered management of the local food supply chains.
• Boosted sustainability and food safety conditions across of the local food systems.
• Progress toward low-carbon, climate-smart, and resilient food supply chains.
• Development and validation of open prototypes (12 technological innovations) and new local food raw materials, ingredients, and products (17 new food items).
• Improved access to market opportunities and food operators’ socio-economic conditions.
• Contribution to healthy balanced African diets in 14 cities and 14 Food Hubs and to the reduction of malnutrition with focus on woman-child nutritional needs.
• Implementation of research structures and networks and reinforcement of collaboration between researchers.
• Contribution to policy decision-making processes for the benefit of the smallholder farmers, food processors (SMEs), consumers, and civil society.
The overall objective will be achieved by addressing three types of needs constraining the African food systems that identify relevant expected results (ER):
1. Organizational needs (i.e. inadequate coordination among food operators and scarce market orientation):
ER1: Map of consumers’ and producers’ preferences and behaviours to detect food-related decision-making processes, describe current choices and practices, and identify propensities for dietary diversity and for adopting innovations and establishing collaborations.
ER2: Network of #14 local Food Hubs enabling coordination of local smallholder farmers, food processors, researchers, NGOs, and food supply chain organization.
2. Technological needs (i.e. poor performances in local agro-food farming and processing systems):
ER3: New models of precision agriculture exploiting digital farming systems.
ER4: Methodological and technological innovations enhancing agro-biodiversity, productivity, and resilience in (crop and fish) farming systems.
ER5: Methodological and technological innovations enhancing primary processing of food raw materials.
ER6: Methodological and technological innovations enhancing secondary processing of novel food products.
3. Nutritional needs (i.e. unbalanced and unhealthy diets):
ER7: Training courses and innovation networking boosting knowledge, scientific cooperation, and dissemination of result.
ER8: Consumer awareness raising campaigns on nutritional recommendations and FoodLAND novel food products, enhancing diversity of healthy diets and reducing malnutrition.
The expected project impacts are the following:
• Empowerment of local smallholder farmers and food operators (SMEs) in the 14 Food Hubs with special attention paid to gender equality.
• Enhanced coordination among producers and fostered management of the local food supply chains.
• Boosted sustainability and food safety conditions across of the local food systems.
• Progress toward low-carbon, climate-smart, and resilient food supply chains.
• Development and validation of open prototypes (12 technological innovations) and new local food raw materials, ingredients, and products (17 new food items).
• Improved access to market opportunities and food operators’ socio-economic conditions.
• Contribution to healthy balanced African diets in 14 cities and 14 Food Hubs and to the reduction of malnutrition with focus on woman-child nutritional needs.
• Implementation of research structures and networks and reinforcement of collaboration between researchers.
• Contribution to policy decision-making processes for the benefit of the smallholder farmers, food processors (SMEs), consumers, and civil society.