Funded under the University of Antwerp’s IOF-SBO funding scheme, the FASS-Food EU research project aims at contributing to address the challenges that prevent the consolidation of fair, accessible, short and sustainable European food chains. The project can count on the direct involvement of two internationally renowned Non-governmental organizations that are deeply involved in fair trade (World Fair Trade Organisation Europe and Fair Trade Advocacy Office) and four relevant stakeholders (Flanders Food, Belgian Fair Trade Federation, Fairtrade Belgium and the Trade for Development Centre – ENABEL).
The project ecompasses the direct assessment of three pilots case studies of alternative, fair, short and sustainable EU food chains, that are struggling with some of the above-mentioned issues (Rikolto in Belgium, Solidale Italiano in Italy and Syn Allois in Greece), the organization of multi-stakeholder meetings, as well as policy and regulatory mapping, in order to identify the main financial, organizational, legal and policy enablers and blockers that prevent similar initiatives from scaling-up.
More specifically, the key objectives of this research project are:
- to map the relevant ecosystem of national and EU-level actors who can contribute to consolidate and scale up short and collaborative food chain initiatives with a view to
- creating healthy, sustainable and fair food systems in the EU;
- to investigate how power is organized and distributed along food chains across different levels of governance (supra-national, national and sub-national) as well as how such power organization and distribution results into institutional and organizational bottlenecks that hamper the consolidation and scaling-up of existing initiatives;
- to identify institutional, organizational and technological innovations to overcome existing bottlenecks.