Rethinking Food Systems

Background

In the sustainability debate, food system transitions are widely mentioned. To produce the growing demand for food, intensive agricultural production systems and the underlying practices have become mainstream. The main aim of these ‘optimised, mainstream’ systems is to produce food efficiently and effectively. However, these ‘mainstream’ food systems have a toll on environment and on socio-economic aspects. This is because current food systems are designed mainly to produce food for a constantly growing population, not taking the expenses of a wider set of ecosystem services demanded for society into account. Many of ecosystem services is considered as public goods (PGs). The main issue with PGs is the incapacity of traditional markets of rewarding the provision of these (ecosystem) services (e.g. non-provisioning ES) eventhough there is a demand. Hence, the undersupply of PGs from agriculture, and its lack of recognition and reward in value chains, are considered as a “market failure”, which is defined as the situation where the society’s desires and constraints are not accurately represented by the monetary value. This project is built around the concepts of PGs, market and marketing, investigating the role of PG within the wider market(ing) environment, which has not yet fully being addressed.

Project description

Food system transition is gaining much attention in the sustainability debate. Intensive agricultural production systems are producing food for a growing population worldwide, but have negative impacts on our environment. Farming, however, not only produces food but also provides other benefits besides food production. Farming can offer both private goods (e.g. commodities) and public goods (largely non-marketable benefits society obtains from farming, such as a range of ecosystem services). While private goods are marketable, there is little understanding of public goods and attention to them as well as their potential contribution to biodiversity-positive food systems. That leads to the problem of stakeholder “free riding”, which degrades the public goods and the environment. Eventually, public goods become a market failure. To solve this problem, the project focuses first on macro-marketing perspectives before tackling the consumer’s wants and needs using micro-marketing techniques. Specifically, our research will investigate the potential marketing framework that recognises and implements the value of public goods. The project aims at providing an overview of potential marketing frameworks that are applicable for public goods, together with a map of stakeholders and their roles within each framework. The research will also evaluate the effect of proposed framework in different European markets, and then consider the potential contribution of technological change in the implementation of framework. The outcome will be the understanding on how public goods fit in the current models and an innovative marketing framework that enables the sustainable market transition incorporating the value of public goods.