A major challenge of Sustainable Development Goal 12 “Responsible Consumption and Production” is to reduce food losses along production and supply chains. This is particularly critical for fresh food products, due to their perishable and fragile nature, which makes the coordination of the actors all the more crucial to avoid wastes and losses. The rise of new technologies, referred to as “Industry 4.0” powered by the internet of things, big data analytics and artificial intelligence, could bring new solutions to meet these needs. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) allow for frequent exchanges of huge amounts of information between actors in the agrofood chains to coordinate their activities. The aim of the chapter is to provide a state-of-the-art analysis on ICTs used in agrofood supply chains, with a special focus on the case of fresh fruits and vegetables, to analyze the potential and weaknesses which exist in different forms of supply chains for ICTs becoming a “resource” (precious, rare, non-imitable, and nonsubstitutable) prospect and to suggest promising ICTs in this context.
In agro-food, Blockchain has been recently implemented in order to improve transparency. Blockchain raises great expectations of data decentralization and better efficiency–cost ratio, integration speed, and data protection that appear as promises of gains in all areas. The fundamental assumption was that transparency prevents or reduces illegitimate forms of power. However, discussions are emerging about how digitization is likely to exacerbate power inequalities in food systems, as transparency can become tyrannical when it contributes to the proliferation of audits, evaluations, and assessment measures. The objective of this research is to contribute by providing knowledge about the implications of this digitization for farmers. For a first exploratory study, we conducted 53 interviews with actors of digitalization of agri-food, and we used 9 press releases, 3 webinars, and 1 article published in a specialized French journal. These materials evoke 12 different agro-food chains recently equipped with blockchain in France. From this pool of chains, we focused on four through in-depth analysis of interviews and literature readings using NVivo software. The first results highlight that the use of blockchain for transparency rarely delivers on its promises. Blockchain tends to centralize control since few actors have access to the distributed ledger, and the visibility brought to farmers, at the consumer level, tends to become a form of control. While blockchain seems to provide some benefits to producers, it raises the issue of overloaded technology and the problem of their data privacy.
(1) Background: In Southern countries, companies that employ a large number of workers are concerned with poverty reduction, which is the priority of their CSR policy. The banana sector has made great efforts to calculate a “living wage”, but this is not sufficient. How do we assess a decent living standard in Southern countries, where basic social needs are rarely covered by the public authorities? (2) Methods: the selection and analysis of the living standard assessment methods are based on a systematic review of the literature. (3) Results: We selected 427 references in total and classified them into 10 method families. Among them, we have not found a ready-to-use method. The paper therefore suggests an innovative methodology (CSDA) inspired by Townsend’s non-monetary deprivation score and by the importance of social norms and ties. Instead of using a list of goods to define a decent living standard, the new method relies on access to services proven to be important for public health by covering social needs. Moreover, this method is easy to implement for the private sector, highlights the priority social needs for workers on which the company can act with its CSR policy, and allows for cross-country comparison. (4) Conclusions: This last point is crucial for the producers’ commercial negotiations with large-scale distribution and also to prevent the flight of workers to other activities or competitors. With regard to poverty alleviation, it will depend on how the company uses the results of the CSDA assessment.
Forty years ago, the French pork industry carried out a foresight study. Where does it stand today? What factors will determine its future? What scenarios can we envisage? Using a foresight method based on the representations of industry players, we attempt to anticipate potential developments in the French pork industry, and present various scenarios.
Prospective studies require discussing and collaborating with the stakeholders to create scenarios of the possible evolution of the studied value-chain. However, stakeholders don't always use the same words when referring to one idea. Constructing an ontology and homogenizing vocabularies is thus crucial to identify key variables which serve in the construction of the needed scenarios. Nevertheless, it is a very complex and timeconsuming task. In this paper we present the method we used to manually build ontologies adapted to the needs of two complementary system-analysis models (namely the "Godet" and the "MyChoice" models), starting from interviews of the agri-food system's stakeholders.
Comment designer ou contre-designer des formes d’innovations qui seraient de « véritables innovations territoriales » ? L’évaluation ex-ante est la clé pour réaliser un design ou un (contre)-design des innovations territoriales. Comment réaliser cette évaluation ? Faut-il enregistrer les performances des territoires ? Faut-il plutôt évaluer les impacts des changements sur les territoires ? Mais par rapport à quelle situation de référence ? Nous proposons les règles suivantes. Quand le changement introduit par l’innovation territoriale est vu comme marginal et situé dans un univers stable, l’évaluation par les performances est suffisante. Dans un univers en proie aux bouleversements, l’évaluation adéquate serait celle des impacts. Quand le changement n’est plus marginal mais fondamental, il devient pertinent d’évaluer la compatibilité de l’innovation à l’aune d’un scénario de référence. Nous illustrons ces trois cas par des exemples de terrain.