Inside, Outside or Connected? An Economic Appraisal of Short Food Supply Chains in the City of Sabadell in the Farm to Fork Context

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Supervisors

Adant, Ignace ; Soregaroli, Claudio ; Gaspart, Frédéric

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Abstract

In a Europe in which urban areas are growing every year, one question arises: 'how to feed cities?'. Short Food Supply Chains ('SFSCs') are trending and commonly cited dynamics that aim to enforce food security at a local level. Agrarian parks have been developed throughout Europe to protect farming areas from urban sprawl. What could be the contribution of SFSC relying on vegetable production in an Agrarian Park to feed a city? And how can peri-urban activities be complemented beyond the boundaries of an Agrarian Park with urban agriculture (‘UA’) located inside the city? To answer these two complementary questions, we study the economic dynamics of some value chains born in the Agrarian Park of Sabadell within the Farm to Fork (‘F2F’) strategy context. The work has two general objectives. The first objective is to develop a framework to evaluate peri-urban agricultural activities within the F2F strategy context. The second one is to identify local solutions to complement the existent peri-urban activities. In the process of evaluating the objectives mentioned, a methodology is proposed, relying on a structured case study approach to ensure that the study is replicable and, therefore, guarantee the assessment of this scientific research, and to permit replication and extrapolation of this study to other peri-urban areas in Europe. Benefits such as price gains from vertical integration and rural-urban bond creation are identified. Besides, the work also confirms the reduction of GHG emissions through a carbon footprint analysis. However, the exploration also identifies precarity on the side of farmers in the Agrarian Park of Sabadell. Furthermore, a low-demand market with imperfect information and quality uncertainty is acknowledged. On this basis, two main recommendations are highlighted, among others. First, farmers can reduce their food waste and increase income through SFSC diversification. Second, understanding UA as a knowledge and information hub for SFSCs’ products quality is an original proposition to overcome the identified market issues. Altogether, the thesis gives a picture of the existing economic dynamics of the Agrarian Park of Sabadell, contributing to the literature of an area where there is barely any.