Climate Change Adaptation and Food Supply Chain Management

Ari Paloviita, Marja Järvelä

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138796669
• eBook ISBN: 9781317634027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

The success of the entire food supply chain depends on the prosperity of farms and local communities. The direct climate change risks faced by the agricultural sector are therefore also risks to businesses and food supply chains. Hence the importance of resilience at farm level, community level and business level when looking at food supply chain policy and management.

Climate Change Adaptation and Food Supply Chain Management highlights the issue of adaptation to climate change in food supply chains, the management and policy implications and the importance of supply chain resilience. Attention is given to each phase of the supply chain: input production, agriculture, food processing, retailing, consumption and post-consumption. European case studies demonstrate the vulnerabilities of contemporary food supply chains, the opportunities and competitive advantages related to climate change, and the trans-disciplinary challenges related to successful climate adaptation. The authors argue for a redefinition of the way food supply chains are operated, located and coordinated and propose a novel approach enhancing climate-resilient food supply chain policy and management.

This book will be of interest to students, researchers, practitioners and policymakers in the field of climate adaptation and food supply chain management and policy.

1 Climate change adaptation and food supply chain management

An overview

Ari Paloviita and Marja Järvelä

Introduction

In the future, climate adaptation will become an inescapable task for the management of the food supply chain, both globally and locally. The gradual warming of the world’s mean temperature and the increased frequency of extreme weather are expected to have a major impact on food supply chain performance and food security (IPCC 2014). Obviously, food supply chain performance and food security will be at risk and vulnerable, due to multiple other factors as well, thus it is an issue of high importance and high complexity – from a societal perspective – to find practical measures of adaptation for the world’s food chains. Adaptation is also important for more conventional reasons because agriculture and the food sector form an important part of the world’s economy, for instance, in the EU economy they provide 15 million jobs, 8.3 per cent of the EU’s total employment and 4.4 per cent of the EU’s GDP (Moussis 2013).

In trying to achieve a resilient food supply, global and local transformations are needed in both socio-economic and socio-ecological systems. When defining adaptation to climate change as a social action, we usually refer to processes and actions that help systems, such as households, organisations, communities, regions, countries, in order to better manage and adjust to changing conditions, stresses, hazards, risks or opportunities (Smit and Wandel 2006). In this book, we consider some of the main actors usually responsible for designing and operating a food system so that it takes on a more sustainable and/or resilient pattern of action. By considering food systems in a comprehensive yet operative manner, we focus on how food chain dynamics function as a whole, instead of studying parts in isolation from one another.

In more concrete terms, food is material we eat. But it is not just that; the discerning end-user may have strong cultural values related not only to the volume but also to the quality of the end product. Furthermore, the end-user may also have demands concerning how the food was produced and its origin. For example, at the upstream end of the food chain, a farmer looking for an alternative concept to his current, not-so-profitable pig farm may wish to start a more environmentally friendly alternative, such as raising wild boars. How can he know that the entire food chain will adjust accordingly?

To start a wild boar farm instead of continuing with a conventional pig farm, the farmer first needs to reform his feed provision and build suitable facilities for grazing. Second, he needs to know who would be his main customers for the boar meat. This involves the external food industry and the requirement to make contracts with retail, restaurants or other customers. Finally, the consumer, or a consumer group, needs to accept the replacement of at least some part of his/her conventional pork with boar meat. This plan may appear a quite simple and viable model. However, we live in a complex world with global driving forces where hardly any actor is free to act in an entirely autonomous manner. Instead, we make choices that are not just the influence of morals, taste and market dynamics but which are also affected by rules and regulations in every stage of the food chain. This makes the topic of food chain management adapting to climate change challenging but also stimulating.

Beyond mitigation, beyond vulnerable agriculture, beyond the business case

A food supply chain is an economic subsystem of a broader socio-ecological system. By adapting the definition of supply chain by Christopher (1998), the food supply chain can be defined as a network of organisations that are involved, through upstream linkages to farms and downstream linkages to consumers, in the different processes and activities that produce value in the form of food products and food services for consumers. The food supply chain concept is driven by business management scientists in the fields of logistics, physical distribution, operations management, marketing and supply chain management. Hence, food supply chain management has traditionally focused on developing economic value within the food supply chain network through value-adding activities and efficiency.

However, a food supply chain is not an island. It is a subsystem of a broader food system, which is a concept originally promoted by rural sociologists in the 1990s (Ingram 2011). Similar to the food supply chain, a food system includes activities from production to consumption, i.e. a chain of activities from the field to the table – from farm to fork. The key difference between a food supply chain and a food system is that the latter includes the interactions between and within the biogeophysical and human environments and also the societal outcomes of the activities (Ericksen 2008). Conceptually, environmental and social values are addressed on a par with economic values in a food system.

Sustainable food supply chain management has been introduced as a management concept in order to address environmental and social issues in food supply chain management. According to Seuring and Müller (2008), sustainable supply chain management “is the management of material, information and capital flows as well as cooperation among companies while integrating goals from all three dimensions of sustainable development, i.e. economic, environmental and social, which are derived from customer and stakeholder requirements”. In a sustainable food supply chain, management issues such as food safety (not to be confused with food security), quality assurance, tracking and tracing practices, the origin of the food products, the inputs used during production, the labour standards, the treatment of animals and the environmental impact of production are important (Beske et al. 2014). However, the typical outcome of corporate sustainability activities in a food supply chain is to create economic value (see Figge and Hahn 2012). Social and environmental issues are addressed as far as there is a “business case”. Moreover, sustainable supply chain management has been traditionally more concerned about the impacts of food supply chain activities on the environment and society rather than the impacts of global environmental and social changes on the business environment.

According to Dyllick and Hockerts (2002), there are three types of capital – economic, natural and social – relevant to economic, environmental and social sustainability. These types of capital are non-substitutable, for example, higher wages cannot substitute for the loss of clean water. In addition, the deterioration of natural and social capital is irreversible and the loss of biodiversity and the impacts of climate change are definite. Hence, the loss of cultural diversity is equally definite. Taking all that into account, it is clear that it is necessary to move beyond the business case in food supply chain management because environmental and social outcomes should not be subordinate to financial outcomes. Rather, corporate sustainability strategies should create environmental and social value alongside economic value (Figge and Hahn 2012). Identifying the societal case and the natural case for food supply chain management is a critical step towards creating a sustainable food system.

Climate change adaptation is an example of a societal case for food supply chain management. Specifically, it is a social learning process in which the intermediate goal should be to empower all actors in a food system so that they learn how to adapt to climate change (FAO 2014). Also in the management literature, the organisational learning model is the most highly developed attempt to understand how, why and when organisations will adapt to climate change (Nitkin et al. 2009: 26). As an issue demanding a societal perspective, climate change adaptation is firmly related to major global issues such as hunger, food security, food waste, water supply and energy supply. The world’s food systems are extremely vulnerable to climate change – whether through extreme weather conditions, gradual changes in climate, or a combination of both. At the same time, climate change adaptation is a local approach associated with local livelihood, rural entrepreneurship and community development. Global food supply chains need to address both global changes in the world’s food systems and the value of localisation. The majority of business discourse on climate change adaptation is concerned with risk mitigation and takes an indirect approach to climate change adaptation, tending to frame adaptation in terms of vulnerability and adaptive capacity, risk and opportunity (ibid.: 17). The indirect aspects of climate change adaptation in the business literature are regulatory, financial, physical, litigation, reputational and competitive risks (ibid.: 18). Accordingly, climate change will affect food supply chains in varying ways, depending on the complexity of the supply chain and on the degree of inter-connectedness and dependency of and on other industries (Beermann 2011).

There are barriers towards effective climate change adaptation in food supply chains. First, the institutionalisation of climate change mitigation is still an ongoing process. One goal of climate change mitigation is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, especially carbon dioxide emissions. However, this aim has not achieved consensus at the inter-governmental level. In the light of recent IPCC reports, it must be admitted that climate change mitigation policy has, to a large extent, failed. Consequently, climate change impacts will affect economies and societies in fundamental ways but, because governments have not succeeded in climate change mitigation at the global level, climate change adaptation must take place at local, regional and national levels. However, adaptation is still being confused with mitigation (Nitkin et al. 2009: 19). Hence, a shift in focus from the inside-out impacts of a food system, i.e. emissions, from food system activities, to outside-in impacts, i.e. the physical and regulatory climate change impacts on food system activities, is required (Porter and Reinhardt 2007). Second, the majority of the literature dealing with climate change adaptation in food systems has focused on agricultural activities. This rather obvious, but limited, view of climate change adaptation in the food system has neglected other critical activities beyond the farm gate, such as the food industry; processing and manufacturing activities; the logistical system and the infrastructure supporting food supply chains; wholesale and retail; and consumption and post-consumption activities. As Eakin (2010: 78) puts it, a shift in focus is needed from concentrating on vulnerable agriculture to focusing on food system vulnerability. Third, food supply chain management is solely based on the business case and consequently biased towards financial performance. It has been generally suggested that companies should shift their focus beyond the business case and financial performance in order to deal with relevant societal issues (Vaara and Durand 2012). Hence, a shift in focus from the food supply chain to the overall food system is required. It must also be noted that climate change adaptation is embedded in the social and cultural worlds and is highly influenced by political processes, which means that depoliticising climate change adpatation and treating it as separate from societal processes runs the risk of exacerbating inequities and vulnerability (Mosberg and Eriksen 2014).

The link between climate change adaptation strategies and resilience thinking has been generally acknowledged in academia (e.g. Beermann 2011). Resilience is a useful concept in understanding the importance of adaptive capacity and coping strategies in order to decrease the vulnerability of the food system. Resilience can be examined at the farm level, the community level, the food company level, the food supply chain level and the household level. According to Ericksen et al. (2010: 73), managing food systems for resilience is an approach focusing on the dynamic processes of change that produce feedback in the food systems. A sustainable food system approach, in turn, can be ensured by integrating intra- and inter-generational justice and by deliberately taking the planetary boundaries into consideration (Gold and Heikkurinen 2013).

Vulnerable spaces and resourceful places: local responses

While sustainable development has been stated and confirmed as a universal policy target, globalisation has increased pressure on local economies and food systems. The pressure on agriculture and small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) processing and manufacturing in particular has been varied, including heavy price competiton from global markets, imported, novel food items and lower standards in farm employment in low-income countries. In view of the global competition, the mainstream policy answer has been further modernisation, ameliorated technological efficiency and increased competitiveness in agriculture, food processing and food manufacturing. Consequently, it is important to remember that all political attempts – whether local or global – that aim at climate change adaptation also need to fit in with the main trends of current policies.

From the point of view of the traditional local diversity of food production, modernisation has reduced diversity as a result of the increased standardisation of the food supply, economics of scale, longer delivery distances and related vulnerabilities in the food supply chain. However, another implication of this trend is that the producers and end-users in a food supply chain are socially and spatially increasingly distant from one another, even if they buy and sell at either end of the chain. Therefore, this mega-trend of modernisation is being realised in an ever more fierce struggle between local traditional farming and small-scale processing, at one end, and the “McDonaldisation” of food at the other end. Recently, however, a critical cultural factor has entered the scene; first, it manifested as critical views on overly standardised bulk production and, second, as an increasing demand for alternatives, such as quality food and organic production, and finally as active local food movements. Potentially, all these alternatives increase the diversity of the food chain, provided that alternative production is feasible for farmers and SMEs, and that all the players in a food chain can adapt their strategies to accommodate these alternatives. Hence, social structures, the role of locality, local micro-business networks and business network relationships that contain farmers and SMEs should be acknowledged by food chain researchers as critical aspects of sustainable performance (Bourlakis et al. 2014) and climate change adaptation.

Even if much of this experimenting on the local “re-rooting” and the “re-routing” of the food supply has followed dynamics other than deliberate adaptation to climate change, it may also serve either directly as mitigation or indirectly aid mitigation by contributing to local climate adaptation mechanisms. In general, it is important to recognise that these re-localisations generate new arenas for interaction for food chain actors who were isolated from each other by modernisation. According to many case studies (including some presented in this volume), re-rooted local communication and co-operative action for alternative food concepts can increase social capital and community resilience. However, these emerging trends to adjust food chains so that they become sustainable and can adapt to climate change are remarkably embedded in particular localities and regions. Thus, the prerequisites for these to emerge and prosper are evidently strongly related to both socio-cultural and socio-economic assets that can be mobilised (Marsden and Smith 2005). Natural resources and spaces need to be translated into places enabling food chain initiatives that have real meaning to those who will take the initiative to build more resilient food chains (Battaglini et al. 2009).

Local assets for food chain management are obviously very different in terms of social and economic resources according to space and place. In the long-term European tradition, the spatial structures of food production were formed by seeking an effective balance between three different types of land use, namely ager, saltus and silva (Pinto-Corrreia and Vos 2004). Each of these types of land use needs their own adaptation dynamics, yet also a mutual balance based on both material and cultural basics is required. For example, some localities are more suitable for large-scale ager type cultivation while others would profit most from saltus-type grazing areas with more natural vegetation, or even from sustainable forestry relying on silva type of localities. Under the circumstances of major uncertainty, set up by the local impacts of future climate change, it is of great importance to consider how we understand the human-natural world metabolism in the long term through both agriculture and the world’s food chains.

When considering our capacity to act and alleviate the threat of climate change, the above exploration of the food chain, the food system...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• 1 Climate change adaptation and food supply chain management: an overview
• PART I Food supply chains: actors, products and relationships
• PART II Local vs. regional vulnerabilities and opportunities
• PART III Sustainable livelihood, community and farm resilience
• PART IV Climate-resilient supply chain management: upstream and downstream
• Index