Food supply chains and sustainability: evidence from specialist food producers in the Scottish/English borders
Section snippets
Sustainable agriculture and ‘local’ foods
The recent interest in sustainable agriculture and agri-environmental programmes in the UK and Europe represents a dethroning of agricultural fundamentalism that was established through the Scott Report back in the early 1940s (Ilbery, 1992; Potter, 1998). In this report, farmers were seen as the natural custodians of the countryside1
Short food supply chains, quality and social embeddedness
Understanding what happens at each stage of the food supply chain, from the farm to the consumer, is important in what are variously and inconsistently being referred to as ‘local’, ‘alternative’ and ‘traditional/speciality’ agro-food systems. A number of authors have conceptualised this process through the notion of SFSCs (Marsden et al., 2000, Marsden et al., 2002; Renting et al., 2003). Following Marsden et al. (2000), three types of SFSC can be recognised:
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Face-to-face, where consumers buy
Food supply chains in the Scottish/English borders region
There is clearly some debate about the extent to which food supply chains, especially those developed by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), are truly sustainable. This view is now further developed in an examination of specific supply chains in the Scottish/English borders. As part of a much larger research project on food supply chains in selected lagging regions of the EU,7 in-depth interviews
Assessing food system sustainability
While accepting that each of the above case studies is unique and has developed its own customised food supply chain, it is also fairly clear that they vary considerably in terms of whether and how they satisfy SUSTAIN's food sustainability criteria. Table 3 provides a checklist of those criteria satisfied by each business. Sustainability judgements are based on detailed re-readings of the case studies, each written up from face-to-face and telephone interview transcripts, as well as written
Critique and conclusions
This paper has raised a number of issues about the sustainability of food supply chains developed by SME speciality producers. In particular it has questioned the existing dichotomy between ‘conventional’ and ‘alternative’ food supply systems discussed by various academics, arguing that considerable blurring exists between them. Speciality food businesses are not necessarily more sustainable and a number of hybrid food systems and spaces have emerged rather than two separate
Acknowledgements
This article derives from the EU-funded project: ‘Supply chains linking food SMEs in Europe's lagging rural regions (SUPPLIERS, QLK5-CT-2000-00841). Collaborating laboratories are: SAC, Aberdeen, UK (Co-ordinator); Coventry University, UK; University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK; Teagasc, Dublin, Ireland; ENITA, Clermont-Ferrand, France; University of Patras, Greece; SIRRT, University of Helsinki, Finland; and the Agricultural University of Krakow, Poland. The authors would also like to thank two
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