Elsevier

Land Use Policy

Volume 22, Issue 4, October 2005, Pages 331-344
Land Use Policy

Food supply chains and sustainability: evidence from specialist food producers in the Scottish/English borders

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2004.06.002Get rights and content

Abstract

Despite an increasing interest in more sustainable forms of land management, few analyses have examined whether ‘local’ or ‘alternative’ food supply systems are sustainable in environmental, economic and social terms. Using SUSTAIN's ‘sustainable food’ criteria, this paper analyses the sustainability of a number of ‘speciality’ food supply chains operated by small rural enterprises in the Scottish/English borders. Results indicate that, in the main, the case study businesses are not particularly sustainable; instead, driven by a strong economic imperative, they often have to ‘dip’ into various ‘links’ associated with more conventional (commodity-based) food supply chains. The paper concludes by warning against the tendency to conflate terms such as ‘local’, ‘alternative’, ‘speciality’ and ‘sustainable’.

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:

  • 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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