EU4Advice

Short Food Supply Chains (SFSCs) are a means for farmers and food producers to improve their position in the value chain and for citizens to increase the trust, transparency, quality and safety of their food. Political and socio-economic barriers and gaps need to be addressed to increase the reach of consumer-producer chains (food networks) across Europe and EU4Advice will provide relevant stakeholders with the necessary tools to achieve this. A key challenge to achieve this goal is to improve the national Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation System (AKIS) by implementing new governance models that facilitate the integration of SFSC advisory services. EU4Advice will lay the foundation for the establishment of a network of SFSC advisors across Europe that will be appropriately structured and connected to a variety of stakeholders within the national AKIS.

The development of networking tools, substantive knowledge for SFSC advisors, a tailor-made dissemination, communication and exploitation strategy and impact assessment plans will create an ecosystem for the effective knowledge transfer among stakeholders in the 27 EU members. Wageningen Research plays a major role in work package 1 around the mapping of the diversity, knowledge needs of, and network of short chain advisors and in work package 3, which focuses on the transformative capacity building of short chain advisors.

This project provides new knowledge, skills and motivation for short chain advisors and through them for farmers, fishermen, growers and other food producers. This knowledge transfer takes place during the project in the living lab, via four European networks and by offering new further training courses. Afterwards, a permanent infrastructure has been set up for knowledge transfer. This project provides the foundation, 'orgware', which is also necessary for the development and knowledge transfer of other innovations (hardware, software) in the field of short chain.