Assessing the economic, social and environmental impact of collaborative short food supply chains: a producers’ perspective

Short food supply chains (SFSCs) have been recently gaining increased popularity. Many are the expectations around their economic, social and environmental impacts on producers, consumers and communities. However, high heterogeneity and informality of SFSCs’ initiatives, coupled to the strong interconnection between farms’ multiple production processes and distribution channels, make it quite complex to assess their impacts. Indeed, few are the comprehensive analyses of SFSCs’ impacts that can be found in the literature, especially with comparisons against long food supply chains (LFSCs). This work presents a qualitative methodology for the assessment of economic, social and environmental impacts of SFSCs and the results from its implementation on 13 European collaborative SFSCs, in the context of the Horizon 2020 EU-funded project “COACH”. The methodology is based on actors’ impacts self-assessment, implemented during wider direct in-depth interviews to producers and other relevant actors of each SFSC initiative. Results showed that producers perceive SFSCs as having an overall better impact than LFSCs on all the sustainability items analysed. Along the supply chain, farmers give a higher evaluation to the impact of SFSC on private economic aspects than processors and retailers, who in turn give a higher evaluation to the impact of SFSC on the community and the territory. Also, actors from more solidarity-oriented initiatives perceive as higher the impact of SFSC compared to actors from more market-oriented initiatives, especially on societal and territorial aspects. The self-assessment procedure imparts a transformative nature to the evaluation, enabling SFSCs operators to self-assess their performance and identify possible corrective actions, gain awareness on the impacts of their choices and activate a joint reflection within their SFSC initiatives. For future strengthening of SFSCs, practitioners and policy-makers should promote and support collaboration and collective investments between food producers, education and training, peer-to-peer skills and knowledge exchange.