International workshops on the future of food systems

RIVM together with UFT, ATB and CREA have conducted three stakeholder workshops in Bulgaria, Germany and Italy to identify the most important challenges regarding the future of sustainable food systems. The workshops were part of WP5 Task 5.5: providing foresight and deliberation on potential future policy targets for SFS. We applied (strategic) foresight to the food system in the EU. Strategic foresight is a systematic and proactive approach to exploring and anticipating future trends, challenges, and opportunities in order to inform and guide decision making and strategy development.

The foresight study started with the development of a conceptual framework, followed by an inventory of driving forces affecting food systems. The workshops were the third step in the foresight process.

For the workshops, three countries were selected to represent regional dynamics and differences of the food system within Europe; Bulgaria representing Central and Eastern Europe, Germany Northern and Western Europe and Italy Southern Europe. For each workshop, stakeholders from different fields of the food systems were invited including policy makers, scientific researchers/experts, interest groups, and the private sector. During the workshop stakeholders have ranked demographic, economic, social-cultural, technological, ecological and political-institutional trends based on their relevance and uncertainty for the European food systems. Impacts of the most important trends were also discussed.

RIVM will publish the results of the workshops in Q2, finalizing phase 1. In the results we focus on similarities and differences among the EU-regions. In phase 2 of FutureFoodS we continue the foresight study with developing scenarios. The different stakeholders which were engaged in the workshops are part of the network that might be employed in the second phase as well.