Martin Collison appointed to EU Focus Group on Food Supply Chains – October 2014

Martin Collison has been appointed as one of 20 experts on food supply chains from 14 members states across Europe who have been brought together to form a new ‘Focus Group’  which meets for the first time in December 2014 in Prague.  The Focus Group is charged with reviewing the potential offered by ‘Innovative Short Food Supply Chain Management’.  The group is charged with 5 tasks to help shape EU policy and investment in this area:

• Identify and analyse the different alternative food supply chain models existing in Europe.
• Identify those models that substantially improve farmers’ income, and have potential for scaling up in terms of the number of producers involved and volumes traded.
• Identify the main needs or instruments required to implement these models and the factors that currently hamper the scaling up.
• Identify existing examples of how these factors can be addressed in Europe, and explore the role of knowledge transfer in addressing them.
• Explore innovative solutions to address the hampering factors and propose directions for future research work.

Further details are available at: http://ec.europa.eu/eip/agriculture/en/content/innovative-short-food-supply-chain-management-first-meeting