Stakeholder dialogue in the fish supply chain
Stakeholder dialogue in the fish supply chain
Large quantities of food loss and waste result from poor coordination, power asymmetries between supply chain stakeholders, and lack of alternative uses for specific by-products. The fish supply chain is not an exception. Lowinfood adopts the FAO definition of food waste as “decrease in the quantity or quality of food resulting from decisions and actions by retailers, food service providers and consumers”. In the fish industry, the use of the term “waste” is not appropriate, and the goal is rather to allocate products to the most profitable and sustainable use along the waste pyramid. To achieve a more sustainable use of fish resources it is important to facilitate discussion and coordination between stakeholders at different levels of the value chain, form production to retail and up to consumption. This is the goal of Lowinfood Task 4.1 “Supply chain dialogue to identify hotspots of FLW in the fish sector”, which puts together stakeholders of the fish supply chain in two European countries, Scotland (UK) and Germany. While Scotland is not part of the EU, it is well embedded in the European market, and is one of the main fish producers in Europe, while Germany is the largest EU market, with 83 million consumers. Therefore, the fish supply chains in these two countries are complementary, with Scotland being more relevant for upstream activities (production and primary processing), and Germany for downstream activities (secondary processing and retailing). Apart from favouring coordination between supply chain stakeholders by creating new relations or building on existing ones, the goal of the dialogue is to develop an in-depth overview of the industry in terms of FLW generation, and to identify suitable policy and innovation efforts for addressing this challenge. Furthermore, the dialogue aims to promote awareness and adoption of other innovative solutions with a potential to reduce loss and waste of fish products. These objectives will be achieved by combining interviews, participatory events, and surveys as opportunities for data gathering. The dialogue represents a social innovation because most of the efforts to date tend to focus on single stages of the supply chain or on specific typologies of actors, while here we adopt a full-supply-chain approach, focusing on the issue that may emerge from the relationships between actors.