Agrifood Trend Radar: From nutrition as a status symbol to urbanization
The food4future trend analysis for Western European agrifood systems is cover story of the November issue of "Sustainability"
11.11.2022
Western European agrifood systems are highly developed and extremely complex. Due to the consequences of climate and demographic change, they face great challenges, but also opportunities. In order continuously secure the nutrition of more than 700 million people in the EU, the agrifood systems’ transformation process must be successful, which also includes the identification of relevant topics for agricultural and food research. This is where future studies can be helpful with an analysis of developing or existing trends, and thus contribute to strategy development for sustainable and resilient agrifood systems.
In order to take account of the complexity and large number of stakeholder involved, we have identified relevant topics and trends in several workshops with experts from a wide variety of disciplines for trend analysis, underpinned them with thorough research and monitored them over a longer period of time with regard to their development. We determined nine trends with 50 sub-themes that we predict to have impact on future agrifood systems. Of these, five can be classified as macro trends and four as micro trends. Macro or mega trends are global and long-term changes with the potential to act as major transformation drivers. Micro trends are short to medium term and are integrated into macro trends.
The macro trends identified are urbanization, globalization and their impact on investments, productivity and vulnerability to plant diseases and pests. Furthermore, the – often illegal – appropriation of large areas of land (land grabbing) and its implications for the food security of many countries, changes in social values e.g. with regard to sustainability and health added value of food, as well as nutrition as a status symbol.
Consequently, the four relevant micro trends include the individualization of nutrition, but also alternative (plant-based) food sources and their production in (peri-)urban areas, as well as the trend towards food production without fresh water.
The trend analysis formed the basis for the research consortium "food4future", which has been researching the development of sustainable and resilient urban agrifood systems since 2019.
You can read more about the identified trends and their implications for the future of European food systems in the open access article:
Preiss, M.; Vogt, J.H.-M.; Dreher, C.; Schreiner, M. Trends Shaping Western European Agrifood Systems of the Future. Sustainability 2022, 14, 13976.