The Complexity of Food Systems: Defining Relevant Attributes and Indicators for the Evaluation of Food Supply Chains in Spain

• Main Authors: Gonzalo Gamboa, Zora Kovacic, Marina Di Masso, Sara Mingorría, Tiziano Gomiero, Marta Rivera-Ferré, Mario Giampietro
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2016-05-01
• Series: Sustainability
• Subjects: food systems; food supply chains; narratives; integrated assessment
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/6/515

The wide-ranging literature on food systems provides multiple perspectives and world views. Various stakeholders define food and food systems in non-equivalent ways. The perception of the performance of food systems is determined by these specific perspectives, and a wide variety of policies responding to different aims are proposed and implemented accordingly. This paper sets out to demonstrate that the pre-analytical adoption of different narratives about the food system leads to non-equivalent assessments of the performance of food supply chains. In order to do so, we (i) identify a set of relevant narratives on food supply chains in Spanish and Catalan contexts; (ii) identify the pertinent attributes needed to describe and represent food supply chains within the different perspectives or narratives; and (iii) carry out an integrated assessment of three organic tomato supply chains from the different perspectives. In doing so, the paper proposes an analysis of narratives to enable the analyst to characterize the performance of food supply chains from different perspectives and to identify the expected trade-offs of integrated assessment, associating them with the legitimate-but-contrasting views found among the social actors involved.