Authors: Dr. Cesar Revoredo-Giha, Professor of Food Supply Chain Economics, Food Marketing Research Team Leader (SRUC) and Dr. Carla Barlagne, Agricultural economics researcher (INRAE)
The ‘Minor Roots and Tubers Fostering Agrobiodiversity and Ecosystem Services’ (ROTATES) project aims to sustainably enhance agrobiodiversity and ecosystem services, i.e., the various benefits that humans derive from ecosystems, by introducing and promoting starchy root and tuber crops, considered as minor crops and currently underutilised in Europe. The crops considered for improving in the project are sweet potato, cassava, taro and yam (hereafter MRTs).
It is important to note that the overall objectives of ROTATES are to enhance the resilience of European agrosystems in a context of climate change, to reduce the impacts of agrosystems on the environment, and to respond to increased consumer demand for healthy food. To achieve this objective, of course, it is imperative for producers to include those MRTs into their activities.
The purpose of this piece is to highlight the challenges of expanding MRTs and why this needs to be done in a value chain context (i.e., there is the need to build or expand the sequence of productive activities for those crops that go from farmers to their final customers being these consumers or animal producers).
This piece starts with an overview of the situation of the MRTs in the European Union using the most recent statistical information from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) for the period 2010 to 2023 and comparing it with potatoes as they are the major tuber crop in Europe. Next the challenges are explained following with conclusions indicating the work ahead.
Situation of MRTs in the EU 27
The FAO data relate to the aggregated demand and supply of MRTs in the 27 member states of the European Union (i.e., EU 27). The aggregated demand is made of the uses for food, non-food and exports, whilst the aggregated supply is mainly comprised by domestic production and imports.
Figure 1 shows the differences in the aggregated demand for potatoes (the main tuber crop in the EU 27) and all the MRTs together. If one considers the average for the period, the demand for potatoes is about 141 times the one for MRTs. Another, aspect to highlight is that while the demand for potatoes is relatively stable during the period, the MRTs one shows mostly an increasing trend.
As mentioned, the MRTs aggregated demand is made of several components. The shares of these components are shown in Figure 2. Since 2015 the non-food (e.g., feed) and exports components are the most important uses of MRTs. In contrast, the food component shows a decreasing trend. This is also observed when the MRTs quantities for food are considered. This indicates that the MRTs are not fulfilling any role in terms of satisfying the demand for healthy food.
It is also important to highlight that the most important component, exports, represent about 50 per cent of the total utilisation of MRTs in the EU 27. This shows that most of the MRTs that are produced or imported by EU 27 leave the region. This contrasts with potatoes where on average 31 per cent of the total aggregated supply is exported.
Finally, Figure 3 shows that an increasing proportion of the MRTs aggregated supply is made of imports and therefore domestic production is minimal.
Whilst there might be deficiencies on the data given the small presence of the MRTs in EU 27, the available data point out that there is significant work to do in terms of establishing or expanding those crops in EU 27. Also important is the need to make them known or appealed to consumers if they are to satisfy their demand for healthy products.
Challenges on building value chains for MRTs
The first step for fostering or building an increasing presence of MRTs is to understand why the MRTs did not receive enough attention as the case of mainstream crops (e.g., wheat, maize, rice). In ROTATES we adhere at the views from the Cropdiva project that certain historical events led to the choice of some particular mainstream crops and their developed in detriment with other crops (minor ones). The implications of this position can be explained by the diagram in Figure 4.
The starting point of Figure 4 is that at some point in history there was a lock in on the choice of MRTs crops. This means that they were relegated from being the focus of research that mainstream crops were subject to, with the consequence that the later crops increased their productivity due to the research, whilst the MRTs remained stagnated.
Less productivity implied lower profitability, which also brought less use of those crops reducing the possibilities to take advantage of scale economies (i.e., reducing the cost of production per area unit by expanding the level of production) and also increasing the transaction costs (e.g., lower volumes of production are subject to higher marketing costs).
Lower profitability means that MRTs compete with disadvantage with other crops, and therefore, they are not chosen in production plans and do not reach the market in comparison with mainstream crops. The number of products developed from MRTs is limited (in comparison with products made of mainstream crops). The effect on the market is that these crops receive less attention from consumers, and they command prices that are lower to their cost of production, which reinforces their lock in situation.
Whilst it is clear from Figure 4 that there is the need of substantial innovation applied to MRTs, the point is how to proceed to break the vicious circle presented in the Figure. Two approaches to this problem indicate that focusing the efforts on one of the stages of the supply chain is not enough but there is the need to involve several stages.
For instance, Meynard et al. (2017) point out that instead of working to increase the sustainability of agriculture and food separately, one should consider addressing them simultaneously. Thus, to enhance biodiversity by increasing the planted area of the MRTs, they should be genetically adapted to the local area and make them familiar to farmers. In addition, the crops should also be promoted to consumers and other agrifood system stakeholders, such as collector centres, food processors, retailers and restaurants.
The second approach, very similar to the previous one but formulated in terms of the design of a value chain, put the emphasis on the strategies of a firm with an innovation (Zilberman et al., 2019). To implement the innovation the entrepreneur needs to think on the procurement of feedstock (intermediate inputs), production and processing, and marketing. It must decide how much to produce, what segments of the supply chain to undertake in-house versus sourcing externally, and what institutions such as contracts and standards it will use to coordinate the suppliers assuring its external sourcing.
As pointed out by the Cropdiva project strengthening agrobiodiversity on the consumer’s plate is just as important as strengthening it in the field. This implies that one should address different aspects of the value chain operation at the same time (e.g., consumer demand, logistics, availability of financial resources). Both upstream activities, such as plant breeding, seed production and agricultural production and downstream activities, such as storage, processing and sales need to be considered.
The road ahead
Overall, a successful introduction of the MRTs in the EU 27 to fulfil the ultimate objectives of the ROTATES project would require considering the development of the entire value chain for those crops, i.e., each of stages and also consumers’ interest on the crops and their products.
In that contest the road ahead in ROTATES includes understanding the barriers and enablers to the development of MRTs at value chain level (e.g., farmers, processors, consumers), considering economic, social and cultural barriers to the consumption of MRTs based products in Europe. This would allow us to identify the drivers of the adoption of MRTs and MRTs-based-products along value chains and developing recommendations to foster the uptake of MRTs and MRT based products.
References
CROPDIVA (2022). Value chains for new food products. Deliverable 5.1. Available online at: https://ira.agroscope.ch/en-US/publication/50806
Meynard, J.M., Jeuffroy, M.H., Le Bail, M., Lefèvre, A., Magrini, M.B. and Michon, C., 2017. Designing coupled innovations for the sustainability transition of agrifood systems. Agricultural systems, 157, pp.330-339.
Zilberman, D., Lu, L. and Reardon, T., 2019. Innovation-induced food supply chain design. Food Policy, 83, pp.289-297.
