Foodshed, Agricultural Diversification and Self-Sufficiency Assessment: Beyond the Isotropic Circle Foodshed—A Case Study from Avignon (France)

Abstract

The regionalization of food systems in order to shorten supply chains and develop local agriculture to feed city regions presents particular challenges for food planning and policy. The existing foodshed approaches enable one to assess the theoretical capacity of the food self-sufficiency of a specific region, but they struggle to consider the diversity of existing crops in a way that could be usable to inform decisions and support urban food strategies. Most studies are based on the definition of the area required to meet local consumption, obtaining a map represented as an isotropic circle around the city, without considering the site-specific pedoclimatic, geographical, and socioeconomic conditions which are essential for the development of local food supply chains. In this study, we propose a first stage to fill this gap by combining the Metropolitan Foodshed and Self-sufficiency Scenario model, which already considers regional yields and specific land use covers, with spatially-explicit data on the cropping patterns, soil and topography. We use the available Europe-wide data and apply the methodology in the city region of Avignon (France), initially considering a foodshed with a radius of 30 km. Our results show that even though a theoretically-high potential self-sufficiency could be achieved for all of the food commodities consumed (>80%), when the specific pedological conditions of the area are considered, this could be suitable only for domestic plant-based products, whereas an expansion of the initial foodshed to a radius of 100 km was required for animal products to provide >70% self-sufficiency. We conclude that it is necessary to shift the analysis from the size assessment to the commodity-group–specific spatial configuration of the foodshed based on biophysical and socioeconomic features, and discuss avenues for further research to enable the development of a foodshed assessment as a complex of complementary pieces, i.e., the ‘foodshed archipelago’.

Self-Sufficiency Assessment: Defining the Foodshed Spatial Signature of Supply Chains for Beef in Avignon, France

“…The foodshed approach has also been used to estimate the size of the foodshed required to meet a given rate of food self-sufficiency, taking into account different food system scenarios in terms of food groups, food production systems (conventional versus organic), diets, and levels of food loss and waste (e.g., the Metropolitan Foodshed and Self-sufficiency Scenario: MFSS; [17]). Thus, in addition to food production capacity based on biophysical conditions, our recent work considered socioeconomic features driving the flows and distribution networks of locally-grown food [7]. Our findings showed that analysis needs to be shifted from size assessment of the foodshed represented as an isotropic circle around the city to commodity-group-specific spatial configuration of the foodshed [7].…”

“…Current research is highlighting foodshed approaches as a way of identifying the farmland areas functionally linked to cities that could be involved in new short food supply chains [7]. In this paper, we first briefly sketch the state-of-the-art concerning the notion of foodshed.…”

Self-sufficiency Assessment: Defining the Foodshed Spatial Signature of Short Beef Supply Chains

“…Thus, in addition to food production capacity based on biophysical conditions, our recent work considered socioeconomic features driving the flows and distribution networks of locallygrown food. Our findings showed that analysis needs to be shifted from size assessment of the foodshed represented as an isotropic circle around the city, to commodity-group-specific spatial configuration of the foodshed [7]. The aim of the present study is to explore foodshed assessment as a complex of complementary entities, i.e., the "foodshed archipelago".…”

“…Following previous work [7], we defined a radius of 100 km around Avignon, a medium-sized city located in south-eastern France. The selected area incorporates three different administrative regions and ten different provinces (the French départements): Bouches-du-Rhône, Vaucluse, Var, Hautes Alpes in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region, Gard, Hérault, Lozère in the Occitanie region and Ardèche and Drome in the Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes region (Figure 1).…”

A participatory tool for assessing land footprint in city-region food systems—A case study from Metropolitan Copenhagen

“…According to Schreiber et al (2021), they can be classified in three types: (a) agricultural production capacity, (b) food flow and (c) hybrid analyses. The majority of the assessments are based on assessing the potential agricultural production capacity in order to feed the specific population of the city-region (i.e., foodshed) (Joseph et al, 2019;Zasada et al, 2019;Kurtz et al, 2020;Vicente-Vicente et al, 2021b); or to assess more specific issues as part of sustainability impact and ecosystem services assessments of regional food systems and land uses (Swiader et al, 2018;Tavakoli-Hashjini et al, 2020). The food flow assessments map consumers and producers, being thus useful when studying distribution networks (Karg et al, 2016;Wegerif and Wiskerke, 2017;Moschitz and Frick, 2020).…”