The world food system has seen an increasing integration of markets – the so-called globalization - so that the supply chains for many food products in many countries got fairly long and complex. This development has been enabled by increasingly large-scale and cheap cross-continental and intra-continental trade. It has brought along manifold benefits for basically all stakeholders involved of which efficiency gains and your-round stable supply are the most important ones at the consumption side. This led to a habituation effect on the side of consumers but also of policy makers that it is taken for granted that there are always sufficient quantities of very diverse food available at very competitive prices year around. But exactly this substantially increased complexity of food processing and supply chains makes food provision at the consumer stage also vulnerable to disruptions. Such largely unforeseen disturbances bring along a number of short-run challenges – in the worst case severe humanitarian ones – to ensure and maintain the comfortable food provision situation consumers were used to. Hence, the seminar will look into recent evidence for this phenomenon, its economic mechanisms and consequences and brainstorm about precautionary measures which could be taken to improve supply chain resilience.
Let's think together! During the seminar participants will interactively explore the knowledge of the crowd (please bring your laptops for that) in order to establish and extract joint knowledge.