FOODCoST

FOODCoST: FOOD Costing and Internalisation of Externalities for System Transition

Abstract

Ensuring sustainable food systems requires vastly reducing its environmental and health costs while making healthy and sustainable food affordable to all. In current food systems many of the costs of harmful foods and benefits of healthful foods are externalized, i.e. are not reflected in market prices and therefore not in decision making of actors in food value chains. Solving the externality problems means to determine current costs of externalities and redefine food prices (true pricing) to internalize them in daily practice. Policy makers, businesses and other actors in the food system, lack sufficient information and knowledge to internalize externalities to achieve a sustainable food system. FOODCoST responds to this challenge by designing a roadmap for effective and sustainable strategies to assess and internalise food externalities. FOODCoST provides approaches and databases to measure and value positive and negative externalities, proposing a game-changing and harmonised approach to calculate the value of climate, biodiversity, environmental, social and health externalities along the food value chain based on economic cost principles. FOODCoST provides an analytical toolbox to experiment, analyse, and navigate the internalisation of externalities through policies and business strategies providing tools and guidance to policy makers and businesses to assess the sustainability impact of their internalisation actions. FOODCoST emphasises the diversity of challenges of true pricing in different value chains and countries and regions, and cocreates, tests and validates the valuation and internalisation approaches in 11 diverse case studies enabling to test, validate and enrich the approaches in order to transit towards a sustainable food system. The project will be based on a multi-actor approach that will ensure a continuous dialogue with all relevant actors across the whole food system (land and sea).

Project details

Unibo Team Leader: Matteo Vittuari

Unibo involved Department/s:
Dipartimento di Scienze e Tecnologie Agro-Alimentari

Coordinator:
Stichting Wageningen Research - Wr(Netherlands)

Other Participants:
Sveriges Lantbruks Universitet -Slu- (Sweden)
Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn (Germany)
ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - Università di Bologna (Italy)
Globaz, S.A. (Portugal)
Institut National De Recherche Pour L'Agriculture, L'Alimentation Et L'Environnement-Inrae (France)
Universite' Catholique De Louvain (Belgium)
European Center For Agricultural, Regional And Environmental Policy Research, Eurocare (Germany)
Ecozept Gbr (Germany)
Pedal Consulting Sro (Slovak Republic)
Comite Des Organisations Professionnelles Agricole De L Union Europeenne Copa Association De Fait (Belgium)
Aarhus Universitet (Denmark)
Soil & More Impacts Gmbh (Germany)
Aki Agrarkozgazdasagi Intezet Nonprofit Kft (Hungary)
Danone Research Sas (France)
Apre Ag.Promoz.Ric.Europea C/O Murst (Italy)
Rijksinstituut Voor Volksgezondheid En Milieu (Netherlands)
Zuidelijke Land- En Tuinbouworganisatie Vereniging (Netherlands)
Universitatea De Stiinte Agricole Si Medicina Veterinara Cluj Napoca (Romania)
Universidad De Almeria (Spain)
Stichting Mvo Nederland (Netherlands)
Technische Hochschule Nurnberg Georg Simon Ohm (Germany)

Total Eu Contribution: Euro (EUR) 7.976.539,00
Project Duration in months: 48
Start Date: 01/06/2022
End Date: 31/05/2026

Cordis webpage

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101060481 This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101060481