The Conference Theme
The climate crisis, technological and societal change, population growth and associated changes in demand as well as the dramatic loss of biodiversity and overexploitation of natural resources are the reasons for the agri-food sector to be under intense pressure to change.
In many places, the natural site conditions for agricultural land use are changing and, as a consequence, the basis for cultivation and animal husbandry systems as well as for yield potential and stability are also changing in the long term. As a result, the functionality and stability of sectoral value chains are also subject to increasing uncertainty. This is associated with far-reaching, regionally and globally effective ecological, economic and social changes, the direction and extent of which are often difficult to assess and which frequently occur as ecological and political crises.
This raises the question of the resilience of regional and global agri-food value chains, i.e. their ability to cope with change and disruption without losing key functions and services:
- How quickly and how well can individual value chains respond in the event of environmentally induced supply shocks?
- How vulnerable are value chains and their actors, especially across national borders and the boundaries of economic areas?
- How are the resulting risks, but also the capacities to act, distributed among the actors involved (agriculture, processing, trade, consumers and citizens in different social environments)?
- Which developments and influencing factors promote, respectively impair, the resilience of agricultural systems and value chains, and how can it be strengthened or secured by suitable (agricultural) policy instruments and other institutional arrangements?
- To what extent do tradeoffs arise between the substantial realization of provisioning ecosystem services, which continues to be necessary in the face of a globally growing population, on the one hand, and the sustainable guarantee of regulating and cultural services on the other hand, and how can such tradeoffs be mitigated?
