Towards SUstainable and REsilient EU FARMing systems (SURE-Farm) SMB

Europe’s agricultural sector faces a range of economic, environmental and social challenges, including more volatile producer prices, new competitors in internationalised and liberalised markets, unusual weather patterns and higher risks of extreme weather events, upstream and downstream market power along the value chain, private standards, increasing dependence on non-farm land owners and financial institutions, demographic change and increasing urbanisation, changing policies and political risks as well as changing societal concerns and consumer preferences. The accumulation of these uncertainties and their potentially complex interconnections lead to concerns about the long term viability of food and other agricultural production, the sustainability of agricultural systems, the vitality of rural areas and the delivery of ecosystem services.

SURE-Farm aims to analyze, assess and improve the resilience and sustainability of farms and farming systems in the EU. For this purpose, SURE-Farm creates scenarios and a novel and comprehensive resilience-enabling framework, develops a set of advanced risk assessment and management tools as well as an improved demographic assessment model and a resilience assessment tool for policies, and in conjunction with stakeholders, co-creates and applies an integrated resilience assessment model and co-designs implementation roadmaps.

SURE-Farm contributes to the work programme on Sustainable Food Security – resilient and resource efficient value chains, whose aim is to identify solutions to the various challenges affecting the resilience of food value chains from primary production to final consumers. More specifically this proposal addresses SFS-31.