Servicing Policy Packages for the Agri-food Sector– Executive Summary

Summary

Publication Year: 2015

Authors:

SPREE

SPREE: Servicing Policy for Resource Efficient Economy is a three-year project from 2012-2015 under the European Union’s Environment Program (FP7). The objective of the project is to design policy packages to achieve sustainable production and consumption patterns characterized by the transition from the purchase of consumer products to services in three sectors: water, transportation and food agriculture. The main product of the project is “Policy Packages for Transition to Service Consumption” which will help achieve a complete separation between economic growth and environmental damage while taking into consideration social considerations.

Summary

The Servicing Policy Packages is the key outcome of SPREE Project. The Servicing Policy Packages in the Agri-food sector is based on the project’s accumulated knowledge on the transition towards servicing and contributes to the development of policies to promote decoupling of economic growth and social prosperity from inefficient use of resources, through the facilitation of Crop Protection Management Solutions.

The Servicing system selected in the SPREE project for the Agri-food sector is Crop Protection Management Solutions consisting of providing customers (farmers) with the service of crop protection against pests and diseases. In practice, this servicing system requires the existence of a specialized company that employs biological, mechanical, chemical and ICT-based methods to detect and fight against pests attacking the customers’ crops. The customers pay for a pest-protected crop/field instead of purchasing the tools and inputs themselves. Thereby, customers purchase and receive a service, instead of a product.

The Agri-food case selected is considered as a Business-to-Business (B2B) type of servicing. The empirical work of the Base Case has focused on Rías Baixas, Galicia, Spain. The Base Case in the Agri-food sector and where attention was focused on in the initial Policy Packaging process (the Basic and Effective Packages) was Spain. Additional case study was carried out in Lithuania.

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