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Name of legal entity Country Overall project value (EUR) No of staff provided Name of client Origin of funding Dates (start/end) Name of partners
GPM Consulting Western Balkan countries 98.835 A: NA, B: 2 PANGEA scc Directorate General Joint Research Centre (DG JRC) 03.09.2018 - 30.08.2019 None

Food quality standards and participation of farmers in modern supply chains in the Western Balkans (FoodQuality-WB)

The objective of this project is to investigate factors affecting farmers’ participation in modern supply chains and contractual arrangement applied between farmers and processors/retailers to ensure the supply of the food quality desired by the market. This will allow better understanding of the socio-economic situation of farming sector as well as the constraints that impede their growth.

Further, the project shall aim at providing insights to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of adopted policies and thus can provide scientifically-based support to policy making. A more comprehensive knowledge of the farm’s access to modern supply chains would allow better targeting on both national support schemes and IPARD pre-accession assistance.

The specific objectives that the survey and the analysis performed by the Contractor need to meet are:

-Analysis of the structure of the market;

-Understanding of the farmers participation in different sales channels, e.g. modern channels versus informal (traditional) channels;

- Contractual agreements of sales channels;

- The role of cooperatives and producers organizations in determining farmers’ participation in modern sales channels;

-The role of food standards and food quality in determining farmers’ participation in modern supply chains;

-The use of standards, certification, and labelling to ensure food quality and provision of information of food attributes to consumers;

-The role of agricultural policy in supporting quality standards and farmers’ entering in new markets;

-Which farmers are excluded from modern supply chains;

-Detailed contractual agreements between farmers and processors/retailers applied to enforce the food quality standards.

Type of services provided:

The WB countries to be covered for this project are Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia. Alongside the WB countries, Turkey must be also included in the study. The survey must include farmers operating in sectors relevant for rural development in the WB countries (e.g. fruit farmers, dairy farms).

The target population of the survey are the farms producing selected products (e.g. fruits, milk). The Contractor must propose a sampling strategy that ensures a representative sample of the target population. The representativeness must be based on information the Contractor can obtain upfront on the characteristics of the farming sector in the regions, such as, for example, type of farm (family farms, corporate farms, etc.), agricultural diversity (farm size, agricultural practices, etc.), the presence of producers' organizations/ cooperatives, or other characteristics relevant for WB countries.

The Contractor strategy to reach the final amount of interviewed farmers must be organized in three stages:

 First, define a strategy to identify and contact the potential farmers to be included in the survey.

 Second, a pilot survey on at least 5% of the total sample of farmers to pre-test the questionnaire.

 Third, a final survey on the rest 95% of the total sample of farmers with the questionnaire pre-tested during the pilot survey.

 The final number of interviewed farms that answered the questionnaire must be at least 210 farms per country, for a total number of at least 1500 farms surveyed, including the pilot.

 

The Contractor must also collect information about the structure of the studied food chains in the surveyed countries. This information must be collected from secondary sources such as statistical reports, policy documents or other literature.