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AbstractPalm oil is the world most used vegetable oil and its use as food ingredient is criticized for creating environmental, socio‐economic, and health sustainability challenges. In Europe, the debate on palm oil sustainability has strongly intensified in the latest years involving several agri‐food chain actors and stakeholders. The research explores Twitter content of key palm oil agri‐food chain actors on palm oil multiple sustainability dimensions, focusing on the European context. First, the study applied a qualitative deductive approach to categorize palm oil sustainability dimensions. Second, among the 463 palm oil agri‐food chain companies identified, 198 have an active Twitter account, including world palm oil producers, European bakery and chocolate manufacturers, and European food retailers. One hundred seven accounts tweet on palm oil. Third, a term frequency analysis and an in‐depth textual analysis of tweets on palm oil sustainability issues were carried out. Results confirms that all agri‐food chain actors communicate about palm oil sustainability, adopting a multi‐dimension outlook. Palm oil producers actively use Twitter to promote palm oil sustainability, whereas European manufacturers and retailers limit their activity to react to consumers' questioning. Whereas palm oil producers tend to shape consumers' opinion over the benefits and the opportunities of palm oil use, food manufacturers and retailers adopt a purely informative approach on sustainability certification, avoiding the engagement over sensitive issues. Health is the most mentioned sustainability dimension. The study also confirms differences between agri‐food chain actors' marketing communication. Finally, the study confirms that, in the case of sensitive issues, as for palm oil sustainability, Twitter is as able to drive companies' communication.

This study evaluated productivity dynamics and identified sources of productivity growth in Italian tomato production and processing. We used a stochastic frontier input distance function with four error components—heterogeneity, statistical noise, persistent and transient inefficiency—and a four-step estimation procedure with a system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator in the first step to address the endogeneity problem. The results reveal significant differences in the productivity and efficiency of tomato production and processing. Moreover, there are considerable differences among the different sizes of tomato producers, with the main variations observed for scale efficiency. While tomato processors operate at an optimal production size, tomato producers are characterized by considerable economies of scale, especially small producers. These results thus suggest that there is significant opportunity for technical efficiency improvements at both stages of the value chain. Finally, due to improvements made to scale efficiency, extensive productivity growth was observed for the group of small tomato producers. The results presented in this paper were obtained within the VALUMICS project "Understanding Food Value Chain and Network Dynamics", funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 727243.

Publisher's version (útgefin grein) ; Transitioning agri-food systems towards increased sustainability and resilience requires that attention be paid to sustainable food consumption policies. Policy-making processes often require the engagement and acceptance of key stakeholders. This study analyses stakeholders' solutions for creating sustainable agri-food systems, through interviews with a broad range of stakeholders including food value chain actors, non-governmental organizations, governmental institutions, research institutions and academic experts. The study draws on 38 in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted in four European countries: France, Iceland, Italy and the UK, as well as three interviews with high-level EU experts. The interviewees' solutions were analysed according to a five-category typology of policy tools, encompassing direct activity regulations, and market-based, knowledge-based, governance and strategic policy tools. Most of the identified solutions were located in the strategic tools category, reflecting shared recognition of the need to integrate food policy to achieve long-term goals. Emerging solutions-those which were most commonly identified among the different national contexts-were then used to derive empirically-grounded and more universally applicable recommendations for the advancement of sustainable food consumption policies. ; The VALUMICS project "Understanding Food Value Chain and Network Dynamics" received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under grant agreement No. 727243. https://valumics.eu/. The authors would like to thank the interviewees for their participation in this study, and the two anonymous reviewers for providing useful comments. ; Peer Reviewed

System dynamics and agent-based simulation modelling approaches have a potential as tools to evaluate the impact of policy related decision making in food value chains. The context is that a food value chain involves flows of multiple products, financial flows and decision making among the food value chain players. Each decision may be viewed from the level of independent actors, each with their own motivations and agenda, but responding to externalities and to the behaviours of other actors. The focus is to show how simulation modelling can be applied to problems such as fairness and power asymmetries in European food value chains by evaluating the outcome of interventions in terms of relevant operational indicators of interorganisational fairness (e.g., profit distribution, market power, bargaining power). The main concepts of system dynamics and agent-based modelling are introduced and the applicability of a hybrid of these methods to food value chains is justified. This approach is outlined as a research agenda, and it is demonstrated how cognitive maps can help in the initial conceptual model building when implemented for specific food value chains studied in the EU Horizon 2020 VALUMICS project. The French wheat to bread chain has many characteristics of food value chains in general and is applied as an example to formulate a model that can be extended to capture the functioning of European FVCs. This work is to be further progressed in a subsequent stream of research for the other food value chain case studies with different governance modes and market organisation, in particular, farmed salmon to fillet, dairy cows to milk and raw tomato to processed tomato. ; Peer Reviewed

System dynamics and agent-based simulation modelling approaches have a potential as tools to evaluate the impact of policy related decision making in food value chains. The context is that a food value chain involves flows of multiple products, financial flows and decision making among the food value chain players. Each decision may be viewed from the level of independent actors, each with their own motivations and agenda, but responding to externalities and to the behaviours of other actors. The focus is to show how simulation modelling can be applied to problems such as fairness and power asymmetries in European food value chains by evaluating the outcome of interventions in terms of relevant operational indicators of interorganisational fairness (e.g., profit distribution, market power, bargaining power). The main concepts of system dynamics and agent-based modelling are introduced and the applicability of a hybrid of these methods to food value chains is justified. This approach is outlined as a research agenda, and it is demonstrated how cognitive maps can help in the initial conceptual model building when implemented for specific food value chains studied in the EU Horizon 2020 VALUMICS project. The French wheat to bread chain has many characteristics of food value chains in general and is applied as an example to formulate a model that can be extended to capture the functioning of European FVCs. This work is to be further progressed in a subsequent stream of research for the other food value chain case studies with different governance modes and market organisation, in particular, farmed salmon to fillet, dairy cows to milk and raw tomato to processed tomato.