IGD

Institute of Geography and Sustainability of the University of Lausanne
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Case studies: distributing value equitably in Swiss food supply chains according to the Equal Profit model

Research fields Agroecology
Keywords Environment
Agroecology
Feeding
Impact assessment
Impact monetisation
Public health
Funding Volteface (UNIL)
Duration January 2022 - December 2023
Website
Researchers Barjolle Dominique (Supervision) [web] [email]
Wyss Rahel (Research Advisory) [email]
Burrus Inès (Project co-applicant)

In Switzerland, almost 1,000 farms close down every year and large farms are increasing their agricultural area at the expense of smaller ones (FSO 2021). In addition, the risk of suicide among farmers is 37% higher than the average. To remedy this situation, the director of the Swiss Farmers' Union is calling for agricultural products to be sold at fair prices that allow farming activities to flourish. The need to rethink purchasing practices, business models and pricing is therefore obvious. However, although there are many Fair Trade initiatives, none has transformed the value sharing model. A new fair trade model, Equal Profit, emerged in 2019 from the findings of Ms Burrus' PhD at HEC Lausanne. By sharing profits equitably between actors in a supply chain, this model breaks the power dynamics between them and ensures a decent income for farmers. The Volteface programme proposes to apply this model to two supply chains of processed products in Switzerland, on the one hand in collaboration with Local Contractual Agriculture initiatives and on the other hand in conjunction with the Demeter biodynamic label. The collection and analysis of financial data from each actor in the two selected chains will allow to study what a fair distribution of value implies for the commercial relationships between actors and to explore the viability of the model and its marketability.



EqualProfit website