Sharing Values for Changing Practices, a Lever for Sustainable Transformation? The Case of Farmers and Processors in Interaction within Localized Cheese Sectors

Abstract

International research and development organizations have acknowledged that localized agrifood systems, particularly geographical indications (GIs), are a lever for evolving towards sustainable agriculture. Such a premise is neither spontaneous nor systematic. Research and development organizations show their limit in proposing approaches to overcome this raised issue: The performance-based approach of sustainability, associated with a strict economical understanding of activities, is at stake. We propose the introduction of a values-based approach to the understanding of localized activities and their contribution to sustainability. We base our demonstration on the study of the relationships between stakeholders within GIs on a day-to-day basis: Corsica and Western Pyrenees (WP) are regions where traditional cheeses (respectively GI Brocciu and GI Ossau-Iraty) are produced with ewe milk. We build a typology of relationships between farmers providing the milk and dairies, based on the theory of worlds of worth (from industrial to artisanal). We cross-reference it with values given to milk and cheese. Despite the framing role of GIs, milk is mainly valued according to industrial criteria of quantity and sound farming practices have no weightage. However, artisanal and civic initiatives have emerged using raw milk and fostering more sustainable practices, notably based on organic farming. Though those initiatives are currently marginal, they might be promising seeds of change.

Product Qualification as a Means of Identifying Sustainability Pathways for Place-Based Agri-Food Systems: The Case of the GI Corsican Grapefruit (France)

“…This does not do much to help guarantee or identify the sensorial profile that distinguishes the Corsican grapefruit from others [51]. There is a dissonance between the local stakeholders' representation of the ideal Corsican grapefruit and that which the consumers have to guide them in their sensorial experience [28]. This is reinforced by the fact that consumers in Europe and in France generally still do not fully grasp the significance of GIs in terms of what they represent for quality (especially for typicality) [4,15].…”

“…A product's description goes beyond its physical characteristics; it is a tangible embodiment of the growers' shared values around quality and production practices [28,30]. Its qualification can also help display the compromises made by the various actors along a supply chain, and the various internal and external constraints they face [1,31,32].…”

Can raw milk cheese and pasteurised milk cheese coexist? Unthinkable or never really considered?

“…Making raw milk cheese relies on a network of processing facilities placed between farmers on one side and large dairies that deal with numerous milk suppliers on the other. This in-between position has a particular configuration in which the relations between the operators are much closer and values more easily shared (Millet and Casabianca 2019). In addition to the specific characteristics of the various cheeses, these values affect both the milk itself and its mode of production and progressively pave the way to the sustainability of their activity.…”

Polycentric structures nurturing adaptive food quality governance - Lessons learned from geographical indications in the European Union

“…The PS is also the main reference document for third party control. After registering their GI, producers are forced to adapt the PS in response to evolving societal, technical, market, environmental, and political conditions or changes within the producer group (Baritaux et al, 2016;Belletti et al, 2015;Mancini and Consiglieri, 2016;Millet and Casabianca, 2019;Quiñones-Ruiz et al, 2018). They can submit applications for PS amendments to national and EU authoritiesfollowing basically the same procedures as for GI registration (Fig.…”