Francesca Galli

In the mid-1980s, under the Commission Presidency of Jacques Delors, a process of revitalizing European integration began, leading to the adoption of the Single European Act in 1986, multi-annual programming within the Multiannual Financial Framework in 1988, the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and the founding of the European Union. An initial proposal to reform agricultural policy was triggered by the 1985 Green Paper and the 1988 report “The Future of Rural Areas”. At the beginning of the Uruguay Round in 1986, agriculture was included for the first time in the GATT negotiations (the international trade agreement). In the name of global markets and the end of protectionist policies, a broad debate on agriculture was opened. In this context, the MacSharry reform of 1992 heralded a new season of the Common Agricultural Policy, which led to a significant reduction in guaranteed prices, offset by the introduction of compensatory payments. On this occasion, the so-called accompanying measures were also introduced which, although separate from the core of the reform and with limited resources, were for the first time focussed on tackling environmental problems.

The MacSharry reform of 1992 made it possible to break the deadlock in negotiations on international trade. The Marrakesh Agreement in 1994 concluded the negotiations and established the World Trade Organisation based in Geneva. However, some years later, while the CAP reform has not yet fully entered into force, there is a feeling that further steps in the process of renewing the CAP are still pending. Not least because its share of the Community budget has not only not been reduced, but actually increased. Other priorities are now emerging. One of these is the introduction of a rural development policy that complements the sectoral approach of traditional agricultural policy with a territorial approach. With these objectives in mind, the LEADER Community Initiative was launched in 1991, a successful experience with bottom-up programming. The approaching end of the millennium provides an opportunity to analyse for the first time the weight of the CAP in the Union’s budget since its introduction at the end of the twentieth century.

The contradictions between food poverty affecting a large section of the global population and the everyday wastage of food, particularly in high income countries, have raised significant academic and public attention. All actors in the food chain have a role to play in food waste prevention and reduction, including farmers, food manufacturers and processors, caterers and retailers and ultimately consumers. Food surplus redistribution is considered by many as a partial solution to food waste reduction and food poverty mitigation, while others criticize charitable initiatives as inadequate responses, that inhibit governments from responsibly protecting the citizens right to food. This paper frames food assistance as “hybrid systems”, situating at the intersection of territorial food, public welfare and third sector voluntary systems. Based on available literature and reflections on previous research examining food banks in Italy, we develop a system dynamics conceptual mapping. The aim is to model a set of relations and dynamic mechanisms associated with variables relevant to food waste generation, food recovery for social purposes and food poverty alleviation. The analysis of feedback interactions highlights the vulnerabilities of food assistance systems that occur when addressing food poverty by reducing food surplus. In summary, as the awareness on food poverty and food surplus arises, incentives to food recovery and redistribution strengthen the role of food assistance actors, increasing their exposure to drivers of change, such as retailers’ standards for food surplus prevention. This paper contributes to the current academic debate on charitable food assistance, with insights for policy makers and other systems’ actors.