Supply chain management and transparency
Work Package 4
The agroforestry and non-timber forest products (NTFP) supply chains (fruit and nuts) are currently mainly based on one-off inter-actions between individual sellers and buyers. This presents challenges with regard to the traceability of these raw materials at later levels of value creation, product quality due to numerous handovers and information imbalances, the opportunistic behaviour of both sides and the high transaction costs. In addition, there is no uniform market price due to the separately negotiated transaction. The intro-duction of a web-based integrity platform to verify production and traceability for agroforestry raw materials can improve market information and transparency, improve the data base for product certification, optimise the physical processing of transactions, and reduce transaction costs and thus increase the profits of value chain actors. This also promotes documentation and compliance with minimum quality standards for products and international certification, thus exporting processed products to attractive target markets such as the EU.