Management of sanitary and phytosanitary risks in the apple industry: the Sustain' Apple project

Sustain'Apple aims at shedding light on the organizational and institutional solutions that may be implemented at all stages of the national chains (short and long chains) and at the international level with a focus on some crucial players (China, Chile, Italy). Priority has been given to improve the sustainability of the organizational and institutional solutions since, although tightly connected with technical solutions, they have not yet received much attention in academic and empirical literature. Sustain'Apple also evaluates the impact of some organizational and institutional solutions on the consumer perceptions of the sanitary risk, international trade and environment. The project runs over a 4 years period (2014-2017). While total funding is 3.9 million euros, it benefits from a French public subsidy of about 830k euros. The Consortium gathers all the capabilities necessary to address these sustainable apple chain issues: on the research side, INRA, CIRAD, IRSTEA, Montpellier Supagro, ESA Angers and UAPV are concerned through UMR MOISA, UMR Innovation, UMR ITAP, PSH and UERI Gotheron. The following disciplines or subdisciplines are involved : organization and institutional economics, international economics, consumer economics, strategic management, international law, agronomy, landscape ecology and Life Cycle Assessment. On the expertise side, the main contributions come from CTIFL on supermarkets, consumers, postharvest technologies and production systems, from GRAB on short organic chains and from ANPP on a detailed and global understanding of the apple production and export industry. Dissemination targets i) the public agencies in charge of SPS control, standard definition and promotion of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) solutions; ii) the main private stakeholders of the apple chains at the production, trade, distribution and consumption levels.