Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
being stranded. A loss of power in the RDC would stop the entire chain
and retailers would run out of products in a few days.
When benchmarking the case-study against the national wide super-
market system, the former may be more resilient than the latter as it is in
a better position to handle infrastructure failures. Due to the higher degree
of autonomy and fewer actors involved, the case system would be able
to work around many events, which could bring the supermarket-based
system to a halt. For instance, a loss of money supply could be handled
by delaying payments until the system recovers. Loss of fuel would be
diffi cult to overcome, but produce could still be collected on bike or by
public transport.
However, from the consumer's point of view, the risks have a different
nature. Consumers in the case system are vulnerable to a poor or failed
harvest (e.g., caused by fl ooding, unusual weather conditions or pests).
The supermarket supply system would be unaffected by a failed harvest
at a single farm because of the large number of producers feeding into the
system. However, the crop diversity of the case-study minimizes the risk
of a complete harvest failure.
1.6.5 LIMITATIONS OF STUDY—VALIDITY OF MODEL
SYSTEMS
The vegetables produced from the case-study farm have determined the
design of the cultivation phase of the two model systems. It is very likely
that other model systems would be developed if the systems were opti-
mized for producing any mix of vegetables of certain food energy content
but such analyses are outside the scope of this study. However, as the
model systems are scale independent the results can be considered as rep-
resenting the production from larger areas where different farms are pro-
ducing different crops. Although in many cases the yields will vary from
those presented, the high and low yield scenario should capture the range
of possible outcomes.
For both emergy assessment and LCA the on-farm use of fuel and ir-
rigation resulted in higher impacts for the case-study than for the model
