French agri-food systems flow analysis: co-design with supply chain stakeholders
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: The agricultural system is of crucial importance since it contributes to the national food autonomy while providing economic activities at a regional scale. Nevertheless, it faces various challenges shared worldwide by agri-food systems: they need to find a compromise between feeding people and minimizing their impact on the environment and the biosphere while ensuring an economic continuity.The present communication is an outcome of the ongoing SOCLE research project funded by the French ecological transition agency. The project objective is twofold: i) provide a shared knowledge database based on the French agri-food systems modelling at the national and international scales and ii) ensure that this database is effectively mobilised both by the agricultural sector practitioners and the national ecological agency. To achieve this, the first task is to reinforce the already accomplished work by the research team on agri-food sectors knowledge [1]. Earlier works described the agricultural supply chains at the national scale, relying on a strong involvement with technical institutes which worked with the research team to understand the supply chains structure and provide data. It ended with the description of nine supply chains (cereals, oil crops and legumes, fruits and vegetables, cattle meat, pig meat, poultry meat, horse meat, dairy and eggs), totalising hundreds of products and transformation sectors (from raw product to the transformed products and coproducts final output). The goal here is to expand this knowledge i) to connect those national databases to existing international flow models (e.g., FABIO [2]) to describe the relationship between France and its partners and ii) to link the flows to their impacts thanks to environmental (water, land use, nitrogen and energy) and social (employment) extensions. The second task is to rely on this modelling work to provide supply chains visualisations, built with a tool developed by the research team [3] allowing to create Sankey diagrams. Nevertheless, those diagrams are not necessarily usable by practitioners as they contain a lot of information that can interfere with their readability and usefulness. Consequently, the project focuses on shaping data visualisation with practitioners, so that the Sankey diagrams target their specific needs. To achieve this, co-design workshops are organised in collaboration with a consultancy specialised in production and consumption impacts analysis and decision tools [4]. They aim at identifying practitioners’ expectations and needs in terms of data accessibility, readability and communication. Four workshops were already organised, each of them focusing on one dimension among agricultural supply chain economic analysis, environmental issues (bioeconomy), outreach and prospective. People attending the workshops came from French agricultural organisations (technical institutes, agriculture department, national agency for agricultural supply chain information and strategic decisions, interprofessional organisations and the ecological transition agency), operating at different scales (national and regional) and scope (the global supply chain or specific products). By showing Sankey diagrams built with the developed model data, we observe how the practitioners navigate the Sankey tool and we collect their feedbacks about both the visualisation and the tool usability. From those past workshops, we notice a great interest for the possibilities offered by the tool, with the emergence of two directions for the data visualisation: a technical one, displaying data along with the sources and hypothesis that were used and a communicational one, allowing to show data through a specific angle (use of coproduct, bioenergy sector, …). Overall, the attendees showed interest for this modelling of agri-food systems in various dimensions and scales, because it allows to grasp their complexity. More largely, the co-design workshops highlight the possible collaboration between academics and non-academics and how the work from each party can enrich each other. This collaborative approach is going to be deepen through the year 2026 in the SOCLE project follow-up. The next steps are first to iterate to add the environmental and social extensions and then to get feedbacks again from both the supply chain practitioners and the French ecological transition agency.[1]J.-Y. Courtonne et al., ‘A baseline for material flow models of French agri-food supply chains’, in 10. International Degrowth Conference & 15. Conference of the European Society for Ecological Economics, Pontevedra, Spain, June 2024, pp. 1–2. Accessed: Dec. 19, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://inria.hal.science/hal-04626872[2]M. Bruckner et al., ‘FABIO—The Construction of the Food and Agriculture Biomass Input–Output Model’, Environ. Sci. Technol., vol. 53, no. 19, pp. 11302–11312, Oct. 2019, doi: 10.1021/acs.est.9b03554.[3]‘Home’, Terriflux. Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://terriflux.com/[4]‘What we do’, BASIC. Accessed: Dec. 16, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://basic.coop/en/what-is-basic/what-we-do/basic.coop/en/what-is-basic/what-we-do/
Source: HAL
Authors: Barrau, Enora, Courtonne, Jean-Yves
Language: English
Subfield: Ecology
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7202061618