Simone Piras

James Hutton Institute · Social, Economic and Geographical Sciences Group

Education plays a central role in the strategy to tackle consumers' food waste. However, research on children's food waste at school tends to focus on quantification and logistical factors rather than on the impact of interventions. Furthermore, behavioural elements, including imitation, tend to be neglected despite their well-established role in t...

This dispatch outlines some of the immediate consequences and long-term challenges posed by the Ukraine war on food security and production systems in Eastern Europe. We draw particular attention to the food aid and provisioning realities around many million (and increasing) numbers of Ukrainian refugees, and the current lack of systemic, governmen...

Consumer food waste, like many environmental behaviours, takes place in private, and is not directly subject to social monitoring. Nevertheless, social interactions can affect private opinions and behaviours. This paper builds an agent-based model of interactions between consumers heterogeneous in their sociability, their initial opinions and behav...

Consumer food waste, like many environmental behaviours, takes place in private, and is not directly subject to social monitoring. Nevertheless, social interactions can affect private opinions and behaviours. This paper builds an agent-based model of interactions between consumers heterogeneous in their sociability, initial opinions and behaviours...

Consumer food waste, like many environmental behaviours, takes place in private, and is not directly subject to social monitoring. Nevertheless, social interactions can affect private opinions and behaviours. This paper builds an agent-based model of interactions between consumers heterogeneous in their sociability, initial opinions and behaviours...

Household food waste reduction is an important component of the EU action for waste management, and one of the subgoals of SDG 12. So far, policy actions have focused more on communication campaigns and food donations, and less on the link with sustainable production. Despite the growing number of publications, existing literature has not assessed...

Resumen: El artículo comienza con un debate sobre el concepto de “contracción” y sus orígenes, fuera del ámbito del desarrollo rural. A partir de ahí, se muestra la distribución de las zonas rurales en contracción en toda Europa. A continuación, se describen los procesos socioeconómicos que impulsan el declive demográfico en las zonas rurales, util...

In the last decades, Brazil has become one of the largest soybean producers and exporters in the world. Although dedicated policies have been implemented since the 1960s, the recent rapid transition towards an agricultural system largely based on soy has had a strong impact on the country's socioeconomic structure-not only in terms of land and labo...

Since the beginning of the 1990s, Brazil has introduced different policies for increasing agricultural production among family farms, such as the National Program for Strengthening Family Farming (Pronaf), the technical assistance and rural extension programmes (ATER), and seeds distribution. Despite the importance of these policies for the develop...

This paper presents a methodology to assess the internal and external coherence, and the robustness to future uncertainty, of place-based interventions addressing spatial (in)justice. The methodology merges elements of Theory of Change (ToC) and mechanism mapping with scenario planning. It was designed based on analysis of a range of European inter...

In developed countries, the largest share of food is wasted at the household level. Household food waste results from a complex interaction between economic factors, well-established routines, and social norms. To explain this interaction, we propose a simple model of waste behavior where the individual and social economic costs generated by wastin...

The breakdown of socialist agriculture in post-Soviet countries generated a large number of smallholders, of which only a minority turned to entrepreneurial agriculture. With the largest number of family farms per capita in Europe, Moldova represents an exemplary case study to explore the livelihood trajectories of these land recipients. Relying on...

Purpose Agri-food supply chains are facing a number of challenges, which cause inefficiencies resulting in the waste of natural and economic resources, and in negative environmental and social impacts. Food waste (FW) is a result of such inefficiencies and supply chain actors search for economically viable innovations to prevent and reduce it. This...

About one third of all food produced for human consumption is wasted. Along with a lively debate on food loss and waste definition and quantification, growing attention is dedicated to the faceted dimensions of consumers’ food waste. Drivers, effects, and mitigating factors have been mainly studied in isolation, with limited attention paid to their...

The generation of food waste at both the supplier and the consumer levels stems from a complex set of interacting behaviours. Computational and mathematical models provide various methods to simulate, diagnose and predict different aspects within the complex system of food waste generation and prevention. This chapter outlines four different modell...

The policy literature on postsocialist Europe tends to frame smallholders' practices of food self‐provisioning and sharing as driven by necessity and proposes land consolidation to increase productivity and efficiency. However, these practices generate nonfinancial benefits, which need to be accounted for. In this paper, I test the socio‐economic r...

In post-Soviet countries, the breakdown of collective agriculture generated large numbers of subsistence-oriented smallholders. Two decades later, most land recipients are reaching old age. We inquire the perspectives for farm succession using a mixed-method survey with 126 smallholders and a pilot survey with 19 children of smallholders carried ou...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess the reliability of questionnaires as a method of quantifying household food waste (FW), thus providing context regarding the validity of existing Italian estimates. Design/methodology/approach A total of 30 households were involved in a diary study that was conducted for one week. The participating...

The literature on rural development focuses on the socio-economic effects of agricultural support policies; the process of policy design, however, is devoted less attention. Identifying policy coalitions may help provide clarity on the motivations behind a given agricultural support system. Using Discourse Network Analysis, this paper studies the d...

Food waste from households contributes the greatest proportion to total food waste in developed countries. Therefore, food waste reduction requires an understanding of the socio-economic (contextual and behavioural) factors that lead to its generation within the household. Addressing such a complex subject calls for sound methodological approaches...

In developed countries, the largest share of food waste is produced at household level. Most studies on consumers’ food waste use models that identify covariates as significant when in fact they may not be, particularly where these models use many variables. Here, using EU-level Eurobarometer data from 2013, we use alternative analytical methods th...

Model average coefficients for the full model including interaction terms. The variables are sorted by z value. (DOCX)

Selected models and averaged coefficients (sorted by z value) for the model with discard behaviour variables excluded. (DOCX)

The complete R Code. (DOCX)

Selected models and averaged coefficients (sorted by z value) for the model with local authority and discard behaviours excluded. (DOCX)

Selected models and averaged coefficients (sorted by z value) for the model with local authority excluded. (DOCX)

In the Republic of Moldova, a large number of households that received land shares after the break-down of the collective farm structure currently focus on semi-subsistence agriculture. Often, one or more members of these households have migrated abroad. This paper aims at assessing the impact of remittances on their agricultural production practic...

Purpose – Agri-food supply chains are facing a number of challenges, which cause inefficiencies resulting in the waste of natural and economic resources, and in negative environmental and social impacts. To deal with such inefficiencies, food supply chain actors search for economically viable innovations to prevent and reduce food waste. This paper...

The objectives of this food waste Policy Evaluation Framework are to help policy makers assess, monitor and track progress of policy measures (in place and to be developed) to prevent and reduce food waste, including (but not limited to) via social innovation, to present indicators and criteria to evaluate such policies, and to identify any barrier...