European agriculture, societies and economies could be transformed if only a fraction of the continent’s municipal procurement contracts were awarded to small-scale organic and agroecological farmers. European farmers, researchers, local policymakers and public procurers are coming together with this ambition in big cities like Copenhagen as well as in smaller towns like Torres Vedras in Portugal. Together, they are breaking down barriers and creating tools for systemic change.
Bureaucratic blockages
In many European cities, smaller organic and agroecological farmers are locked out of public procurement for schools, hospitals, prisons, elderly homes and universities. This results from their own limited administrative resources, as well as complicated logistics, required volumes, long delays in payment, and overemphasis on price as an award criterion by public authorities.
Procurement officers in public bodies may lack detailed knowledge about local food and farming
As Danish organic retailer and distributor Camilla Varming Nielsen explains, “I like public kitchens … but the whole bureaucracy is a pain to go through. It’s too much paperwork, too much detail. It doesn’t fit into the workday or into the nature of the products.”
Another complicating factor is that procurement officers in public bodies are often responsible for purchasing a wide range of products and may lack detailed knowledge about food and farming. They may not know where to find organic producers, let alone small-scale agroecological growers, nor do they necessarily understand farmers’ specific seasonal offers, needs and challenges. All these challenges combined mean that public procurers tend to order food from large industrial wholesalers.
Taking up the challenge of removing these barriers, local governments and public procurers at the frontline of green procurement practices across Europe are fostering collaborations with small-scale agroecological farmers. They are also benefiting from the support of socially engaged researchers. As a result, policy change is already happening in many cities and towns around Europe.
Copenhagen’s vision for food system change
Among the frontrunners of green procurement in Europe is the city of Copenhagen. Every day, this city of 1,366,000 inhabitants serves 100,000 meals – consisting of close to 90 per cent organic food – in 1,000 publicly run institutions. It is noteworthy that organic food is made available at no increased cost for kitchens through reducing food waste, replacing animal products with plant-based products, especially proteins, and focusing on seasonality. A key driver of this achievement has been the municipality’s ambitious food strategy.
The transition started in 2001 when the city realised it needed to take radical steps to protect its groundwater, which had become polluted by industrial farming around the city. This was a catalyst for the municipality to start procuring organic food, which created increased demand and encouraged local farms to convert to organic production. In 2019, building on this momentum, Copenhagen took its commitments to food system transformation to an even higher level through a visionary long-term food strategy that includes ambitious targets by 2025, combined with a Climate Plan and an Action Plan for the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
These municipal goals have opened the door for significant changes in public procurement. “I try to work with political goals that have been set by politicians, to see how we can implement them through our procurements so that they are embedded in the contracts,” explains Betina Bergmann Madsen, chief procurement officer for Copenhagen’s public kitchens.
Copenhagen is making its tenders more accessible to small and medium-sized farmers and food businesses
Within the framework of this food strategy, the city has committed to providing sustainable meals for residents that combine health, taste and responsibility for the climate. It also promotes food literacy and democracy and strives to strengthen communities. Finally, the strategy ensures that Copenhagen is closely linked with its regional food system, including smaller-scale growers and food businesses.
Revolutionising tenders
Now that nearly all the city’s public food is organically sourced but not necessarily local, Copenhagen is looking to create partnerships with food producers in and around the city and is making its tenders accessible to small and medium-sized farmers and food businesses.
This is a major shift. Currently, just three large wholesalers supply the majority of food for public catering in Denmark. However, signalling a new direction, the municipality adjusted its award criteria for food tenders. Price now receives only 40% weighting, while the environment (green vehicles, packaging and environmental labels such as fair trade, organic and marine stewardship) accounts for 25 per cent, quality for 25 per cent, and diversity of fruits and vegetables for 10 per cent.
At the heart of the change, however, is a collaborative approach for designing tenders: public officials, professional catering and food service staff, wholesalers and growers are all involved. Importantly, a key step in Copenhagen’s new tendering process is to assess whether smaller suppliers – who can generally only provide a fraction of the required volume – are keen to bid for part of the contract. At the same time, participating kitchens must confirm that they can accommodate food deliveries from multiple suppliers. If there is a green light on both fronts, the tender can be divided into smaller lots with separate contracts for vegetables, fruit, bread, dairy and meat suppliers.
EU rules on the free movement of goods and fair competition prohibit tenders that explicitly solicit ‘local’ goods, but the rules are more flexible when it comes to smaller lots. Procurement contracts for goods and services by municipalities below the threshold of €215,000 fall outside the scope of the European procurement directive 2014/24/EU. This means authorities have more flexibility in actively seeking to buy local goods when procuring, unless this is specifically prohibited in national law.
In the case of a recent organic potato procurement, Copenhagen overcame this obstacle through an innovative but legally sound tender that combines the supply of goods with an educational service. In practice, the organic farmer contracted by the municipality supplied potatoes to school kitchens and hosted field trips for students on his organic potato farm.
Building on these experiences, Copenhagen, together with the City of Ghent in Belgium and the network for Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI), has developed an innovative Farm-to-fork toolkit to help other municipalities unlock tenders for small-scale producers across Europe (more information in Resources section). Strategies included range from tips on skilfully navigating existing EU legislation to adopting collaborative practices that help reduce farmers’ administrative burdens.
Policy recommendations
With some political will, possibilities exist to increase public purchasing of local agroecological food within current European procurement regulation, but structural change is needed for a truly enabling policy environment. The European Food Policy Coalition, a platform of civil society and organisations working on sustainable food systems and supported by the Buy Better Food campaign and the COACH project, has come up with actionable minimum mandatory standards for public canteens across the EU, including procurement criteria, verification and enablers.
Small-scale agroecological farmers will benefit by gaining access to new markets with reduced administrative requirements
Among their recommendations is that at least 10 per cent of food in public procurement should originate from small-scale farmers (defined by turnover, agricultural area and number of employees). They also recommend that EU policymakers cooperate closely with local and regional governments to institutionalise sustainable public food procurement as part of a multi-level governance framework.
In addition, many of these actors are also calling for an EU-wide guarantee for food education as well as healthy, sustainable free school meals for all children, regardless of their economic background. These steps would be an effective way to implement the EU’s Farm to Fork Strategy, which aims to make European food systems fair, healthy and environmentally friendly.
They could go far in creating a socially inclusive, healthy and just food system and eliminating the stigma of food aid programmes. And at the same time, small-scale agroecological farmers will benefit by gaining access to new markets with reduced administrative requirements, thus improving their livelihoods. These outcomes also resonate with the key demands of the farmers currently protesting across Europe.
Authors: Csilla Kiss and Lindy Binder are from Coventry University’s Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR) in the UK. Csilla supports international research projects at CAWR, and Lindy is a writer and communicator specialising in environmental and justice narratives. This article is an outcome of the COACH research project, in which both authors are involved. Contact: ab8083@coventry.ac.uk
Sources
- The Farm-to-Fork Toolkit and many other materials about public procurement can be found at https://hub.urgenci.net/public-procurement/ and at https://foodpolicycoalition.eu/about-us/#why
- ICLEI & EU FPC. “Manifesto for establishing minimum standards for public canteens across the EU. European Food Policy Coalition (EU FPC),” 2022. This document is open for endorsement by local and regional governments.
- Kopenhavns Kommune. “The City of Copenhagen’s Food Strategy”, 2019.
- Hansen, M.W., Hansen, S.R., Dal, J.K., & Kristensen, N.H. “Taste, education, and commensality in Copenhagen food schools,” Food and Foodways, 28:3, 174-194, 2020.
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This article is part of Issue 1-2024: Policies for Agroecology
