Increasing investments of the Dutch Agri-food sector in emerging economies

Sufficient and healthy food for the booming African cities is a huge challenge. Dutch agri-food companies already play a significant role in the increasing worldwide demand for (fresh) food produce. It is believed that the agri-food sector can even do better, using the opportunities offered by the growing cities and contributing to sustainable food systems. On January 16, 2018, the Food & Business Knowledge Platform (F&BKP) and MVO Nederland (CSR Netherlands) organized the second meeting of the “Innovation Network Feeding Cities” to facilitate sharing of experiences in practice, matchmaking of ideas and people, and looking for improvement of the enabling institutional environment.

The ambition of the Innovation Network Feeding Cities is to be an informal network of professionals from companies, sector organizations, consultants, knowledge institutes, policy officers, and civil society organizations. In this second meeting which took place at the Rabobank in The Hague, the following objectives were central:

Sharing experience of ambitious small and large scale initiatives and the innovative ideas that they brought forth;
Match-making and networking for early movers: linking with running projects and initiatives with hands-on experience;
Explore what can be done at policy and institutional level to support initiatives even better.

The meeting built on concrete cases of businesses and NGOs operating in the agri-food sector, starting with three inspirational presentations in plenary followed by discussions in six subgroups where experiences here shared and ways forward for specific initiatives were crowdsourced.

The lessons learned and advice from the participants on each of the cases are included in the report.

Click here for more information and to download the full report of the meeting.