detect behavior

FoodLAND is making use of behavioural economic and biometric experiments to account for individual food-related preferences and decisions, and include them into the map of factors influencing innovation adoption and food consumption, to enhance coordination among actors, to increase the dietary diversity, and to abate the risk of providing one-size-fits-all solutions.

Behavioural economics applied to the theory of individual choices enables the understanding of individuals’ responses to certain stimuli. While making choices about a food product, consumers aim not only to answer basic food needs but also to satisfy a set of values and beliefs. Consumers make their often-repeated food choices also driven by non-conscious reasons, influenced by a complex set of emotions and feelings.

Incentivised experiments are being used in FoodLAND to study consumers’ as well as producers’ (smallholder farmers’) behaviour since individuals’ behaviours in the laboratory have proven to be a good indicator of their real-world behaviours. Incentivised experiments ensure that participants are motivated and fully committed to the tasks they are asked to perform.

These experimental approaches, combined with surveys, will be used in FoodLAND to scrutinize both the supply of and demand for novel, sustainable, local food products, for population groups (farmers, consumers) in African countries at different levels of nutrition transition.

Project research, additionally, takes advantage of advanced neuroscientific methods, and especially of the biometric methods that allow for less intrusive investigation of daily food shopping and to elicit consumers’ food-related values and motivations. 

It is crucial for the project to encourage exchanges across the network of Food Hubs, boosting synergies between partners, fostering the replicability of the validated innovations, and further enlarging the network. Moreover, FoodLAND is aimed at sharing scientific and technological findings via open platforms (e.g., Open Research Europe). This goal will be achieved by continuously feeding the platform with the methodological advancements reached by the previous tasks, and supplementing it with the validated results.

The platform will be open to the scientific community and to non-consortium research units. The established collaboration with scientific advisors (LEAP4FNSSA, RUFORUM, IoH Carlos III, CRRAT-INRA, COI), as well as stakeholder advisors (local and national farmers’ and consumers’ associations, food retailers, public authorities), will further strengthen the propagation and reproducibility of the FoodLAND innovations.

FoodLAND will develop and validate technological innovations for agricultural and horticulture production addressing a series of food sectors (from cereals to fruits, legumes, and vegetables) as well as for integrated aquaculture systems, giving priority to novel local varieties and species. This approach will valorise the local specificities and vocations, enlarge the spectrum of innovation adoption, and meet the consumers’ nutritional needs.

The plant breeding work in this research will involve the development and evaluation of different breeding lines and varieties of legume crops with different traits including enhanced nutritional traits, thus creating diverse populations of legumes which is beneficial to agrobiodiversity and environment systems. The bean lines will be improved and selected for augmented nutrient contents (Fe and Zn), increased yield, resistance/tolerance to major bean diseases, earliness in maturity, and acceptable seed traits (seed colour and size).

The aquaculture research and validation activities of the project will ensure a solid knowledge base of overcoming the main problems in the development of aquaculture in Sub-Saharan Africa and will provide new methods and technologies for other countries in Africa. By developing aquaculture technologies for urban and peri-urban areas, the production will be brought closer to the markets resulting in a shorter distribution chain that can be more competitive with imported products. New fish species will also be valorised and new fish processing methods tested to increase the shelf life and value of the products and ensure a competitive advantage for the aquaculture sector. Fish from wild populations will not be used directly in any experiments and the fingerlings of local species produced in the project but not used in the experiments will be restocked in natural waters. The planned work in  FoodLAND will, directly and indirectly, contribute to preserving the wild populations of local species, which have recently gained the critically endangered IUCN status.