IfM secures grant for major project in safeguarding food supply chains

The IfM's Interdisciplinary Research Centre for International Manufacturing (previously called the Global Food Security Interdisciplinary Research Centre) has been awarded a major grant from the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to build resilience in the UK’s food system.
Led by Principal Investigator Jagjit Singh Srai, Director of Research in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, the “Resilience in Agrifood Systems: Supply Chain Configuration Analytics Lab” (RASCAL) project will study the balance between UK food production and imports, especially in light of disruptions caused by economic, political or climate factors. It will also form part of the University’s Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Food System Resilience.
The project comes at a time where risks to the UK’s food system, such as geopolitical instability and climate change, are rising and innovative ways to ensure the resilience of food supply chains are essential.
“The focus is on the balance between home (UK) production and imports, and how this may change based on cascading risks resulting from disruptions associated with economic, socio-political or climatic issues. We will create an interactive digital lab that enables exploration of multiple scenarios involving cascade risks, and potential mitigation interventions,” says Jag.
Risks to the food system include shifts in consumer demand, changing patterns in retailer sourcing, biosecurity threats, competing government policies, overseas conflicts, and climate events like floods or droughts. These factors can significantly impact production costs and future investments in infrastructure and labour. From the consumer perspective, in addition to product availability, choice, and safety, the project will investigate factors impacting economic hardship, nutritional insecurity, and associated health problems.
The achieve this, the project will follow four key stages:
- Build Interactive digital infrastructure to leverage disparate datasets to explore the balance between self-sufficiency and imports.
- Develop new tools for understanding cascade risks and their cumulative impacts along well documented food supply chains.
- Explore real-world scenarios, using examples of UK fruit and vegetable supply and alternative protein sources, to demonstrate how advanced modelling can evaluate the impact of cascading risks.
- Provide intervention strategies for specific agri-food supply chains to mitigate supply chain risks through a combination of visual interactive tools and field research methods.
“The RASCAL project will bring together a highly collaborative, interdisciplinary team from biological sciences, engineering, and management to co-develop intervention strategies. Our UK stakeholder partners from across the food supply chain will share data, enabling us to integrate previously disconnected information,” says Jag. “We are excited by methodological innovations we are targeting, both in scenario planning and intervention design, and the potential impact on the resilience of food supply chains, both here in the UK and internationally, by understanding risk interdependencies across food systems.”
Under the overall goal of ensuring the UK is better prepared for unexpected challenges, this project is part of a wider set of funding from UKRI to ensure the robustness of UK supply chains and help secure essential resources and food supplies for the future.
“Our collaboration partners provide expert input to our programme and include Queen’s University Belfast, where we are already aligned with their new RiSC Network Plus Centre (also included in this UKRI announcement) focused on reimagining supply chains critical to the UK, the University of Plymouth’s modelling expertise, and more locally the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB) drawing on their expertise on agri-food innovation," Jag concluded.
Find out more: https://www.ukri.org/news/uk-supply-chains-get-safeguarding-boost/