Import procedures for timber to the European Union; Options for streamlining procedures for legal timber

This report provides a description of the institutions involved in timber import and an overview of import procedures and related documents in the Netherlands in the framework of the European Union Action Plan for Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT). FLEGT aims at establishing Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs) between the EU and timber producing countries. The report includes recommendations with respect to streamlining import procedures and electronic document handling.Timber Import Procedures, Agribusiness, International Development, International Relations/Trade,

Semantic Interoperability for Data Analysis in the Food Supply Chain

Food supply chains consist of many links and operate on a global scale with many stakeholders involved from farm to fork. Each stakeholder maintains data about food products that they handle, but this data is not transparently available to all stakeholders in the chain and trust in data sharing is low. In addition, there are various other data sources that contain interesting data for stakeholders in the food chain, such as import/export transactions, production (forecast) data, parcel crop information, local weather predictions and social media streams. To improve their production, growers and traders are very interested in trends in the market and activities in supply and demand. To make all stakeholders in the food chain benefit from these data sources and to share data more transparently, the Dutch horticulture and food domain is developing the HortiCube platform via which various data sources are made accessible to application developers using a secure, linked data application interface. This paper describes the design and engineering of the semantic approach to enable interoperability between data sources. This includes (1) a high-level design of the HortiCube, (2) the metadata ontology used for describing the contents of the data sources in the HortiCube, (3) the common horticulture model used to achieve semantic alignment between data sources in the HortiCube, (4) a test application for a specific product case and (5) a discussion of our results and future work on this topic. The main contribution of our research is the generic solution and ontology design to the semantic challenges that arise when different data sources are combined to answer analysis questions for the user

Lifting the Veil of Social Unrest about Food The Dynamics behind Transitions in Food Chains

This paper presents a novel approach to gain a deeper understanding of the forces driving sustainability transitions in food production and consumption. It follows a complex adaptive systems approach to study processes leading to sociotechnical innovations on a timescale of typically a decade. Dramaturgical analysis and agent-based simulation are combined to analyse how systems of institutional arrangements and production technology adapt to changes in public opinion and disrupting events like the outbreak of animal diseases or public health hazards. A dramaturgical analysis on the basis of newspaper articles and parliamentary records is performed for two cases. The resulting patterns of behaviour of key actors in these processes are modelled in an agent-based simulation. The purpose of the agent-based simulation is to validate that the assumed behaviours lead to the observed innovations, and to study how the system could have developed under different behaviours or a different course of external events

Lemon car game

Abstract This article presents two versions of a negotiation game, the LEMON CAR GAME, that is used to investigate cross-cultural variation in negotiation behaviour. The game is about trading a second-hand car with a possible hidden defect. One version is a specific research set-up destined to investigate face to face negotiation between participants with different acculturation on the cultural dimension of power distance. The other is a first Web-based version of the game. Both games are described. At the time of writing there are no experimental data yet

The use of future Internet technologies in the agriculture and food sectors:integrating the supply chain

The Future Internet is expected to greatly influence how the food and agriculture sector is currently operating. In this paper, we present the specific characteristics of the agri-food sector focusing on how information management in this area will take place under a highly heterogeneous group of actors and services, based on the EU SmartAgriFood project. We also discuss how a new dynamic marketplace will be realized based on the adoption of a number of specialized software modules, called “Generic Enablers” that are currently developed in the context of the EU FI-WARE project. Thus, the paper presents the overall vision for data integration along the supply chain as well as the development and federation of Future Internet services that are expected to revolutionize the agriculture sector

Demonstration of a Multi-Agent Simulation Model of Trust in Supply Chains

The trust and tracing game - played by humans - is a research tool designed for study of trust in commodity supply chains. Preliminary observations from the game suggest that rational choice is to some extent dominated by player’s personal preferences. Multi-agent simulation systems are being developed for comparison between behavioural models and experimental results. A prototype will be demonstrated and directions for future development will be presented. The purpose of this demonstration is to get in touch with AI researchers working in related areas.

Import procedures for timber to the European Union; Options for streamlining procedures for legal timber

This report provides a description of the institutions involved in timber import and an overview of import procedures and related documents in the Netherlands in the framework of the European Union Action Plan for Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT). FLEGT aims at establishing Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs) between the EU and timber producing countries. The report includes recommendations with respect to streamlining import procedures and electronic document handling