Trends Shaping Western European Agrifood Systems of the Future

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

 

The manuscript submitted by Preiss et al. describes and summarizes the four workshops for future agrifood systems in Western Europe. The topic addressed is interesting to a wider audience. However, as detailed below, some small aspects are inadequate and need to be modified.

 

Figure 1 and 3 are not cited in the main text.

 

What do the second and third semicircular lines in Figure 1 mean?

 

In Figure 2, both urbanization and landgrabbing are shown in the similar blue color. Either one needs to be changed.

 

Are there any relationships in the same colors in Figure 2 and 3?

Author Response

Thank you for your review. Here you find point-by-point answers to your remarks and how we used them to improve our Ms further:

1. Former Figure 1 and 3 (now 2 and 4) are now cited in the text. It seems crossreferences were lost during uploading.
2. The semicircles supposedly show an overarching connectedness/transdisciplinarity between the four trend-clusters that were identified during the first workshop. The experts then tried to visualize that each topic-cluster is connected with each other – and not just dividing them into separate cake-slices. We altered the description in the Ms.
3. Colors in Fig 2 (now 3) are changed.
4. There are no relationships, colors are changed in former Fig 2 (now 3) to avoid confusion.

Reviewer 2 Report

The Ms. discussed about the Trends in shaping Western European agrifood systems of the future. This Ms. is well written but requires minor revision.

 

1. Authors must check Ms throughout to remove any spelling, grammatical and typological errors.

2. In Introduction section, Authors should cite few recent relevant research work.

3. Authors used any statistics in presentation of their work in this work??

4. Authors should include Conclusion section with describing the importance of the present study.

 

5. References must be cross checked from text to list, vice versa. 

Author Response

Thank you for your review. Here you find point-by-point answers to your remarks and how we used them to improve our Ms further:

1. Spelling/Typos and Grammar were checked thoroughly again. We hope we removed the last mistakes.
2. We altered parts of the introduction and included citations from recent work.
3. We extended the methodology section and hope this clarifies our explorative & qualitative research approach.
4. A conclusion section was added. We hope this explains the importance clearly.
5. We checked the references again in the revised version, we exchanged 2 references and excluded 1 reference.

Reviewer 3 Report

The topic is extremely interesting and central in academic debate. However, the study seems to be methodologicaly very poor/not adequately explained, results have almost no clear connection to data and a theoretical framework is completely missing. Important trends, I see in my research, seems to be not consedered, such as consumer-producers networks, I wonder why.

Finally, just a note, in English it is organic food/farming/agriculture and not biological food/farming/agriculture.

I suggest:

- to reframe the introduction clarifing from the begining the dimension you have then analysed in discussion

- be much more detailed in the methodological part in order to show the affordability of the study in terms of data collected

- create clear connection between data and results

- disclose the limits of this study in terms of number of subjects involved, space covered and possibility to generalize the results

Author Response

Thank you for your review. Here you find point-by-point answers to your remarks and how we used them to improve our Ms further:

1. We now explain our methodological approach more detailed in the MS and included a graph to visualize the steps that were taken (see 2. Materials and Methods p.2ff and new Fig.1).
2. During the workshops the experts identified various topics – including differing topics in the area of citizen/laypeople involvement in agriculture or with producers/farmers and the whole nexus of evolving relationships between consumers/farmers. Apart from the mentioned producer-consumer-networks, we discussed topics such as the consumer reactions to food related scandals (e.g. the scandals around Nestle during the last years) or citizens growing will to influence agricultural politics (e.g. discussion on Glyphosate in the EU) and many others. After discussions it was agreed by the experts that most of these topics can be traced back to/are triggered by/stem from the shift/changes in societal values as well as the changing importance of nutrition as a status symbol that we both discuss in the MS as two of the macro trends. We hope that the changes that we made to the methodology section make this approach clearer. We included the example given here also in the MS (see p3).

3. Biological was replaced with organic in Figure 2.
4. We changed parts of the introduction to explain more clearly that our study is less normative and more explorative (foresight) and clarify what dimensions we were focusing on. In contrast to studies that strive to inform about how agrifood systems should/could be altered to be more sustainable/secure, we strive to provide insights on currents trends that we identified as having a (possibly) strong impact on future agrifood systems in Western Europe. How these trends should/could be handled is focus of further research and of politics, this was also clarified in the MS.
5. We hope the connection between the 4 expert panel workshops we held and the resulting trends/topics are now clearer due to the prolonged method section
6. Number of subjects (50 experts and their backgrounds) involved was disclosed in the method section. Limitations are now extended in the discussion. From line 68ff in the MS we already disclosed the limitation that mapping a complete future agrifood system is near impossible with the means at hand, this argument was extended. In the newly added conclusion (as well as in the now extended discussion), we explain the relevance and possibilities as well as limits for generalization of our work further.

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

The revision has improved definitely the quality of the article, in my opinion. I think it would be still possible to introduce more clearly at the beginning the aspects then considered in the results and discussion, driving the reader in understanding better.