AUTHORS: Olga Szewczyk, Elisabet Nadeu
Legume production can play an important role in diversifying protein sources, increasing the EU’s strategic autonomy, and improving the resilience of cropping and food systems. However, evidence shows that structural weaknesses across the supply chain are limiting current production of food-grade legumes. This report examines how supply-chain interventions can reduce financial risk and improve income stability for farming embarking on food-grade legume production.
Protein diversification, for example through a combination of animal-sourced, plant-based and novel proteins, offers an opportunity to address many of the current challenges faced by Europe’s agricultural and food systems (climate, environment, health, animal welfare, resource use) and overall strengthen the resilience of its supply chains. Legume production plays an important role in diversifying protein sources. Despite the rising interest in legume production, adoption in Europe remains modest and uneven, and European farmers willing to diversify into food-grade legumes face a supply chain that was not built for them.
This report examines how Europe’s legume supply chains can be organised and governed to enable farmers to diversify into food-grade legume production in an economically viable and resilient manner.
A growing body of research suggests that the core constraint is not agronomic potential alone, but structural weaknesses across the supply chain (Brannan et al. 2023; Ferreira et al. 2021; Meynard et al. 2018). Stakeholder interviews conducted for this research reinforce the point: the barriers most frequently cited are not agronomic but organisational, from the absence of reliable buyers to the difficulty of accessing appropriate post-harvest infrastructure and the weakness of collective bargaining arrangements. Decades of investment have optimised infrastructure for cereals and feed (Magrini et al. 2016; European Commission 2018; LEGVALUE 2021), leaving the “middle” of the legume chain – aggregation, cleaning, storage and processing – underdeveloped.
The analysis identifies five mutually reinforcing barriers pointing to a weak connective tissue between the supply-chain actors:
- aggregation and infrastructure deficit,
- weak collective organisation,
- market opacity and contractual insecurity,
- feed-oriented lock-in, and
- knowledge and advisory gaps
To address this, the report concludes with a set of concrete recommendations that would allow these elements to come together into functioning supply chains:
- Invest in regional aggregation and minimal-processing infrastructure, supporting shared post-harvest facilities through the CAP Strategic Plans, and from 2028 onward, the National and Regional Partnership Plans, with priority for cooperative and farmer-led ownership.
- Support the creation and professionalisation of food-grade legume Producer Organisations, using the proposed protein-sector interventions to provide a legal basis and sustained operational funding.
- Improve market transparency and contractual security, extending EU market observatory mechanisms to food-grade legumes and developing standardised contract templates with risk-sharing provisions.
- Ensure that CAP and CMO instruments actively support food-grade value chains, with eligibility criteria that distinguish feed-oriented from food-oriented activities.
- Invest in knowledge infrastructure and supply-chain coordination, funding legume-specific advisory services, peer-learning networks and cross-border coordination platforms.
Photo by Betty Subrizi from Unsplash
