Reconsidering the Cereal Chain Organization for Food and Green Chemistry

Cereals are vital resources for a large number of human activities. Their differentapplications have led to the structuring of multiple chains: food chains (milling, baking,…),feed industries, starch industry, and more recently biofuels. All those sectors mobilize arange of different economic actors who are seeking to maximize their economicperformances by adjusting their business models to the ability to produce, to add value andto respond to consumer preferences. Such a sector-oriented optimisation leads to strivingfor maximal production of the main product of each chain without taking into account theopportunities for by-products. Accordingly, this may result in our societies on one hand to aconflict of interest between cereal sub-sectors (as for example between food and fuel) whichin turn reinforce competition between these sectors. On the other hand, this may lead towaste streams and insufficient usage of potentially valuable co-products.Moreover one should take into account population growth, food insecurity, increasing foodrelated health issues, climate changes, pressure on fossil fuels, etc. A global solution is hardto reach, since one is dealing with balances between offers and demands by market prices.Such a balance is subjected to fluctuations inherent to agricultural production, which cancause highly significant price distortions and severe local problems. The alternative to thisapproach is to review the organization of the full cereal chain, from production to final enduses,with the aim to both optimize each of these individual supply chains as well asmaximize the output of the entire system, locally and globally.Accordingly, a more holistic approach applied to the complexity of the full cereal system isrequired today. This paper will propose a combined local and global approach based onreverse engineering to reorganise cereal chains to better fulfil the different uses of cerealproducts