Competitiveness of Small Farms and Innovative Food Supply Chains: The Role of Food Hubs in Creating Sustainable Regional and Local Food Systems
By Giaime Berti, Catherine E. A. Mulligan. 2016
348 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Over the last decades, the economic, social and environmental sustainability of the conventional agri-food system has and continues to be contested within both academic and public institutions. For small farms, the unsustainability of the food system is even more serious; farms’ declining share of profit and the cost-price squeeze of commodity production has increased barriers to market access with the inevitable effect of agricultural abandonment. One way forward to respond to the existing conventional agri-food systems and to create a competitive or survival strategy for small family farms is the re-construction of regional and local agri-food systems, aligning with Kramer and Porter’s concept of shared value strategy. Through a critical literature review, this paper presents “regional and local food hubs” as innovative organizational arrangements capable of bridging structural holes in the agri-food markets between small producers and the consumers—individuals and families as well as big buyers. Food hubs respond to a supply chain (or supply network) organizational strategy aiming at re-territorialising the agri-food systems through the construction of what in the economic literature are defined as values-based food supply chains.
Subfields: Business and International Management, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Plant Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f6c8cbd41d092c732497c08c4a22c4a6b4bdfc34
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In Business and International Management
In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
In Plant Science
Citations in the corpus
- Agri-Food Markets towards Sustainable Patterns (2020, background): “New direct delivery food logistics and business models and networks (e.g., based on agri-food e-supply chain, regional and local food hubs) have been proposed with the aim to improve transport and logistic organization and performance, and coordination between the actors of SFCs [265,266,271,293].”
- Measuring the Economic, Environmental, and Social Sustainability of Short Food Supply Chains (2019, background): “especially for those small family farms, which struggle to interface with the conventional markets” [21], (p.”