Determinants of Farm Resilience to Climate Change: The Role of Farmer Entrepreneurship and Value Chain Collaborations

Untangling the role of social relationships for overcoming challenges in local food systems: a case study of farmers in Québec, Canada

Advocates for re-localizing food systems often encourage consumers to support local farmers and strengthen local food economies. Yet, local food systems hinge not only on consumers' willingness to buy local food but also on whether farmers have the social support networks to address diverse challenges during food production and distribution. This study characterizes the challenges and support systems of farmers selling to local markets in Québec, Canada, across multiple growing seasons using a mixed-methods research design. We sent an online questionnaire to 1046 farmers and conducted follow-up interviews with 15 of the 133 respondents. Our findings show that farmers relied on an average of four support actor groups, particularly employees, customers, and other farmers. Actors played distinct roles in terms of the importance, frequency, and formality of interactions, providing immediate and long-term support through formal and informal relationships across multiple spatial scales (farm, local community, and regional/international). Our thematic analysis showed that support actors helped farmers in four key domains: (1) Knowledge sharing and emotional support; (2) Labour and workforce; (3) Material and financial aid; and (4) Consumer education and business promotion. Farmer associations provided resources to tackle various challenges, acting as bridges across multiple support actor groups. Yet, our results suggest that political desires to encourage local food systems are in some cases poorly matched with resources to address specific types of challenges farmers face. Specifically, overlooking the role of diverse social support actors in helping farmers build food production and distribution capacity could undermine efforts to foster localization.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10460-022-10343-0.

Research on the Influence Mechanism of Agricultural Entrepreneurship: Evidence From Five Provinces in Western China

Individual entrepreneurial behaviors will be affected by their attitudes and environmental factors. Therefore, entrepreneurial attitude and entrepreneurial environment interpret the entrepreneurial behavior mechanism of farmers from the perspectives of internal and external factors. This manuscript is based on a survey data of farmers in five western provinces in China. Using structural equation modeling, the mechanism of the effects of farmers’ entrepreneurial attitudes and entrepreneurial environment on entrepreneurial behavior was analyzed empirically. The research results show that individual entrepreneurial attitudes and the external entrepreneurial environment cannot directly affect entrepreneurial behavior, and both will be through entrepreneurial self-efficacy. The sense of entrepreneurship indirectly affects entrepreneurial behavior, and entrepreneurial self-efficacy plays an intermediary role. The “entrepreneurial behavior structure” model proposed in this manuscript points out that cultivating entrepreneurial attitudes and creating an entrepreneurial environment cannot directly promote entrepreneurial behavior of farmers, but must stimulate farmers’ entrepreneurial behavior. The sense of self-efficacy provides a direction for the promotion of policy formulation and practical guidance for farmers’ entrepreneurship.

Food Markets and Free Fairs as Contributors for Designing Climate Resilient Cities: A Study Case in Southern Ecuador

Climate change will have far-reaching impacts on food systems, which require strengthening social, economic, and political structures that allow farmers to offer their produce and consumers to have access to the food they eat. This research focuses on food access and stability. Specifically, through the analysis of a system of urban markets and free fairs, the (a) public satisfaction with these spaces, (b) the distribution and access to the same spaces, and (c) potential scenarios envisaging a food system that contributes to the designing of a climate resilient city are evaluated. The results indicate a high public satisfaction with markets and free fairs, while providing evidence on the importance of designing cities that include a network of markets and free fairs in urban planning for climate adaptation and resilience, shifting the paradigm from centralised urban systems towards an urbanism of services’ proximity within walking distances.

Impacts of Collaborative Partnership on the Performance of Cold Supply Chains of Agriculture and Foods: Literature Review

Collaboration in a supply chain continuously proves its role in increasing the performance of supply chains, which attracts the attention of both academia and practitioners, specifically, how to generate higher impacts of collaborative partnership on the performance of supply chains and measure them. In cold supply chains of agriculture and foods, the vital need for collaboration becomes even more significant to improve the performance. Therefore, this paper reviews relevant articles derived from the Web of Science and Scopus databases. Via the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA), the research team classifies the types of collaborative partnership in cold agriculture and food supply chains, issues of the literature when analyzing collaboration impacts on the performance of CSCs of agriculture and foods, and finally, the opportunities for the future research to boost the collaboration practices in these cold chains. Following this sequence, 102 articles were eventually extracted for the systematic review to identify themes for not only addressing the review questions but also highlighting future research opportunities for both development of partnership integration and performance of the cold chains of agriculture and foods.

Stakeholders’ Preferences towards Contract Attributes: Evidence from Rice Production in Vietnam

Contract farming is typically considered an appropriate measure for small-scale farmers to solve their constraints and problems. However, despite positive effects, low participation in and high dropout rates from contract farming schemes remain challenges. Therefore, this study objects to evaluate preferences for contract attributes and attribute levels among contracting buyers, farmers, and government officials through data triangulation from key informant interviews, focus group discussions, and participant observations. Based on Henry Garrett Ranking, Rank Based Quotient, and Rank Based Sum methods, results indicate that the most important attributes were price options, payment, delivery arrangement, input provision, input-use requirements, and product quality standards. Despite a consensus on the ranking of the contract attributes, the preferences for the attribute levels among the stakeholders were heterogeneous. It is recommended that attributes and their levels should be pertinent in contract agreements. Thus, contract design with an adjusted or premium price, 50% of estimated payment before harvesting and the rest after delivery three to five days or lump-sum immediate payment, delivery after harvesting, inputs provision by the contractors through the representative branches or stores located at the local areas or cooperatives, banning active-ingredients or flexible use of inputs from the contractors to produce Good Agricultural Practices or organic products are considerable options.

Achieving a Climate-Change Resilient Farming System through Push–Pull Technology: Evidence from Maize Farming Systems in Ethiopia

Building climate-resilient farming systems is important to promote the sustainability of agriculture at the global level. Scaling-up agroecological approaches in main staple crops, such as maize, is particularly important in enhancing the climate resilience of millions of smallholder farmers in developing countries. In this regard, push–pull technology (PPT) is an ecological approach to a farming system that aims to improve the climate resilience of maize producers in a smallholder mixed farming system. PPT is primarily designed to control pests and weeds in an ecofriendly approach, to improve soil fertility, to improve livestock feed, and to increase farmers’ incomes. In this study, we compared the level of climate resilience between PPT maize farming systems and non-PPT maize farming systems in southern Ethiopia. Using the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Self-Evaluation and Holistic Assessment of Climate Resilience of Farmers and Pastoralists (SHARP), we measured 13 agroecosystem indicators of climate resilience and compared the degree to which the two farming systems differ in their level of resilience to climate change. The results indicate that PPT farming systems are more climate-resilient than their non-PPT counterparts. PPT maize farming systems had a significant impact on 8 out of the 13 agroecosystem indicators of climate resilience. To harness the full benefits of PPT, governmental extension agents, NGOs, and agricultural researchers should promote PPT-based maize farming systems. The promotion of PPT needs concerted efforts and strong national coordination in solving PPT implementation barriers, such as improving access to input and output markets and animal health services.

Medical economic vulnerability: a next step in expanding the farm resilience scholarship

In recent years, the long-standing questions of why, how, and which farm families continue farming in the face of ongoing changes have increasingly been studied through the resilience lens. While this body of work is providing updated and novel insights, two limitations, a focus on macro-level challenges faced by the farm operation and a mismatch between the scale of challenges and resilience measures, likely limit our understanding of the factors at play. We use the example of medical economic vulnerability, a micro-level challenge traditionally confined to the household sphere of the agri-family system, as a way to call attention to these limitations. Focusing on United States (U.S.) farm households, we assess: (1) To what extent are they experiencing medical economic vulnerability when using objective and subjective outcome measures? (2) Which demographic and farm characteristics are associated with experiencing medical economic vulnerability? (3) What is the association between institutional arrangements and medical economic vulnerability? Our analysis of over 900 surveys coupled with a conceptual framework merging complementary insights from three bodies of literature revealed seemingly large differences in the prevalence of medical economic vulnerability across the objective and subjective measures with the subjective measure indicating a general sentiment of medical economic vulnerability in a majority of respondents. Conversely, limited variations were noted in who experiences medical vulnerability on the basis of demographic and farm characteristics, with stronger associations being connected to the households' health insurance arrangements. We conclude with three implications of our findings for the farm resilience literature.

Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Farmers and Their Responses: A Study of Three Farming Systems in Kerala, South India

Particularly in countries with an agrarian economy, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought hardships faced by farmers into sharp focus. One of the most badly hit countries was India. This study aims to bring to light the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the livelihoods of farmers in three farming systems (coffee farming, Kole wetland paddy farming, and homestead farming) in the southern Indian state of Kerala. We collected the data using telephone interviews and studied the impacts (economic, social, institutional) of the pandemic on the selected farming systems, the responses of farmers (short and long term) to these impacts, and the ability of farmers to secure their livelihoods (by analyzing resilience capacities and transforming structures and processes of the farming systems). The methodological framework used was developed based on the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach and the Resilience Framework. We found significant impacts on the three studied farming systems due to COVID-19. As the impacts, responses, and ability to secure livelihoods varied across the three farming systems, we concluded that there is not a single solution that could be prescribed for all farming systems and that each land use system must be treated individually.

Resilience of global and local value chains to the Covid-19 pandemic: Survey evidence from vegetable value chains in Senegal

In this paper we descriptively investigate the Covid-19 pandemic's early impact on the fruit and vegetable supply chain in Senegal, using trade statistics and survey data collected through online questionnaires and telephone interviews with smallholder farmers, agro-industrial companies, agricultural workers, traders, importers, and consumers. Our results point to major differences in how Covid-19 and containment measures disrupt supply chains between the modern export-oriented supply chain that is centered around a few large vertically integrated agro-industrial companies, and the more traditional domestic-oriented supply chain with a large number of smallholder farmers and informal traders-with the former being more resilient to the Covid-19 shock. We show that both the modern and the traditional supply chain innovate to cope with the Covid-19 containment measures. While our study is subject to some limitations, our findings bring nuance in the debate on the resilience of the food system to the pandemic, and have important policy and research implications toward international trade, social safety measures, and food and nutrition security.

Formation of Farming Community Resilience Models for Sustainable Agricultural Development at the Mining Neighborhood in Southeast Sulawesi Indonesia

Although the exploration of mineral resources and industry can promote economic development, it can also threaten the resilience and well-being of the environment, health, ecosystems, and the comfort of surrounding communities. Therefore, business entities, through corporate social responsibility (CSR) or other activities, can function to balance negative impacts and strengthen sustainable development that can increase the resilience and welfare of the surrounding community. This study aims to develop a resilience model of the local farming community resilience (FCR), which supports the sustainability of agricultural development. The research will be carried out in a community in Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia. This study measures the resilience of the farmers’ community. To obtain models and instruments that are valid and reliable, the instrument is tested on 295 respondents in 10 villages adjacent to the nickel mining industry using the Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM). Out of the 17 items, five dimensions (e.g., economic, social capital, environmental, community competence, and information and communication) are proposed to measure the FCR. Thus, this work presents a complete scale development and can provide policies for governments, particularly in Indonesia. Moreover, the FCR scale might be utilized by different entities (e.g., NGOs, open experts and social group media) to determine the view of genuine clients regarding the association’s CSR execution.

Resilience of local food systems and links to food security - A review of some important concepts in the context of COVID-19 and other shocks

The objective of this review is to explore and discuss the concept of local food system resilience in light of the disruptions brought to those systems by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The discussion, which focuses on low and middle income countries, considers also the other shocks and stressors that generally affect local food systems and their actors in those countries (weather-related, economic, political or social disturbances). The review of existing (mainly grey or media-based) accounts on COVID-19 suggests that, with the exception of those who lost members of their family to the virus, as per June 2020 the main impact of the pandemic derives mainly from the lockdown and mobility restrictions imposed by national/local governments, and the consequence that the subsequent loss of income and purchasing power has on people's food security, in particular the poor. The paper then uses the most prominent advances made recently in the literature on household resilience in the context of food security and humanitarian crises to identify a series of lessons that can be used to improve our understanding of food system resilience and its link to food security in the context of the COVID-19 crisis and other shocks. Those lessons include principles about the measurement of food system resilience and suggestions about the types of interventions that could potentially strengthen the abilities of actors (including policy makers) to respond more appropriately to adverse events affecting food systems in the future.