Creating Food Value Chain Transformations through Regional Food Hubs: A Review Article

Unraveling Elusive Boundaries: A Comprehensive Framework for Assessing Local Food Consumption Patterns in Nova Scotia, Canada

Promoting local food consumption for economic growth is a priority; however, defining "local" remains challenging. In Nova Scotia, Canada, this pioneering research establishes a comprehensive framework for assessing local food consumption. Employing three data collection methods, our study reveals that, on average, Nova Scotians allocate 31.2% of their food expenditures to locally sourced products, excluding restaurant and take-out spending, as per the provincial guidelines. The participants estimated that, in the previous year, 37.6% of their spending was on local food; this figure was derived from the most effective method among the three. However, the figure was potentially influenced by participant perspective and was prone to overestimation. To enhance accuracy, we propose methodological enhancements. Despite the limitations, the 31.2% baseline offers a substantial foundation for understanding local food patterns in Nova Scotia. It serves as a replicable benchmark for future investigations and guides researchers with similar objectives, thereby establishing a robust research platform.

Deliver Smart, Not More! Building Economically Sustainable Competitiveness on the Ground of High Agri-Food Trade Specialization in the EU

Competitiveness has always been a multifaceted illusive concept, which has made it a real challenge for scholars and practitioners to find the most suitable measurement tools to completely encapsulate all the complex nuances of competitiveness. This becomes even more of a challenge when approached in relation to particular economic sectors. The agri-food sector is no exception, especially when considering all its interconnections with the other sectors: water, energy, transport, waste. All of them impact the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Similarly, scholars have been debating the meaning of sustainability for decades, some even arguing that it is a political, subjective, and, in some cases, self-contradictory concept. As far as the sustainability of agricultural competitiveness is concerned, the literature is still developing. It is much more focused on fostering environmental competitiveness, and less attention was paid to the strategies designed to capitalize on sustainable economic competitiveness-a concept that has attracted divergent opinions in the literature, mainly due to ambiguity. Thus, instead of falling into the pitfall of vagueness, this paper was aimed at bringing its contribution to this field by undertaking the research objective of exploring a single facet of sustainable agricultural competitiveness: the economic facet. Hence, this paper proposes the construction of the sustainable economic competitiveness index (SECI) with direct application for agri-food value chains. It consists of three attributes: (a) factor endowments, resource independence; (b) agricultural chain performance; and (c) national agricultural chain strategies and policies. In this study, SECI was tested against the cereal chain for a selection of EU countries, based on the data taken over from FAOSTAT and INTRACEN Trade Map, in the case of the 2011-2020 period. Various statistical and econometric methods were used to test the robustness of SECI. Results stand as proof that building sustainable agricultural economic competitiveness relies on a mix of strategic actions. The key vector in this mix is that trade flow patterns and policies must be calibrated in accordance with national factor endowments in order to achieve high levels of SECI. To add more managerial implications, this paper argues for the smart delivery of agri-food products with high added value instead of focusing on exporting big volumes of raw agricultural materials with little added value.

Traceability Information Model for Sustainability of Black Soybean Supply Chain: A Systematic Literature Review

Traceability information as a solution option becomes an important task for the industry in providing products, preparing sustainable raw materials, and ensuring adequate safety quality. The emergence of these demands makes the industry perform tracking in order to prepare product inventories ranging from raw materials to products that have been produced. Based on these reasons, the scope of this paper is to provide a systematic review of the literature on various aspects of implementing information traceability models and sustainability of supply chain on economic, social, environmental, technological, institutional, and infrastructural dimensions. For this purpose, we use the Scopus, Science Direct, EBSCO Host, and ProQuest databases. We used the PRISMA model to identify, filter, and test for the eligibility of articles to be included. We selected 52 articles contributed by this search engine. We found was that between 2018 to 2021 there was increasing interest in this research. The dominant traceability information model in the article uses blockchain, the rest use operations research (OR), Google Earth Engine (GEE), website-based, Unified Modeling Language (UML), Extensible Markup Language (XML), physical markup language (PML), logit, enterprise resource planning (ERP), soft independent modelling of class analogies (SIMCA), and Spatially Explicit Information on Production to Consumption Systems (SEI-PCS).