Over the past few years, convergence between organic farming and processes of rural development has been progressively acknowledged and organic practices and practitioners have been effectively involved in various rural development projects. Nevertheless, organic farming's potential contribution to rural development processes has not been explored extensively in the specialized literature. This paper illustrates the manifold synergies existing between organic farming and sustainable rural development, through a specific framework of analysis built on the implicit assumption that both modern, dynamic and multifaceted organic farming systems and rural economies are ‘hybrid and composite networks,’ which can be analyzed according to an evolutionary perspective and to the network analysis approach. The work identifies four main points of communality between organic farming and sustainable rural development: innovation, conservation, participation and integration. All of them are critical aspects in current strategies for sustainable rural development, and, at the same time, key features of modern organic farming ideology and practices within an eu context.

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There is rising interest in collaboration among supply chain partners in food and fibre supply chain management studies. In organic and fair-trade chains, collaboration is rooted in both principles and current practices. A tool for assessing collaboration in the food and fibre sector has not been developed to date. To fill this gap a collaboration index has been adapted to the Egyptian organic and fair trade cotton supply chain. A factor analysis has been performed to this end. Two factors emerged within each of the three constructs defining the collaboration index: information sharing (price information and logistics), decision synchronization (exception management and general management) incentive alignment (risk sharing and technical support). The study contributes to defining a method for designing specific collaboration indexes in different food and fibre chains. The index provided relevant context-related information supporting the collaboration strategies in the Egyptian organic cotton chain. HighlightsA method for designing collaboration indexes in food and fibre chains is defined The index refers to decision synchronization, information sharing, incentive alignment Six distinct factors were extracted across the three dimensions of collaboration The collaboration between the lead company and the contracted farmers is described The index indicates how to implement effective collaborative strategiesAssessing the level of collaboration in the Egyptian organic and fair trade cotton chain

An Eco-Region (Biodistretto in Italian) is a rural area where different actors work together for the sustainable management of local resources, based on the principles and models of organic farming. Social, environmental, economic as well as ethical dimensions are involved. Eco-Regions are quickly growing in number in the EU and worldwide; different Eco-Regions types emerged, showing a variety of cultural, physical, socioeconomic characteristics, and related policies and regulations. The Eco-Regions represent an innovative sustainable integrated rural development approach; their success can be supported by analyzing their basic features and their development dynamics. A balance between a strictly centralized and bureaucratic Eco-Regions management and a bottom-up non-regulated Eco-Regions proliferation should be provided to grant the development of community-based resilient initiatives. To this end a monitoring tool, based on the Porter's Diamond model, involving the local actors in analyzing the Eco-Regions structure and performances, could provide useful. Previous studies defined an Eco-Region monitoring tool, where different shortcomings characterized the analytical framework definition. The goal of the present paper is therefore to define an improved monitoring tool, more consistent to the Porter's Diamond model by reviewing the cluster related literature, focusing on the Porter's approach. The integrations resulting from the literature analysis contributed to a major increase in the indicators directly related to the original Porter's approach; new food security and sovereignty, as well as specifically designed sustainability indicators have also been added. By expanding the pool of indicators, the monitoring tool is more adaptive and able to support sustainable management of Eco-Regions in different contexts.