Collaboration and Sustainable Agri-Food Suply Chain: A Literature Review

Abstract

Maintaining collaboration among the entire stages in the agri-food supply chain to achieve sustainability is complex. All the stakeholders involved in the activities have to prioritize their financial benefits without putting aside social development and environmental responsibilities. Some scholars have paid attention to this topic. The objective of this paper is to review current research on sustainable supply chain and collaboration model in agri-food industry. Sustainability aspects that consist of economic, environment, and social and the model of sustainable supply chain in agrifood industry are analyzed. Moreover, collaboration in sustainable agri-food supply chain management is also studied thoroughly from vertical and horizontal perspectives. The result shows that there are few studies focusing on the integrated collaboration to achieve sustainable supply chain system. Additionally, not all sustainable aspects are covered thoroughly. The scholars pays more attention to economic and environmental aspects than social aspects. Furthermore, some studies only focus on one type of collaboration in sustainable agri-food supply chain. Often, these studies do not even consider all elements in the triple bottom line.

How to Support Group Decision Making in Horticulture: An Approach Based on the Combination of a Centralized Mathematical Model and a Group Decision Support System

“…[17] identify as new opportunities for operations research in agri-food SC better predictive modelling of the decision making behavior of actors in the natural resources system, multiple stakeholder decision analysis, optimization in a more complex business environment and multi-criteria decision making. [18] affirm that when dealing with the complexity of agri-food supply chain, sustainability is one of perspectives that can be applied to maintain the competitive strategies in economic, environmental, and social aspects that is called triple bottom line. For that, multicriteria or multi-objective decision support tools should be developed that take into account the three dimensions of sustainability.…”

The role of collaboration for resilience of the sugarcane-energy supply chain

“…Specifically in the agribusiness case collaboration is adequate to minimize costs, increase profits, to meet quality requirements and, should those results be positive, to gain buyers' trust (Prima Dania, Xing, & Amer, 2016). Collaboration involves all activities, such as production processes, information sharing, infrastructure, capacities and knowledge in the agribusiness chain links: farmers, processers, distribu-Holding the definition above as starting point, Cao and Zhang (2011) developed a list with six main characteristics: (1) information sharing, (2) congruence of goals, (3) in-synch decisions, (4) alignment of incentives, (5) collaborative communication and (6) joint creation of knowledge among partners in the supply chain.…”

“…After the literature review on collaboration in agribusiness chains, Prima Dania et al (2016) highlight the relevance of interaction among producers-plant owners when they state that inefficiency tends to be caused by small and behavioral problems instead of matters demanding structure (Prima Dania et al, 2016). Additionally, local autonomy is crucial to support the relationship between farmers and local plants (Prima Dania et al, 2016).…”

“…Therefore, interaction among farmers, processers and buyers in agribusiness chains points out that different interests, goals, levels of power (such as access to credit, for instance) and perspectives of future become obstacles for creating a satisfactory collaboration (Prima Dania et al, 2016).…”

“…Keeping collaboration along all phases of the supply chain is rather complex because the more stakeholders participate in the collaborative system, the more difficult it becomes (Prima Dania et al, 2016). Without collaboration, however, the price for buyers would be higher once at each phase of the chain values would be increased for the purposes of decreasing risks and increasing benefits (Prima Dania et al, 2016).…”