Agriculture and Sustainability of the Welfare: The Role of the Short Supply Chain

Abstract

Abstract The lengthening of the supply chain developed over the last decades – due to the multiplication of intermediaries - has produced effects from an environmental, economic, social and territorial point of view cannot pass unnoticed. As a matter of fact, the excessive amount of participants taking part in all the phases of the supply chain has created the basis for an increase of environmental impacts due to many factors: the implementation of farming methods, which are getting more and more intensive, put pressure on the environment, on the sustainability of the agricultural industrial production process and increase the number of kilometres the goods have to travel in order to be distributed. Moreover, the extension of the supply chain has produced a decrease of its share of value-added to the benefit of the farmers and, as a consequence, has excluded many small producers from the market and caused a negative impact on rural areas (unemployment, depopulation due to migration). From the customers’ point of view, the increase of intermediaries has created an informative asymmetry due to the impossibility to track their shipment as well as to a lowering of their quality standards, caused by an increasingly standardized production process. During the last years, the interest of policy-makers in short supply chain has grown. It appears to be a tool able to incentivize a sustainable agricultural productions and to provide environmental, economic and social benefits. In fact, the short supply chain other than reducing costs, which are cut down by decreasing the number of intermediaries that take the product from the producer to the consumer, creates a positive environmental externalities and, above all, promotes the local areas. This work highlights the central role taken on by the implementation of new forms of marketing in the short supply chain and its importance in influencing the concept of sustainable development in the agricultural supply chain. Moreover, this work aims to find evidence-based guidelines for policy-makers seeking to support the development of these new forms of marketing, whose potential lies in the customers’ attention to ethical and environmental issues and their need for natural and healthy food.