Community Sustainability Through Supply Chain Responsibility In Reform Era China

Abstract

Making agribusinesses and agri-food supply chains (SCs) create shared value for producers and rural communities is an attractive yet complex issue. Researchers, policy makers and business actors focus on policies, activities, and models in agri-food SCs to meet multiple social and economic demands, and natural resource challenges in rural communities, yet limited research examines the interactional processes between agri-food SCs and rural communities. In China’s agrifood systems, agri-food SCs and rural communities are two interconnected and rapidly changing fields in transitions towards sustainability, and desirable pathways require collective considerations of the dynamic impacts on each other. This study proposes a community-oriented understanding of supply chain responsibility (SCR). It examines dynamic interactions between agri-food SCs and rural communities, which aims to improve our understanding of the nature and impacts of SCR on rural community sustainability. Especially, how those domains influence each other to achieve sustainability simultaneously, and how to implement community-oriented SCR in Chinese agri-food systems.The study adopts a multiple case study approach to examine four research questions, which are: (1) What are current contributions of agri-food SCs to rural community sustainability? (2) What levels of community sustainability are connected with the different contributions of small and medium enterprise (SME)-led, cooperative (co-op)-led, and farmer-led agri-food SC? (3) How do agri-food SCs contribute to community sustainability, especially what aspects or elements of agri-food SCs contribute to community sustainability? (4) How can agri-food SCR proactively be implemented to enhance community sustainability? Rice and vegetable crops are targeted in this study, as the two crops have wide production and the different nature of rice and vegetable agri-food systems is suitable for comparisons. For agri-food SCs, the attention to farmer-led, co-op-led and SME-led agri-food SCs associated with those crops reflected the variation of activities, policies and successes to promote transitions to sustainability in a sectoral context. At the village level, one well- developed village and one less well-developed village were chosen to reflect the “extreme” examples in a case. The study location is chosen in Wuhan, one of the pilot cities for integrated sustainability reforms in central China.In both cases, multiple data collection and data analysis methods were used. By using the walking the-chain observations and interviews, the appropriate cases that fulfil the research design and research purposes were selected. Community capital assets in villages and sustainability capabilities in agri-food SCs were employed to examine context-specific SCR practices. To understand community capital assets, in-depth interviews with village leaders and household interviews with farmers were conducted in four villages. To evaluate sustainability capabilities of three types of agri-food SCs in two cases, in-depth interviews with informed people and focus group discussions were held. The detailed descriptions of the community capital assets and chain level sustainability capabilities inform the mutual influence between agri-food SCs and rural communities. The crosscase synthesis seeks to understand activities, relations, meanings and ideas embedded in the interactions within the various rice and vegetable SCs and village communities. The comparative analysis of the village structure, village development processes and synergies of community capital assets deepens the understanding of agri-food SCs’ contribution to rural communities. The contextualised chain level sustainability capabilities suggest three types of agri-food SCs are connected with different levels of rural community, while high-level rural community sustainability requires coordination across all levels of community among rural households, villages and areas beyond the villages.The holistic and integrated views on the interactions between agri-food SCs and rural communities enhance our understanding of the nature and effects of SCR on rural community sustainability. This study finds that agri-food SCs and rural communities influence each other to achieve sustainability outcomes. The synergies between the two domains, through the SC-rural community nexus, have more potential to promote community-oriented SCR for economic, social, environmental, political and cultural transformations. This study also suggests that the pathways towards communityoriented SCR require agency and structure to be inclusive towards development commitments at household, village and the broader area levels, and development opportunities for diverse chain types and villages in Wuhan’s rice and vegetable SC networks. It calls for a proactive government role in encouraging rather than impeding SC-rural community nexus for community sustainability in China’s agri-food systems.