Sustainable Agri-Food Systems: Environment, Economy, Society, and Policy
1
International Centre for Advanced Mediterranean Agronomic Studies (CIHEAM-Bari), Valenzano, 70010 Bari, Italy
2
Department of Food, Nutrition & Facilities, FH Münster—University of Applied Sciences, 48149 Munich, Germany
3
Department of International Affairs, College of Arts and Sciences, Qatar University, Doha 2713, Qatar
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Academic Editor: Antonino Galati
Sustainability 2021, 13(11), 6260; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13116260
Received: 1 May 2021 / Revised: 28 May 2021 / Accepted: 29 May 2021 / Published: 1 June 2021
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Agri-Food Systems: Environment, Economy, Society and Policy)
Agri-food systems (AFS) have been central in the debate on sustainable development. Despite this growing interest in AFS, comprehensive analyses of the scholarly literature are hard to find. Therefore, the present systematic review delineated the contours of this growing research strand and analyzed how it relates to sustainability. A search performed on the Web of Science in January 2020 yielded 1389 documents, and 1289 were selected and underwent bibliometric and topical analyses. The topical analysis was informed by the SAFA (Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture systems) approach of FAO and structured along four dimensions viz. environment, economy, society and culture, and policy and governance. The review shows an increasing interest in AFS with an exponential increase in publications number. However, the study field is north-biased and dominated by researchers and organizations from developed countries. Moreover, the analysis suggests that while environmental aspects are sufficiently addressed, social, economic, and political ones are generally overlooked. The paper ends by providing directions for future research and listing some topics to be integrated into a comprehensive, multidisciplinary agenda addressing the multifaceted (un)sustainability of AFS. It makes the case for adopting a holistic, 4-P (planet, people, profit, policy) approach in agri-food system studies.
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Keywords:
agriculture; alternative food networks; bibliometrics; culture; diet; food chain; food supply chain; food systems; governance; sustainable development goals; United Nations’ Food Systems Summit
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MDPI and ACS Style
El Bilali, H.; Strassner, C.; Ben Hassen, T. Sustainable Agri-Food Systems: Environment, Economy, Society, and Policy. Sustainability 2021, 13, 6260. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13116260
AMA Style
El Bilali H, Strassner C, Ben Hassen T. Sustainable Agri-Food Systems: Environment, Economy, Society, and Policy. Sustainability. 2021; 13(11):6260. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13116260
Chicago/Turabian StyleEl Bilali, Hamid, Carola Strassner, and Tarek Ben Hassen. 2021. "Sustainable Agri-Food Systems: Environment, Economy, Society, and Policy" Sustainability 13, no. 11: 6260. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13116260
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