Agricultural Food Marketing, Economics and Policies

Dear Colleagues,

As is well known, agriculture and food production have been—for some time now—called upon to become more sustainable in the global context of rising population and living standards, climate change, and environmental degradation. According to existing literature, this can be done through the development of innovative ways and tools to reduce resource use, reduce material consumption and waste production, and reverse the trend of biodiversity loss, while ensuring that society is provided with sufficient, nutritious, sustainable, and affordable food. Such a general need, shared at international political level, is today overwhelmingly urgent due to the need to recover from the crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has accentuated the effects of degrowth. The North and South of the world need a new economic model more oriented toward equity, restructuring of production, and consumption models, sobriety combined with full employment and social security, as well as food security and local agriculture. This is perfectly in line with the importance of food and agriculture in achieving the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, all directly or indirectly related to food, and in accelerating the transition to Agenda 2030.

In this general context, research and reflection contributions, developed in different territorial contexts, are well accepted:

• Policies at different levels of decision making, both in order to capture orientations toward the creation of healthy and sustainable food environments and to characterize forms of integrated and shared responsibilities between civil society, businesses, policy makers, and producers aimed at dialogue and cooperation for the creation of sustainable development hubs;
• Aspects of production that promote regenerative and agro-ecological agricultural practices and healthy and sustainable food systems; organizational and management changes brought about by the COVID-19 crisis; organizational and management changes aimed at achieving the Millennium Goals;
• Agri-food supply chain and its orientation on health and sustainability, to analyze the level of involvement of the business system in change and to identify areas for improvement from field to table, also aiming at reducing food losses and waste; to analyze to what extent sustainability is an integral part of business strategies; to ensure the transparency of its processes throughout the supply chain; to strengthen regional and local supply chains to improve distribution, helping to guarantee the right to food;
• Agri-food marketing, to analyze food needs, preferences, and cultures; the level of information on the economic, social, and environmental impacts of daily food choices; technological, digital, and geospatial solutions aimed at creating knowledge networks to exchange information on more sustainable choices and innovative solutions by farmers and producers; to promote training programs and awareness campaigns to make food production and consumption patterns healthier and more sustainable and to adopt more responsible food behavior to reduce the environmental, economic, and social impact of food waste.

Prof. Giuseppe Timpanaro
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Agriculture is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.