Special Issue "Food Supply Chains: Efficiency, Resilience, and Sustainability"
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Food".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 June 2021).
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Covid-19 has dramatically disrupted food supply chains around the world, at all stages, from production to retail. On the supply side, food processing plants have closed after employees tested positive for Covid-19. Workers at other stages of food supply chains, including farm and grocery store workers, have tested positive. Travel disruptions have created problems for farms that depend on migrant workers to plant and harvest crops. On the demand side, restaurant, hotel, and school closings have led to a collapse in demand for dairy and meat products. At the same time, demands for staple foods at grocery stores and other retail outlets have surged.
These disruptions have exposed weak links and a lack of resilience in food supply chains that until now were unknown. Food distributors and retailers have focused in recent years on increasing the efficiency of supply chains. They have been largely successful, but at the cost of a reduced resiliency that has been exposed by Covid-19.
Food and agricultural policy initiatives to increase the resilience of food supply chains are essential. Unfortunately, the disruptions due to Covid-19 have exposed the nascent state of research on resilience in food supply chains, and how resilience interacts with efficiency and sustainability.
Submissions for this Special Issue are welcome that advance our understanding of systemic risks in food supply chains and the identification and assessment of policy options. This includes methods that can reveal weak links, tipping points, bottlenecks, and other problems affecting food system response to supply and demand shocks. Submissions are also welcome that develop and apply analytical and empirical frameworks to refine systemic concepts of efficiency, resilience, and sustainability; test policy options; and examine complementarities and tradeoffs between efficiency, resilience, and sustainability.
Prof. David Abler
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 papers will be 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 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
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-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability 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 1900 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.
Keywords
- food supply chains
- efficiency
- resilience
- sustainability
- Covid-19