Managing international agrifood supply chains - Pathways towards a sustainable paradigm

Drawing on academic literature concerning supply chain management and, more specifically, (global) agrifood chains, the extant paper proposes a conceptualization of factors of supply chain design and operations as well as effective governance mechanisms that facilitate holistic performance of agrifood supply chains. Furthermore, tradeoffs that probably emerge when aiming at comprehensive multi-dimensional performance are attributed to different supply chain strategy types. Asking why businesses and supply chains still postpone integration of sustainability and other non-financial performance measures into global agrifood supply chains, we point out that these measures represent in fact credence attributes not to be verified by the (final) consumer. This implies the propensity of businesses to engage both in hidden action concerning actual supply chain/operations management and conspicuous public relations. From these considerations we derive some research propositions to be tested in follow-up empirical and modeling/simulation research on global food supply chains.