Sustainability Information Services for Agri-Food Supply Networks

Sustainability Information Services for Agri-Food Supply Networks – Closing Gaps in Information Infrastructures Several global developments (e.g. diminishing production resources, growing demand for bio-energy) and numerous sector-wide crises (e.g. BSE, swine fever, dioxin) have led to a changing attitude of society towards the consequences of the agri-food system‘s activities for social, economic and environmental issues, captured in the term of sustainability. Consumers in their role as final customers, and as a consequence also enterprises within agri-food supply networks, show increasing interest in the characteristics of food, and in turn, on the availability of related information and guarantees. New solutions for determination and communication of sustainability are needed for the agri-food sector, covering single aspects of sustainability as well as sustainability in a broader sense, including social, economic and environmental issues. The present doctoral thesis introduces a structured approach for developing sustainability information services for agrifood supply networks and presents a framework that integrates these services into existing network-wide production and decision processes. The approach is presented using the example of European pork production and the three selected information domains food safety (representing social sustainability), quality (representing economic sustainability) and global warming potential (representing environmental sustainability). Resulting information reference models give an aggregated overview on information availability and exchange in European pork supply networks, additional information demands of possible service users and deficiencies in the existing information infrastructures. Integrated service solutions which are based on the identified information sources, demands and deficiencies are introduced to exemplify the approach. The thesis supports different stakeholders involved in agri-food production, such as service developers, enterprise decision makers and management consultants, in developing enterpriseand supply network-specific solutions which meet customers’ and consumers’ demands by providing appropriate sustainability information and guarantees.