A growing number of consumers are concerned with the impacts of consumption choices. Local food supply chains are increasingly being discussed for their potential to overcome the impacts of global and more industrialized chains. However, opposition between local and global food systems is being questioned and distinctions are ambiguous. Can sustainability performance be assessed in relation to ...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it discusses how the functioning and performance of food chains are affected by the way stakeholders are embedded in the chains, by the coordination modes, and by the kind of governance. Second, by depicting six relevant agro-food chains, attention is raised on the kind of the stakeholders that participate in the chain and on the role of each with a spec...

The concept of substantial equivalence, introduced for the risk assessment of genetically modified (GM) food, is a reducing concept because it ignores the context in which these products have been produced and brought to the consumer at the end of the food chain. Food quality cannot be restricted to mere substance and food acts on human beings not only at the level of nutrition but also through...

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate a discrete time three–species food chain system with ratio dependence. By employing coincidence degree theory and analysis techniques, sufficient conditions for existence of periodic solutions are established. Keywords—Food chain; ratio–dependent; coincidence degree; periodic solutions

There is a blossoming of voluntary certification initiatives for sustainable agro-food products and production processes. With these certification initiatives come traceability in supply chains, to guarantee the sustainability of the products consumed. No systematic analysis exists of traceability systems for sustainability in agro-food supply chains. Hence, the purpose of this article is to an...

The intraspecific interference of a top-predator is incorporated into a classical mathematical model for three-trophic food chains. All chaos types known to the classical model are shown to exist for this comprehensive model. It is further demonstrated that if the top-predator reproduces at high efficiency, then all chaotic dynamics will change to a stable coexisting equilibrium, a novel proper...