a research paper on food production

Food Production, Processing and Nutrition

Aims and scope.

The Food Production, Processing and Nutrition journal aims to provide a unique dedicated forum for publication of the highest quality and novel contributions in the field. Both fundamental research and applied areas are of interest and these extend to food production with respect to variety improvement and selection as well as green processing. Food safety, elimination of contaminants, and retention of nutrients and bioactive components that play a role in health promotion of consumers, are important aspects that will be covered. The journal publishes articles that deal with topics on food production and processing from farm to fork, and their influence on nutrition and health. Production technologies, absorption, bioavailability and personalized nutrition with consideration of gut microbiota are also of interest to the journal. Results may be communicated in the form of original research and reviews.

Article-processing charge:   Food Production, Processing and Nutrition  charges publication fees for non-solicited articles starting from 1 January 2024 . The journal levies an article-processing charge of EUR1890 / USD2290 / GBP1490 for each of the non-solicited articles submitted for publication after December 31, 2023.

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• Most accessed

Non-destructive hyperspectral imaging technology to assess the quality and safety of food: a review

Authors: Dharmendrakumar Patel, Suresh Bhise, S. S. Kapdi and Tanmay Bhatt

Gut microbiota response to consumption of milks fermented with specific strains of Lactococcus lactis with hypocholesterolemic effect

Authors: Miguel A. Rendon-Rosales, José I. Méndez-Romero, Adrián Hernández-Mendoza, Aarón F. González-Córdova, Miguel A. Mazorra-Manzano, Hugo S. García, Lilia M. Beltrán-Barrientos, María C. Estrada-Montoya and Belinda Vallejo-Cordoba

Critical vulnerabilities of food selections based on nutrient content claims and reference amounts of food and creating a reliable procedure

Authors: Abed Forouzesh, Fatemeh Forouzesh, Sadegh Samadi Foroushani and Abolfazl Forouzesh

Quality and safety of new types of dairy products based on cow’s and mare’s milk with vegetable additives

Authors: Maxat Iztileuov, Assan Ospanov, Fatima Dikhanbayeva, Zhuldyz Smailova and Gulzat Zhunussova

Vacuum microwave drying of PEF-pretreated Chilean abalone ( Concholepas Concholepas ) slices: drying features, sustainability parameters, and protein quality properties

Authors: Mario Pérez-Won, Luis González-Cavieres, Anais Palma-Acevedo, Erick Jara-Quijada, Gipsy Tabilo-Munizaga and Roberto Lemus-Mondaca

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Plant food anti-nutritional factors and their reduction strategies: an overview

Authors: Mrinal Samtiya, Rotimi E. Aluko and Tejpal Dhewa

A comprehensive review on bitter gourd ( Momordica charantia L.) as a gold mine of functional bioactive components for therapeutic foods

Authors: K. S. Gayathry and Jenny Ann John

Edible insects as a food source: a review

Authors: Chufei Tang, Ding Yang, Huaijian Liao, Hongwu Sun, Chuanjing Liu, Lanjun Wei and Fanfan Li

Aflatoxin contamination in food crops: causes, detection, and management: a review

Authors: Abhishek Kumar, Hardik Pathak, Seema Bhadauria and Jebi Sudan

Global seaweed farming and processing in the past 20 years

Authors: Lizhu Zhang, Wei Liao, Yajun Huang, Yuxi Wen, Yaoyao Chu and Chao Zhao

The Correction to this article has been published in Food Production, Processing and Nutrition 2022 4 :28

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Journal announcement

Indexed by DOAJ, FSTA, Scopus, ESCI, and Ei Compendex! We are pleased to share the news that Food Production, Processing and Nutrition has been indexed by DOAJ, FSTA (Food Science and Technology Abstracts), Scopus, ESCI (Emerging Sources Citation Index), and Ei Compendex.

Thematic series

Published collections

Natural Products and Bioactive Compounds in Food Check the original articles and reviews of this special issue which report the updated and new findings on the structure, functionality, nutrition, and application of natural products.

Bioactive proteins and peptides Bioactive proteins and peptides are considered as important ingredients in functional foods, nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals. The roles of bioactive proteins and peptides include antioxidant, antimicrobial, antihypertensive, immunomodulatory and other biological activities. This special issue has provided innovative, original research and comprehensive reviews that reflect the latest developments in the field.

Editorial Message from Editor-in-Chief

Professor  Fereidoon Shahidi ,  Department of Biochemistry, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada

Launching of the journal of Food Production, Processing and Nutrition (FPPN)

The journal of Food Production, Processing and Nutrition is expected to capture findings, discoveries and developments in the field in the global arena.  I encourage you to submit your findings and innovative research results and reviews to our new journal.

Fereidoon Shahidi Editor-in-Chief of Food Production, Processing and Nutrition

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The Food Production, Processing and Nutrition journal is affiliated with Jiangsu Academy of Agricultural Sciences .

Annual Journal Metrics

2022 Citation Impact 4.7 - 2-year Impact Factor 5.0 - 5-year Impact Factor 1.515 - SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) 0.697 - SJR (SCImago Journal Rank)

2023 Speed 25 days submission to first editorial decision for all manuscripts (Median) 114 days submission to accept (Median)

2023 Usage  467,397 downloads 67 Altmetric mentions 

ISSN: 2661-8974

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• 25 Jan 2021
• Working Paper Summaries

India’s Food Supply Chain During the Pandemic

Policy makers in the developing world face important tradeoffs in reacting to a pandemic. The quick and complete recovery of India’s food supply chain suggests that strict lockdown measures at the onset of pandemics need not cause long-term economic damage.

• 08 Jun 2020

Food Security and Human Mobility During the Covid-19 Lockdown

COVID-19 represents not only a health crisis but a crisis of food insecurity and starvation for migrants. Central governments should ensure that food security policies are implemented effectively and engage with local governments and local stakeholders to distribute food to migrants in the immediate term.

• 29 May 2020

How Leaders Are Fighting Food Insecurity on Three Continents

The pandemic could almost double the number of people facing food crises in lower-income populations by the end of 2020. Howard Stevenson and Shirley Spence show how organizations are responding. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 31 Jan 2019
• Cold Call Podcast

How Wegmans Became a Leader in Improving Food Safety

Ray Goldberg discusses how the CEO of the Wegmans grocery chain faced a food safety issue and then helped the industry become more proactive. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 15 Nov 2018

Can the Global Food Industry Overcome Public Distrust?

The public is losing trust in many institutions involved in putting food on our table, says Ray A. Goldberg, author of the new book Food Citizenship. Here's what needs to be done. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 15 Mar 2018

Targeted Price Controls on Supermarket Products

Governments sometimes consider targeted price controls when popular goods become less affordable. Looking at price controls in Argentina between 2007 and 2015, this study’s findings suggest that new technologies like mobile phones are allowing governments to better enforce targeted price control programs, but the impact of these policies on aggregate inflation is small and short-lived.

• 26 Jun 2017
• Research & Ideas

How Cellophane Changed the Way We Shop for Food

Research by Ai Hisano exposes cellophane's key role in developing self-service merchandising in American grocery stores, and how its manufacturers tried to control the narrative of how women buy food. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 31 May 2017
• Sharpening Your Skills

10 Harvard Business School Research Stories That Will Make Your Mouth Water

The food industry is under intense study at Harvard Business School. This story sampler looks at issues including restaurant marketing, chefs as CEOs, and the business of food science. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 18 Nov 2016

Standardized Color in the Food Industry: The Co-Creation of the Food Coloring Business in the United States, 1870–1940

Beginning in the late 19th century, US food manufacturers tried to create the “right” color of foods that many consumers would recognize and in time take for granted. The United States became a leading country in the food coloring business with the rise of extensive mass marketing. By 1938, when Congress enacted the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, the food coloring business had become a central and permanent component of food marketing strategies. This paper shows how food manufacturers, dye makers, and regulators co-created the food coloring business. Food-coloring practices became integrated into an entire strategy of manufacturing and marketing in the food industry.

• 16 May 2016

Food Safety Economics: The Cost of a Sick Customer

When restaurants source from local growers, it can be more difficult to assess product safety—just another wrinkle in high-stakes efforts to keep our food from harming us. Just ask Chipotle. John A. Quelch discusses a recent case study on food testing. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 15 May 2007

I’ll Have the Ice Cream Soon and the Vegetables Later: Decreasing Impatience over Time in Online Grocery Orders

How do people’s preferences differ when they make choices for the near term versus the more distant future? Providing evidence from a field study of an online grocer, this research shows that people act as if they will be increasingly virtuous the further into the future they project. Researchers examined how the length of delay between when an online grocery order is completed and when it is delivered affects what consumers order. They find that consumers purchase more "should" (healthy) groceries such as vegetables and less "want" (unhealthy) groceries such as ice cream the greater the delay between order completion and order delivery. The results have implications for public policy, supply chain managers, and models of time discounting. Key concepts include: Consumers spend less and order a higher percentage of "should" items and a lower percentage of "want" items the further in advance of delivery they place a grocery order. Encouraging people to order their groceries up to 5 days in advance of consumption could influence the healthfulness of the foods that people consume. Similarly, asking students in schools to select their lunches up to a week in advance could considerably increase the healthfulness of the foods they elect to eat. Online and catalog retailers that offer a range of goods as well as different delivery options might be able to improve their demand forecasting by understanding these findings. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.

The role of food industries in sustainability transition: a review

• Published: 16 February 2024

Cite this article

• S. Prasanna 1 ,
• Praveen Verma   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4965-668X 1 &
• Suman Bodh 1  

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The global food industry is crucial in promoting sustainability, contributing to environmental degradation but also driving positive change. This review paper explores the significance, methodologies and recent research of food industries in promoting sustainability. The food industry faces sustainability challenges due to climate change, resource depletion, food security and health concerns. Policy makers, consumers and stakeholders are pushing businesses to reduce carbon footprint, adopt ethical sourcing, minimize waste and improve nutritional quality. This paper presents a compiled information of review of literature related to sustainability transition in food industry published worldwide. Shifting consumer preferences towards sustainable and healthy diets is a crucial aspect of the food industry’s role in sustainable transition. Promoting plant based diets, reduced food waste and adopting circular economy principles can significantly contribute to sustainable consumption patterns. The food industry is making significant strides in sustainability, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving supply chain transparency and promoting responsible sourcing, but challenges persist. This review paper serves as both a clarion call and a roadmap, emphasizing the inextricable link between the food industry and sustainability.

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Research Article

Climate smart agriculture and global food-crop production

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Environment and Production Technology Division, International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC, United States of America

Roles Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Roles Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft

Affiliation Energy Systems Division, Argonne National Laboratories, Lemont, IL, United States of America

Roles Data curation, Validation

Roles Data curation

• Alessandro De Pinto, 
• Nicola Cenacchi, 
• Ho-Young Kwon, 
• Jawoo Koo, 
• Shahnila Dunston

• Published: April 29, 2020
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231764
• Reader Comments

Most business-as-usual scenarios for farming under changing climate regimes project that the agriculture sector will be significantly impacted from increased temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns. Perhaps ironically, agricultural production contributes substantially to the problem with yearly greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of about 11% of total anthropogenic GHG emissions, not including land use change. It is partly because of this tension that Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) has attracted interest given its promise to increase agricultural productivity under a changing climate while reducing emissions. Considerable resources have been mobilized to promote CSA globally even though the potential effects of its widespread adoption have not yet been studied. Here we show that a subset of agronomic practices that are often included under the rubric of CSA can contribute to increasing agricultural production under unfavorable climate regimes while contributing to the reduction of GHG. However, for CSA to make a significant impact important investments and coordination are required and its principles must be implemented widely across the entire sector.

Citation: De Pinto A, Cenacchi N, Kwon H-Y, Koo J, Dunston S (2020) Climate smart agriculture and global food-crop production. PLoS ONE 15(4): e0231764. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231764

Editor: Paolo Agnolucci, University College London, UNITED KINGDOM

Received: September 11, 2019; Accepted: March 31, 2020; Published: April 29, 2020

Copyright: © 2020 De Pinto et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: The data used for this analysis are available for download at https://github.com/IFPRI/Climate-Smart-Ag-PlosOne .

Funding: The authors acknowledge the generous support of the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) funded by CGIAR Fund Donors and the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security, which is carried out with support from CGIAR Fund Donors and through bilateral funding agreements.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

1 Introduction

Uncertainty in projections makes it difficult to determine the precise impact of climate change on future agricultural productivity, but studies have consistently found that under most scenarios significant negative effects should be expected worldwide [ 1 – 6 ] and especially in economically underdeveloped regions [ 7 – 9 ]. Importantly, agricultural production is not only affected by climate change but contributes substantially to the problem with yearly greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that range from 5.0 to 5.8 Gt CO 2 e or about 11% of total anthropogenic GHG emissions [ 10 ]. Combined with forestry and other land uses, anthropogenic land activities contribute about a quarter of annual GHG emissions, which is the equivalent of 10 to 12 Gt CO 2 e per year [ 10 ].

Recent developments in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations (i.e. the Paris Agreement in 2015 and the Koronivia joint work on agriculture [ 11 , 12 ]) and the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change special report [ 13 ] have reinvigorated calls for incentives to reduce GHG emissions, including the pricing of carbon and the levy of a carbon tax. However, the latest analyses on the subject [ 14 , 15 ] indicate that a tax on GHG emissions may lead to significant tradeoffs between emissions abatement and food security.

It is in this environment that the concept of Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) has become increasingly relevant. CSA proposes a framework that supports decision-making in the agriculture sector by considering three foundational outcomes and by fully accounting for the trade-offs and synergies among them. It is comprised of agricultural systems that contribute to sustainable and equitable increases in agricultural productivity and incomes; greater adaptation and resilience to climate change of food systems from the farm- to the national-level; and reduction, or removal, of greenhouse gas emissions, where possible [ 16 ].

Many operational aspects of CSA are still under investigation as local contexts determine the enabling environment as well as the trade-offs and synergies between productivity, adaptation, and mitigation [ 17 , 18 ]. Farmers must identify what can be considered climate-smart given their biophysical, agricultural, and socio-economic context. As a consequence, the use of the CSA approach is knowledge-intensive and can require considerable institutional support [ 19 , 20 ]. Because of these difficulties, Chandra at al [ 21 ] note that, at this time, CSA is “a popular scholarly solution” experiencing difficulties in translating into smallholder farmer and civil society actions as well as new policy directions. Taylor [ 22 ] illustrates how the failure to incorporate issues related to social justice make the acceptance and implementation of CSA difficult in many communities. The frequent result is that, even when farmers, agrarian organizations, large scale farmers, and policy maker have embraced the concept of CSA, they struggle with the implementation and tend to look for simple protocols to follow.

Despite these unsettled issues, a substantial amount of resources have been mobilized to promote and implement CSA at a scale sufficient to have a global impact [ 23 ]. Even though CSA is more than a set of agricultural practices, it does include some specific technologies and agronomic tools, and these are the focus of this study. Our goal is to provide a first set of boundaries for the global effects of CSA used in food-crop production with a particular attention to its potential to reduce GHG emissions without jeopardizing food security. For this, we focus on some aspects of food-crop production that can be modelled globally with a reasonable level of accuracy given the latest developments in modeling capabilities [ 9 , 24 – 26 ].

Our analysis looks at four major categories of agricultural practices: no-till, integrated soil fertility management, nitrogen use efficiency and alternate wetting and dry. They have been shown to have positive impacts on yields and GHG mitigation across a wide range of conditions, but they all require specific modifications and adjustments on the ground. As a consequence, the modelling work presented here is a stylized representation of a range of many technologies and practices that would be identified using the CSA approach.

Notwithstanding these limitations, the results of our analysis clearly indicate that CSA practices have the potential to increase food production under unfavorable climate regimes and to improve the food security conditions of millions of people while reducing GHG emissions. However, results also indicate that for CSA to make a sufficiently large impact on global GHG emissions, it must be implemented widely across the entire sector and requires a significant amount of support and coordination. Our findings are also suggestive of broader benefits related to the resilience of the production system, to a reduced pressure for expanding cropland area and to reduced soil fertility depletion. While encouraging, these results are the product of the method and of the modeling assumptions used in the analysis and they must be evaluated and refined by additional global and regional analyses.

We performed an ex-ante analysis of the long-term effects on global food security and GHG emissions of adopting of a set of CSA technologies and practices to grow three widely grown crops: maize ( Zea mays ), wheat ( Triticum aestivum ), and rice ( Oryza sativa ). These three crops represent about 41% of the global harvested area and approximately 64% of the estimated 2–3 Gt CO 2 e per year emitted by crop production globally [ 27 ]. The effects of CSA practices on production, food security, and GHG emissions were assessed via comparison with the outcomes of a business-as-usual (BAU) scenario in which farmers retain the current practices during the period 2010–2050.

All scenarios, BAU and alternatives, were created using the IMPACT system of models [ 26 , 28 ] which links crop and climate models to the core economic model in which agricultural production is represented across 320 sub-national regions called “food production units” (FPUs, see Supplementary Discussion S1 in S1 File ). Because of the linkages among these models, IMPACT’s outputs reflect the interactions between biophysical, economic and population trends, the combination of which represents the functioning of the global food market. A stylized representation of the modeling steps and of the information flow is provided in Fig 1 . The process represented in the figure is used to generate each one of the scenarios described in the sections below.

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Source: Authors.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231764.g001

2.1 Simulation of production, prices and food security—the core of the modeling system

To simulate the effects of CSA adoption on yields, production, harvested areas, world commodity prices and indicators of food security, we linked the spatially-disaggregated data of three models: the Spatial Production Allocation Model (SPAM) [ 29 ], the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT) [ 30 ], and the International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade (IMPACT v3.3) [ 28 ] (Supplementary Discussion S1 and Supplementary Fig 1 in S1 File ).

The SPAM model was used to identify the location of crop production on a global grid in which each grid-cell is of size 30 arc minutes (a square of approximately 56 km by 56 km at the equator). For each grid-cell, SPAM provides a database cataloging the dominant crops, representative cultivars, management practices, and the inputs used. Data about climate, irrigation type, and soil properties were geo-linked to each SPAM grid-cell and were essential to run crop model simulations at the grid-cell level. The DSSAT crop model was used to simulate crop yields, with current and or with CSA practices, as a function of the interaction between biophysical elements of the crop systems (e.g. soil, weather, and crop) and management practices (e.g., tillage, nutrient application, and water availability). After the completion of a calibration step (Supplementary Discussion S2 with Supplementary Table 2 and Supplementary Figs 2 and 3 in S1 File ), the yield responses were aggregated to evaluate agriculture production across IMPACT’s FPUs. IMPACT utilizes the yield responses to agricultural practices as shifters for the crop-specific supply curves and for the yield’s growth rates [ 1 , 9 , 28 , 31 ]. Starting from these changes in growth rates, the systems of equations at the core of the model endogenously determine crop areas, agricultural production, commodity prices and food availability. In turn, taking into consideration population and income growth, changes in food availability translate into changes in the regional availability of kilocalories [ 28 ]. In IMPACT, the share of people at risk of hunger (i.e. suffering from undernourishment) is calculated based on an empirical correlation between the share of undernourished people within the population and the relative availability of food. The calculation is adapted from Fischer et al. [ 28 , 32 ]. The share of undernourished children under the age of five is based on the calculation of the average calorie availability per capita per day, women’s access to secondary education, the ratio of female to male life expectancy at birth, and health and sanitation conditions [ 28 , 33 ]. It is an estimate of undernourishment in terms of weight for age.

2.2 Implementation of CSA technologies in DSSAT

The CSA scenarios simulate the use of four practices that are recurrently identified in the literature for their potential to deliver across the objectives of CSA and to be adopted widely [ 18 , 34 ]. There are several other practices and technologies that are proposed for CSA, the ones selected are among those that can be modeled with higher accuracy. The technologies considered for maize and wheat are no-till and integrated soil fertility management, while those for rice are alternate wetting and drying and nitrogen use efficiency. These practices are already utilized and widely tested due to their promising positive effects on yields, their higher resource use efficiency (e.g., water and nutrients) and their overall effects on GHG emissions ( Table 1 and Supplementary Discussion S3 for a description of the technologies; Supplementary Discussion S4 and Supplementary Table S3 for modeling details and an assessment of our simulation results in S1 File ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231764.t001

In order to simulate no-till, the default setting for conventional tillage in DSSAT was removed and a seed planting stick and a deep fertilizer injection were used as planting and fertilizer application methods to minimize soil disturbance (more details in Supplementary Discussion 3 in S1 File ). Six countries (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, New Zealand, Paraguay, and Uruguay) where no-till has already been widely adopted were excluded from the simulations [ 51 , 52 ] because we assume that the potential for expansion in these six countries is low. In other places, especially North America where no till is already present but not widely adopted, we assume that it is not utilized and therefore our analysis may overestimate the impacts of using this practice.

Integrated soil fertility management was implemented by simulating the application of organic amendment, in addition to the inorganic fertilizer applications already defined in the BAU scenario. The site-specific organic manure application quantity was based on Potter et al. (2010; http://www.earthstat.org ) [ 53 ] and was used monthly during the fallow period (after harvesting–before planting). The rate of inorganic fertilizer application is the same as in the BAU scenario; however, the application scheduling is optimized based on the growth stage of each crop to minimize nitrogen stress during flowering and grain filling.

For rice production, enhanced nitrogen use efficiency and alternate wetting and drying (AWD) were simulated. Nitrogen use efficiency was simulated by focusing on enhanced plant uptake of nitrogen fertilizer under both rainfed and irrigated conditions. This was done by turning on in DSSAT the option for nitrogen fertilizer application based on deep placement of urea supergranules at a depth of 10 cm beneath the surface soil. Simulation of AWD was only applied to irrigated rice and was based on a recent study by the International Fund for Agricultural Development-IFPRI Partnership Program that identified alternative agricultural mitigation options for rice production using the DeNitrification-DeComposition model [DNDC; 54 ]. We employed the same modeling approach of DNDC, which assumes that: i) rice paddy is initially flooded to 10 cm, ii) water level is reduced at rate of -0.5 cm/day to -5cm, and iii) then re-flooded at rate of 0.5 cm/day till to 10 cm.

2.3 Calculation of GHG emissions

DSSAT was used to calculate per-hectare GHG emissions which were then multiplied by the harvested areas projected by the IMPACT model to compute total GHG emissions. Specifically, temporal changes in soil carbon stock were simulated in the CENTURY soil organic matter (SOM) module embedded into DSSAT [ 55 ]. Direct N 2 O emissions were simulated by modifying DSSAT’s source codes to model denitrification processes. The modifications ensure that our estimates of direct N 2 O emissions are comparable to those calculated using the 2006 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) emission factors [ 56 ], where 1% of N additions from mineral fertilizers, from organic amendments and from crop residues, 1% of N mineralized from soil organic matter, and ~0.7% of N from residue inputs are converted into N 2 O emissions.

For flooded rice soils, we used the IPCC default emission factor of 0.3% of applied N. Methane (CH 4 ) emissions were calculated by combining DSSAT-simulated rice biomass with IPCC Tier 1 method’s emission coefficients proposed by Yan et al. 2009 [ 57 ]. Parameters of the Tier 1 method include baseline emission factor (1.3), scaling factors for continuous flooding (1) and multiple drainage (0.52), simulating effect of rice straw (0.59), and conversion factor of farmyard manure (0.14). These were combined with the simulated outputs of rice yields and straws, days in growing season, soil organic carbon content, and the input data of manure application rate. Finally, all GHG emissions were converted into tons of CO 2 e using global warming potential for 100-yr time horizon of each GHG (Supplementary Table S4 in S1 File ).

2.4 Scenarios

2.4.1 business as usual scenario..

BAU scenario reflects the use of current practices and technologies throughout the 2010–2050 period and assumes that agriculture is developing under climate change conditions. BAU and all the alternative scenarios use the population and income growth assumptions that underly the middle of the road Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 2 (SSP2; [ 37 , 38 ]) from the IPCC Assessment Report 5 (AR5; [ 15 , 24 , 58 ]). Under the SSP2 narrative, global population will reach over 9 billion people by 2050 at an average annual growth rate of 0.6% and per capita GDP grows at just below 2% per year. The climate models used in both DSSAT and IMPACT under a Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP 8.5; [ 59 ]) represent two possible future states of the climate. One, the GFDL-ESM2M (GFDL; [ 60 ]), is drier and cooler than the other, the HadGEM2-ES (HadGEM; [ 61 ]) (Supplementary Figs 4 and 5 and Supplementary Table S5 in S1 File ). Given the high uncertainty around the overall effects of carbon fertilization on crop productivity [ 62 , 63 ] we cannot make conclusive statements about how increased concentrations of CO 2 in the atmosphere will impact production (see a detailed treatment of the issue in Supplementary Discussion S5 in S1 File ). Therefore, our modeling approach assumes no additional effects on yields from atmospheric carbon.

2.4.2 Climate smart agriculture scenarios.

These scenarios were constructed by assuming that farmers who are currently using a particular set of practices to grow maize, wheat, and rice are offered a portfolio of alternatives from which to choose (i.e. the four CSA practices considered). We first explored two scenarios with the objective to shed light on the largest possible effects of adopting CSA practices. The scenarios are based on two basic adoption rules implemented at the grid-cell level. The first (Rule 1) requires that CSA practices generate a yield gain compared to BAU in order to be adopted. The second (Rule 2) requires that an alternative practice generates higher yields and a decrease in emission intensity (i.e. the quantity of CO 2 e per unit of product). If none of the alternatives increases yields, it is assumed that farmers retain their current practices. Given our objective, both scenarios assume that when a CSA practice is chosen all farmers in a given area adopt it beginning from the first year (i.e. 100% of the area in which Rule 1 or Rule 2 are satisfied it is assumed to adopt the CSA practices). Admittedly, the chosen adoption rules overestimate the role that yield gains play in farmers’ decisions. We do recognize that there are other benefits that might motivate adoption. However, at this time there are no widely applied financial mechanisms that disincentivize the use of current agricultural practices or that promote CSA [ 64 ]. Furthermore, non-monetary benefits vary greatly with local conditions and with farmers’ idiosyncrasies which cannot be represented in a global modeling exercise. More importantly, it is unlikely that countries would support the wide uptake of practices that reduce yields, given the importance that increased productivity holds for food security. We therefore think that, albeit with limitations, the assumption that adoption requires a yield increase is a pragmatic way to move forward in global analysis such as the one we are undertaking.

We did however test the possible effects of production costs and other barriers to adoption through two additional scenarios. It is well known that production costs and other factors (e.g. farmers’ access to markets and to credit, the characteristics of a particular technology, the quality of extension services, attitudes towards risk and risk exposure) affect the adoption of new practices and technologies [ 65 – 68 ]. Based on these notions, a third scenario was implemented which uses adoption Rule 1 together with the adoption rates used by Rosegrant et al. [ 9 ]. These implicitly include multiple costs related to adoption and were obtained through surveys and interviews with experts. These rates are more realistic than the 100% adoption assumed in the previous scenarios (Supplementary Discussion S6 with Supplementary Table S6 in S1 File ).

The issue of costs of production is particularly important for AWD, a practice that could significantly reduce the use of water without reducing rice yields (see Table 1 ). This means that AWD could be adopted even though there is a reduction in yields. Therefore, the fourth and last simulated scenario uses Rule 2 but expands adoption by including the potential reduction of production costs associated with implementing AWD. A review of the literature reveals that irrigation costs represent from 3 to 36% of production costs [ 56 , 57 , 69 ] and AWD is reported to reduce irrigation cost up to 30% [ 70 , 58 ]. Based on these estimates we calculate that as long as yields decrease less than 9%, AWD is still be more profitable, and therefore preferable, to the current practices (Supplementary Discussion S7 in S1 File ).

The performance of CSA practices depends on tailoring their implementation to the specific local conditions, but the capacity and knowledge to do so varies greatly from farmer to farmer. Therefore, for all scenarios we simulated instances in which farmers perform a poor, average, and optimal tailoring of the technology to their local biophysical circumstances (represented in the model by weather and soil characteristics). To do this, we exploited the fact that each IMPACT FPU contains multiple 30 arc minutes grid-cells. We considered the yield gain distribution in each FPU and used the average of the lower quartile, the average of the distribution, and the average of the upper quartile to represent a poor, average, and optimal tailoring of CSA.

Thus, our evaluation of the effects of widespread adoption of CSA practices is based on a total of 26 simulations ( Table 2 ). Given the amount of output generated, for each scenario we report a single value which is the average of the GFDL and HadGEM results followed in parenthesis by the range of the results (lowest–highest value) obtained using the different climate models and levels of tailoring. The same information is indicated in the whisker bar in the figures.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231764.t002

3.1 Prices and production

Projections for the BAU scenario indicate that global production of maize, wheat, and rice in 2050 will increase by 47% (36–58%), 42% (40–44%), and 19% (18–20%) respectively, compared to 2010. Prices are projected to increase by 80% (56–103%), 35% (24–46%), and 52% (44–60%) respectively. Therefore, despite the impact of climate change, production of these three main cereals is projected to increase. After economic growth and changing incomes and diets are considered, by 2050 according to BAU projections there will be 47 million (45–48) fewer undernourished children and 385 million (361–410) fewer people at risk of hunger.

We first report in detail the results for the CSA adoption scenarios based on Rules 1 and 2. The sensitivity of these scenarios to barriers to adoption and to costs of production is reported later in the paper. The results show that CSA practices are adopted on a total of approximately 372 million hectares when adoption is based exclusively on yield increase (Rule 1) and on 241 million hectares when adoption is dependent on reduction in emission intensity and increase in yields (Rule 2) (Supplementary Discussion S8 with Supplementary Table S7 in S1 File ). Compared to BAU, by 2050 CSA practices are estimated to increase global production of maize by an additional 4% (1–9%) with Rule 1 and 3% (1–5%) with Rule 2; wheat production is also estimated to increase by about 4% (1–9%) with Rule 1, and 3% (0.4–8%) with Rule 2. CSA practices appear to have the largest effect on rice, for which production is projected to increase by about 9% with both rules (4–16% with Rule 1 and 4–15% with Rule 2) ( Fig 2 ).

Columns indicate the average tailoring of CSA practices; whisker bars identify results for the poor and optimal tailoring. Source: Authors. BAU = business as usual scenario.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231764.g002

We should note that not all countries experience an increase in production. The wide-scale adoption of CSA practices induces a reorganization of global production because of differences in land suitability. As a result, in some countries the reduction in crop harvested area offsets the gains in yields (Supplementary Table S8 in S1 File ). Nevertheless, overall the changes in production are sufficient to have a sizable impact on world prices (see description of endogenous effects in Supplementary Discussion S9 in S1 File ). Prices are still projected to increase but compared to BAU their growth is reduced by 8% (3–17%) for maize, by 11% (3–25%) for wheat, and by 27% (13–42%) for rice with Rule 1, and by 6% (2–11%) for maize, 8% (2–20%) for wheat and 26% (14–40%) for rice with Rule 2 (Supplementary Table S9 in S1 File ). As a result, the population at risk of hunger decreases more than what is projected by the BAU scenario. The number of people at risk of hunger is reduced by an additional 34 million (10–69 million) by 2050 under Rule 1 and by 29 million (10–59 million) under Rule 2, with the largest improvements in Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and Pacific, and South Asia. Similarly, the number of undernourished children decreases by an additional 2 million under both Rules 1 and 2 (a range of 1–5 million with Rule 1 and 1–4 million with Rule 2) with most of the improvements in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia (Supplementary Table S10 with Supplementary Figs 6 and 7 in S1 File ).

3.2 GHG emissions

Global GHG emissions decrease under both adoption scenarios, but there are important distinctions between the two. When farmers’ adoption choices are based only on yield increases (Rule 1), the reduction in GHG emissions is estimated to be equivalent to 44 Mt CO 2 e yr -1 (9–77 Mt CO 2 e yr -1 ). The reduction of emissions is significantly higher with Rule 2, 101 Mt CO 2 e yr -1 (84–124 Mt CO 2 e yr -1 ). This shows that there is a substantial amount of area in which CSA practices can increase yields but do not reduce GHG emissions. The higher levels of emissions abatement come at the cost of production. On average across climate scenarios, under Rule 2 total cumulative production for the three crops is reduced by 21 Mt yr -1 (1 and 53) of fresh matter harvest compared to Rule 1. This is equivalent to 1% (0.1 and 2%) of total yearly global production of maize, wheat and rice.

It is important to note that the effects on emissions vary from country to country and that we find instances in which an increase in emissions occurs in some countries ( Fig 3 and Supplementary Table S11 in S1 File ).

Negative values indicate an abatement compared to BAU and positive values an increase. Source: Authors.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231764.g003

Emissions can increase because of the potentially large changes in countries’ crop harvested areas and yields. Total emissions can increase even when a reduction of emission intensity is achieved if the reduction in emissions per unit of output is offset by increases in yields or in areas (Supplementary Discussion S10 with Supplementary Table S11 in S1 File ).

3.3 Other effects related to emissions

Interestingly, part of the reduction in emissions is due to the effects on soil organic carbon concentration, which is estimated to grow compared to BAU by 0.11 t ha -1 yr -1 (0–0.49 t ha -1 yr -1 ) over the area that adopts the alternative practices based on Rule 1, and by 0.14 t ha -1 yr -1 (0.01–0.53 t ha -1 yr -1 ) based on Rule 2. These changes are beneficial for sustainable production and resilience since higher soil organic carbon concentrations increase soils nutrient availability and soils water retention.

Some potentially important effects on land use must be noted. The combination of higher yields and lower prices reduces producers’ incentives to expand production onto additional land as the demand for wheat and rice can be satisfied with less harvested area (Supplementary Table S12 in S1 File ). Even though global harvested area for maize is projected to expand by 1 million hectares in 2050, on average across Rule 1 and 2 the net effect is a decrease in total harvested areas for the three crops estimated at 10 million hectares (3–27 million hectares) compared to BAU. This result is suggestive of a reduced pressure on forests and other natural areas that might be environmentally significant and rich in carbon. However, the reallocation of harvested area following changes in production and prices causes other crops to take over the land freed by rice and wheat (Supplementary Discussion S11 in S1 File ). Total land allocated to soybeans, vegetables, temperate fruits, sugarcane, and rapeseed is estimated to increase by 2 million hectares in 2050 on average across Rule 1 and 2 (1–4 million hectares) (Supplementary Table 13 in S1 File ). Depending on how they are grown, these crops might have a higher carbon footprint than the crops they replace.

Importantly, simulations show that increases in production of grains reduces the price of livestock feed and increases the number of animals that can be supported globally. The stronger the effect on prices, the greater the increase in the global cattle herd. As a result, emissions from cattle may increase by 5.4 Mt CO 2 e yr -1 (1.2–13.1 Mt CO 2 e yr -1 ) by 2050 and partially offset the reductions in emissions discussed earlier (Supplementary Discussion S12 and Supplementary Table S14 in S1 File ).

3.4 Adaptation and resilience

The effects on production, prices, soil, and land use suggest that CSA practices are a form of adaptation to new climate conditions and make crop-production more resilient. A comparison with a scenario in which the effects of climate change on future crop production are removed (a No Climate Change scenario. See Supplementary Discussion S13 and Supplementary Fig 8 in S1 File ) show that the production gains obtained from CSA practices can offset the negative impacts of climate change on maize and rice production and slow down consequent increases in prices. CSA practices are also successful in reducing the price of wheat which, despite an increase in production, is projected to increase in the BAU scenario. It is however difficult to draw broader conclusions about resilience, as this would require a more specific analysis of the differential effects across multiple social contexts, at different geographical scales, and for different social groups [ 71 , 72 ].

3.5 Effects of adoption rates and production costs

Results for the third scenario, which uses lower adoption rates, and the fourth, which includes AWD production costs, are reported in Fig 4 along with the results from Rules 1 and 2. To provide a comprehensive review of all the simulated scenarios, we consider the cumulative fresh weight harvest for the three crops. The results in Fig 4 focus on production and emissions. Similar results for harvested area are presented in Supplementary Table S15 in S1 File .

Columns indicate the average tailoring of CSA practices; whisker bars identify results for the poor and optimal tailoring Source: Authors.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231764.g004

As expected, social and cost barriers—heuristically included in the simulations by reducing the rate of adoption of CSA practices as in Rosegrant et al [ 9 ]—significantly affect the results with an overall reduction in benefits. Compared to BAU, yearly production for the three crops increases on average by 60 Mt (22–122 M tons) and GHG yearly emissions are reduced on average by 13 Mt CO 2 e (-2–31 Mt CO 2 e, where the negative number indicates an increase in emissions). Therefore, the reduced adoption lowers the crop production gains observed using Rule 1 by about 40% and reduces the effects on emissions by two thirds or more.

When the reduction in production costs for AWD is accounted for, AWD is adopted on some additional 0.8 million hectares leading to the highest achieved emission reduction. Yearly production is essentially unaffected but yearly abatement reaches on average 105 Mt CO 2 e yr -1 (90–134 Mt CO 2 e yr -1 ).

4 Discussion

The largest positive impacts on production and food security as well as the highest levels in GHG emissions abatement, should be interpreted as aspirational targets and viewed as an upper bound of the possible effects of adopting the CSA practices considered across maize, wheat and rice. These results are predicated on high levels of uptake by farmers and their capacity to tailor the implementation of CSA practices to local conditions. The scenario that simulates lower and more realistic adoption rates and the scenarios that represent a lower proficiency at using the practices, show rapidly diminishing benefits. This stresses the importance of major new investments to overcome long-standing problems such as underperforming extension services, farmers’ lack of credit, risk management and timely information about markets. These barriers are known to prevent the adoption of more productive, more resilient and sustainable agricultural systems.

Even though the focus of CSA is not on mitigation benefits, the pressure on the agriculture sector to reduce GHG emissions is likely to increase as other sectors reduce their share of global emissions. The performance of agricultural practices in terms of their abatement potential is therefore important. According to our assessment, the total maximum abatement obtainable (134 Mt CO 2 e yr -1 ) is about 17% of what is considered the economically achievable mitigation from managing cropland, which is 0.77 Gt CO 2 e yr -1 [ 73 ]. Also, after the indirect effects of cattle emissions are accounted for (approximately 4 Mt CO 2 e yr -1 ), the maximum abatement obtainable is 13% of the 1 Gt CO 2 e yr -1 abatement goal for the agriculture sector to remain below the 2°C global warming [ 74 ]. If one considers that the GHG emissions from the three crops analyzed is in the range of 1.28–1.92 CO 2 e yr -1 [ 25 ], our results point to a 7–10% reduction at best of those emissions. Given these limited abatement levels, the large scale adoption of alternative production systems (e.g. silvopastoral systems, agroforestry practices, precision agriculture) should be considered, and additional opportunities for abatement ought to be found elsewhere along the value chains [ 75 ].

Importantly, results indicate that recent concerns expressed in the literature regarding the negative effects of carbon tax on food security might be misplaced. In actuality, carbon pricing could help internalizing the external costs of GHG emission and steer the agriculture sector towards more carbon-efficient methods of production and distribution. Clearly, one can always impose a sufficiently high carbon tax with detrimental effects on the food security of a significant share of the population. However, our results for population at risk of hunger show that alternative practices and technologies, of which only a sample is explored in this study, can limit these effects if not completely offset them. In our analysis we did not explicitly explore the effects of policies that promote a reduction of GHG emissions. However, the results obtained using adoption Rule 2 show that as the emphasis shifts from yield gains to reducing emission intensity, emission abatement increases albeit at the cost of agricultural output. Resolving the tradeoff between emissions reduction and production in an economically efficient manner depends not only on carbon pricing or emission-reduction incentives but also on a proper pricing of the factors of production. An appropriate pricing of inputs like water and nitrogen fertilizers would promote the adoption of water-saving practices such as AWD with no significant reduction of productivity, and the adoption of practices that increase nitrogen use efficiency, with a consequent reduction in emissions and an increase in productivity.

Results also show the importance of understanding how changes caused by the widespread adoption of CSA practices may play on a global scale. The indirect effects arising from the reorganization of global production can lead to larger agricultural areas being allocated to other crops, and to an expansion in the global livestock herd due to cheaper feedstock prices. These effects can be large enough to limit the emission abatement effectiveness of CSA practices. In addition, the heterogeneous changes in countries’ GHG emissions, even in the presence of a global positive outcome, shows the importance of global coordination. Such coordination should also consider the interaction between agricultural land and carbon-rich environments such as forests and peatlands to avoid emission leakage [ 76 , 77 ].

Beyond the specifics of CSA, our results are strongly suggestive that using alternative practices the agriculture sector can increase its output and reduce its carbon footprint under future climate scenarios. However, many are the assumptions that underly our work and much more research must be undertaken to evaluate the global effects of changes in food production systems. Simulating alternative agricultural futures requires a model representation of the main structural drivers of demand and supply of food products and this requires significant assumptions about producers’ and consumers’ behavior. Scenario analyses based on model simulations, of which this study is an example, are not a prediction of the future. They are a representation of possible alternative futures given our current knowledge and assumptions about trends in climate, technology, population, income and other drivers, and about how they may interact in an economic system. Scenarios also rely heavily on existing global datasets, which come with many limitations. One way to test the robustness of the scenarios produced by models that do not generate confidence intervals or goodness-of-fit metrics, like the one we used, is to undertake a sensitivity analysis for some of the key variables. We have done this for climate, adoption levels, and yield performance but many more could be explored. Results from the sensitivity analysis point to the qualitative robustness of some of the findings (e.g. agriculture can withstand the negative impact of climate change using alternative practices, sustainable increase in production while reducing the carbon food print is possible), others indicate where additional research is necessary (e.g. investigate the multiple pathways that link agricultural output with the food security status of vulnerable people, move beyond the emphasis on yield gains and model the effects of crop rotations). Other results reveal the limits of the modeling environment that was used. A perfect example of this are our findings about land use change. The overall effects of higher yields and lower prices is to reduce the need for additional harvested area to fulfill the increasing demands for maize, wheat and rice. This suggests a reduced pressure to expand cropland and potential land-sparing effects. However, IMPACT does not model explicitly the competing demands of all land uses. It only considers cropland area and its agricultural output. While the idea that agricultural intensification reduces agricultural land’s encroachment into other natural areas is not new, it was famously put forward by Borlaug [ 78 ], whether this happens in reality is the subject of some controversy [ 79 – 81 ] and our model cannot directly resolve these questions. More research in this issue is therefore necessary.

One way to verify and test the validity of these scenarios is also to use alternative models after proper calibration [ 82 ] and compare results across them. Although this requires considerable resources, these types of comparisons have been done to assess global issues related to climate change such as agricultural production under future climate regimes [ 82 ], agricultural production and mitigation [ 83 ], and future nutritional challenges [ 84 ]. It would be advisable that a similar exercise is undertaken to explore the merits and benefits of alternative production systems like the one proposed by CSA.

5 Conclusion

Much has been written about CSA and its potential benefits but most of the existing analyses are based on local experiences and no study has so far attempted to quantify these benefits on a global scale. Our results show that widespread adoption of CSA practices can increase production and lower world prices of wheat, maize, and rice under future unfavorable climatic conditions. The reduction in prices is projected to make food products more accessible to millions of people thereby lowering the number of people at risk of hunger and that of undernourished children. These gains can be obtained while improving soil fertility and with a reduction in GHG emissions. Taken all together, results suggest that CSA practice can deliver benefits across its three foundational pillars on a planetary scale.

However, what clearly transpires from our results is that to make a significant impact, the principles of CSA must be applied widely across production systems and for this to occur significant investments must be made. Ideally, as others have suggested [ 85 ], the same or similar principles should be applied across the whole food system (i.e. trade, stocks, nutrition and social policies). It is also clear that the wide-ranging and multidimensional effects, sometime unintended or unforeseen, must be understood and managed. CSA with its multi-objective approach may provide a useful framework for decision-making ranging from the farm to the policy level.

Supporting information

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231764.s001

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Jennifer Lieberman, Daniel Mason-D'Croz, Keith Wiebe, and Channing Arndt for their help and useful comments. The authors take sole responsibility for the opinions expressed within this article.

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A systematic literature review of food sustainable supply chain management (FSSCM): building blocks and research trends

The TQM Journal

ISSN : 1754-2731

Article publication date: 6 December 2021

Issue publication date: 19 December 2022

The purpose of this paper is to explore the increased research attention gained by sustainability in food supply chain management. Although previous review studies have focused on aspects such as traceability, food safety, and performance measurement, sustainability has rarely been considered as a means of integrating these issues.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper presents a comprehensive review of the literature on food sustainable supply chain management (FSSCM). Using systematic review methods, relevant studies published from 1997 to early 2021 are explored to reveal the research landscape and the gaps and trends.

The paper shows the building blocks and the main research directions in FSSCM, particularly considering the opportunities in “neglected” emerging countries. Insights are provided into the various elements of the sustainability supply chain in the food industry, which have previously been analysed separately.

Originality/value

Only a few researchers have systematically reviewed the literature or taken a bibliometric approach in their analyses to provide an overview of the current trends and links between sustainability and food supply chain management.

• Systematic literature review
• Food sustainable supply chain management (FSSCM)
• Food industry
• Global supply chain
• Emerging countries
• Sustainability

Palazzo, M. and Vollero, A. (2022), "A systematic literature review of food sustainable supply chain management (FSSCM): building blocks and research trends", The TQM Journal , Vol. 34 No. 7, pp. 54-72. https://doi.org/10.1108/TQM-10-2021-0300

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2021, Maria Palazzo and Agostino Vollero

Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

1. Introduction

The debate over the approach to sustainability has become central to most businesses, as a proper sustainability perspective holistically considers all of a company's functions and business relationships along supply chains, which are increasingly interconnected globally ( Carter and Rogers, 2008 ; Solér et al. , 2010 ). Managing the integration of sustainable environmental, social and economic criteria along the multiple aspects of the supply chain represents a major challenge for manufacturers and producers ( Massaroni et al. , 2015 ).

Supply chain management (SCM) has been defined as “the configuration and operation of efficient and effective production and logistics networks and the intra- and inter-organizational management of supply, transformation and delivery processes” ( Brandenburg and Rebs, 2015 ). A revolution in SCM has occurred in recent years, which has been noted by many scholars and researchers, as its focus has shifted from economic performance to an integrated social and environmental approach ( Seuring and Müller, 2008 ; Ahi and Searcy, 2013 ; Khan et al. , 2020 ).

Exploring the intersection between sustainability and SCM involves considering different viewpoints, as SCM is based on both downstream and upstream flows of goods ( Cosimato and Troisi, 2015 ; Fahimnia et al. , 2015 ; Maditati et al. , 2018 ). The downstream flows of goods (towards the final customer) has been traditionally viewed as involving responsibility and ethical issues ( Seuring and Müller, 2008 ), while upstream flows of products/services (towards the supplier) are explored from manufacturing, product recovery and reverse logistics perspectives ( Feng et al. , 2017 ), and thus more concerned with environmental issues, such as energy and waste reduction ( Naik and Suresh, 2018 ; Kumar et al. , 2020 ; Kumari et al. , 2021 ). There is general agreement that the sustainable management of a supply chain requires an integrated approach to social, environmental and economic goals ( Carter and Rogers, 2008 ; Hassini et al. , 2012 ; Juettner et al. , 2020 ). Thus, the means by which SCM can develop sustainable features and follow the path of sustainable development have been considered ( Manning, 2013 ; Zhu et al. , 2018 ). This can be challenging in industries such as food, in which the SCM can have a strong effect on not only the final consumer but also other stakeholders in the value chain ( Matopoulos et al. , 2015 ; Ghadge et al. , 2017 ; Mangla et al. , 2019 ).

A food supply chain (FSC) is particularly complex, as it connects different sectors of the economy (agriculture and the food-processing industry and distribution sector) in a market dominated by rapidly changing customer preferences ( Beske et al. , 2014 ). Food types can affect the natural environment, due to the food production systems, transport distances from producers and consumers, waste management, and workers' conditions in the sectors involved ( Beer and Lemmer, 2011 ). The situation is even more complicated in the agri-fresh food sector due to the perishability of products and the short shelf-life ( Siddh et al. , 2017 ). Thus, examining sustainable development in the FSC is extremely complex due to the high level of unpredictability in terms of demand and cost, the fragile nature of food and consumers' increased awareness of risks and safety issues associated with diets and eating disorders ( Siddh et al. , 2018 ). Finally, many firms in the FSC are small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) ( Beer and Lemmer, 2011 ; Ghadge et al. , 2017 ) that may find it difficult to address sustainability challenges and implement practices. The various FSC duties and tasks are often perceived as more demanding when sustainability is applied to enrich conventional profit-oriented models ( Allaoui et al. , 2018 ). Studies in this area have addressed issues such as the triple bottom line, ethics and corporate social responsible principles in their analyses ( Siddh et al. , 2018 ; Allaoui et al. , 2018 ), but few have provided an integrated overview of the phenomenon.

Only a few researchers have systematically reviewed the literature or taken a bibliometric approach in their analyses to provide an overview of the current trends and links between sustainability and food supply chain management (FSCM). However, many articles have applied specific methods to explore particular themes or typical processes. These themes and processes include sustainable sourcing ( Ghadge et al. , 2017 ), food traceability ( Bosona and Gebresenbet, 2013 ), approaches for enhancing sustainability in SCM ( Sharma et al. , 2017 ; Dania et al. , 2018 ), sustainable supply chain strategies and tactics ( Beske et al. , 2014 ; Zhong et al. , 2017 ), food safety ( Siddh et al. , 2018 ), controls of the level of sustainability ( Sharma et al. , 2017 ), measurements of sustainable items ( Sharma et al. , 2021 ) and the circular economy ( Corallo et al. , 2020 ).

Bosona and Gebresenbet (2013) , for example, presented a literature review that focussed mainly on food traceability, which highlights several features, definitions, items and measurements of the food traceability system. The bibliometric approach was also taken by Beske et al. (2014) , who described how sustainable supply chain management tactics allow organizations to manage their supply chain while putting into practice dynamic capabilities. Zhong et al. (2017) used the bibliometric approach to review the FSCM, and considered it in terms of systems and implementations. Siddh et al. (2017) explored the agri-fresh food supply chain quality features and definitions, by collecting and analysing relevant academic papers. Using the same method, Sharma et al. (2017) analysed the performance indicators and sub-indicators of green SCM implementation. Dania et al. (2018) proposed a systematic review of sustainable agri-food supply chains to assess and manage collaborative performances, while Govindan (2018) focused on the influence of stakeholders in the food industry.

Thomé et al . (2020) recently provided several insights into food supply chains and short food supply chains based on a bibliometric analysis, while Kamble et al. (2020) proposed a framework for managers in the agri-food supply chain based on an extensive literature review, to increase supply chain visibility and resources. Finally, Sharma et al. (2020) applied a systematic literature review of machine learning applications in agricultural supply chains.

These studies demonstrate the pressing need to examine the “green” side of SCM in the food sector. They show that the number of empirical papers in this area is increasing, but that there is a lack of an integrated perspective for holistically linking recent trends and facets of the FSCM. The focus is on very specific viewpoints rather than a broader exploration. To increase our understanding of the intellectual progress and knowledge structure of food sustainable supply chain management (FSSCM), a comprehensive analysis is required. Thus, in the present paper, we aim to outline a comprehensive framework of the research and current trends in the FSSCM, and to identify specific research gaps that must be addressed.

To achieve this, earlier review analyses of FSSCM and broad research trends are identified objectively and systematically, by providing an analysis of the evolution of FSSCM over the past years, exploring the international research, studying the mainly empirical FSSCM research, examining the research tools applied, identifying any issues that arise, and by identifying the main gaps and directions for future research in the field of FSSCM.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the methodology used for the literature review. Section 3 provides the results and analyses of the selected papers. Sections 4 and 5 present the findings, a discussion and the implications in terms of FSSCM that can enrich further research. Finally, a conclusion and limitations are presented in Section 6 .

2. Methodology

As other studies take various specific perspectives, we applied a comprehensive analysis of the literature focussing on the link between sustainability and FSCM. This offers a complete view and several insights for further studies in various emerging business contexts.

Unlike other conventionally structured literature reviews, a systematic review was selected as this can be effective in managing the exploration of a huge number of academic publications and enables the development of a complex framework for the research subjects ( Garcia-Buendia et al. , 2021 ). The method can also help researchers and scholars explore the literature by considering its bibliographic elements ( Xu et al. , 2020 ). This analytical approach also helps in terms of recognizing the main features and definitions of specific research field(s), identifying the main research questions and gaps, identifying the theoretical area in which the analyses will have an effect, understanding the theoretical concepts and their terminology, providing a list of the relevant resources available, and highlighting the research designs, methodologies and approaches that can be applied ( Soni and Kodali, 2011 ; Fahimnia et al. , 2015 ; Feng et al. , 2017 ).

Time horizon: The first step is the selection of a time period. The exploration period for academic and research articles is between 1997 and early 2021, as SCM and corporate social responsibility (CSR) were implemented in the food industry to a greater extent after 1997 ( Henk and Hans, 1997 ). We end our paper collection in early 2021.

Selection of publications: Only papers written in English were selected, and the articles were selected in Scopus. This database is commonly used by management science researchers (or in related fields) for bibliometric analyses or systematic literature review methods in SCM ( Soni and Kodali, 2011 ; Fahimnia et al. , 2015 ). The Scopus database has greater coverage than the Web of Science, and it was deemed more appropriate for exploring complex research areas that are constantly changing and developing ( Feng et al. , 2017 ).

The keywords used for the selection of the publications: The keywords chosen for developing the search of the main publications in Scopus were “supply”, “food”, and “sustainabl*”. In total, after using the “title, abstract, keywords” search in the Scopus, 1,930 papers were found by searching with these keywords. “Sustainabl*” involves environmental, economic, and social facets, and thus papers identified by searching for “sustainabl*” and “supply” were examined. The papers resulting from the searches were then analysed for information including title, author(s), affiliation(s), source title, number of citations, keywords, abstract and references.

The categorization of academic publications according to the Association of Business Schools (ABS) 2018 list: The number of papers was further reduced by selecting only academic and well-referred journals that were considered in this list. Of the 1,930 papers, some were non-referred publications appearing in 0-star journals, magazines and conference proceedings that did not follow a rigorous scientific editorial approach. Chapters of books and whole books were also not selected for the analysis. After deleting these, 733 articles remained and were filtered from the total number of downloaded publications.

Categorization of academic publications: After reading the abstracts and the complete papers, the number was further reduced by considering the relevance of the publications. The sample size was condensed in this phase to create a representative data set. The rule for selecting the articles was that they had to be related to the food sector, supply chain management and sustainability. Thus, 176 papers remained.

Systematic classifications of the papers: The articles were then categorized according to leading journals in FSSCM research and journal name per number of published articles; number of published articles in FSSCM research per field; number of publications; trending articles about the food sustainable supply chain; geographical locations by region of the first author's affiliation; the methodology used; theoretical frameworks; tool/research methods; data collection; the entity of analysis and sustainability issues.

3. Results and analysis

All of the identified papers are presented, discussed and analysed in the following sections in terms of their various aspects and features.

3.1 Year-based classification of number of publications

The number of articles about FSSCM has increased, probably due to the increased interest and awareness of managers and academics in the area of sustainability and SCM. The annual number of published articles has increased in recent times (2017–2020) to three times that of the 2015–2016 period (in fact, in 2017, 26 papers were published; in 2018, 29 articles were proposed; while in 2019 and 2020, 23 and 27 studies were focused on the selected topics).

3.2 Journal-based categorization of papers

This categorization illustrates the frequency of papers presented in various leading academic journals. Many of these appear to be very interested in issues and problems related to FSSCM. These include Business Strategy and the Environment (BSE), the British Food Journal (BFJ), Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management (CSREM), Food Policy (FP), Industrial Management and Data Systems (IMDS), International Journal of Production Economics (IJPE), International Journal of Production Research (IJPR), Journal of Cleaner Production (JCP), Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management (JMTM), Production Planning and Control (PPC), and Supply Chain Management – An International Journal (SCM-IJ).

In total, 176 papers that focused on SCM definitions and features in the food industry from the perspective of sustainability were selected. This demonstrates that a considerable number of papers were published in the relevant fields of study. Table 1 shows the number of total articles published (PSC) and average global citations received per paper (AGC), and most are from JCP (49 PSC, 28.24 AGC), followed by IJPE (18 PSC, 94.56 AGC), PPC (7 PSC, 4.14 AGC), SCM-IJ (7 PSC, 17.29 AGC), and BSE (6 PSC, 21.67 AGC). Considering the average global citations received per paper (AGC), the journals with the highest are IJPE (18 PSC, 94.56 AGC), IJPR (5 PSC, 81.60 AGC), FP (4 PSC, 75.50 AGC), CSREM (4 PSC, 41.25 AGC) and JCP (49 PSC, 28.24 AGC).

Moreover, the distribution of published articles in FSSCM research per field (economics; ethics-csr management; international business and area; information management; marketing; operations research and management science; organizational studies; regional studies; sector; social studies), based on how they are ranked in the ABS Journal Guide of 2018 was analysed.

It was highlighted that, especially, in the fields of “Operations Research and Management Science” and “Sector”, there were many articles published in 2018, 2019 and 2020 in the realm of FSSCM.

3.3 Categorization of publications based on the geographical location of first authors

Publications are classified based on the first authors' affiliated regions and include developed and emerging economies. This classification clearly shows that most papers are from developed countries in Europe (63%), Asia (18%) and North America (8%), with less attention paid to FSSCM in developing areas such as South America (5%) and Africa (1%), although many countries in these regions are still mainly agrarian.

3.4 Categorization of trending articles in the field of FSSCM

Several of the papers achieved a remarkable number of total citations. The data presented in Table 2 show that two papers gained more than 300 total citations, four achieved over 200, and the remaining four publications gained more than 100 total citations.

3.5 Categorization based on methodology and tools/research methods

FSSCM papers can be analysed according to the methodology (approach) applied. Most publications utilized a qualitative approach (78%) and only 22% take a quantitative approach.

Table 3 shows that theoretical and empirical explorations of SCM sustainability in the food sector have been conducted ( Pohlmann et al. , 2020 ; Yakavenka et al. , 2020 ; Khan et al. , 2021 ).

Case study analysis is the most used (26%: 46 papers) followed by statistical analysis (22%: 38 papers), conceptual analysis and/or frameworks (19%: 34 articles), mathematical models (13%: 23 articles), quality tool (11%: 19 articles) and finally bibliometric analysis and/or literature review (9%: 16 papers). Examples of the methodologies and tools applied to this complex concept include the following: Taghikhah et al. (2020) used several mathematical models to explore the relation between consumer preferences and environmental factors related to food production. Morley (2020) used case studies to analyse the impact of public procurement on various food company strategies. Thomé et al . (2020) used a structured literature review to examine studies of short food supply chains. Sharma et al. (2020) statistically analysed aspects of food and other industries during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

3.6 Research publications categorization on the basis of data collection

We first examine the data collection (data sources) applied in the FSSCM papers and find that the majority of the publications use primary data (i.e. survey, experiment, interviews, focus groups, observation, etc.) (56%: 99 papers). Secondary data (i.e. archival, content extraction, bibliometric records, etc.) are used in 46 papers (26%), a combination of primary and secondary data is used in 10 (6%), and 21 papers (12%) do not use data collection as they are based on conceptual analyses, viewpoint research, etc.

3.7 Research publications categorization based on issues of FSSCM

We then categorize the papers based on the FSSCM issues addressed, as shown in Figure 2 . FSSCM involves multiple sustainability issues, and the majority of articles focused on “supplier management” (20%: 36 papers). “Sustainable development” was the next most common (17%: 30 papers), followed by “collaboration and coordination management” in 25 (14%), “performance management” in 17 (10%), “circular economy” in 15 (9%), “logistic management” in 14 (8%), “strategic management” in 11 (6%), “innovation” in 10 (6%), “agriculture” in 6 (3%), a “comprehensive view” (involving more than one issue) in 5 (3%), “quality management” in 4 (2%), and “other issues” were analysed in 3 papers (2%).

Thus, “supplier management”, “sustainable development” and “collaboration and coordination management” were the most common issues, covered by over half of the total selected publications. Other issues are also significant in the area of FSSCM, but not to the same extent, while others are mainly neglected (i.e. “agriculture” and “quality management”)

3.8 Research publications categorization on the basis of theoretical framework

The theoretical framework applied to develop the selected papers was then explored. Nearly two-thirds (114) of the articles did not follow any specific theoretical approach. The stakeholder approach was considered in 11 articles, 8 papers were based on the triple bottom line, 8 took the life cycle approach, 7 the circular economy approach, 6 applied resource-based view (RBV) and knowledge-based view (KBV) frameworks, 6 the institutional theory, 4 applied the resource dependency theory and 2 the decision theory-based framework. Other approaches (i.e. country of origin, TOE, critical success factors, etc.) were taken in ten articles.

3.9 Publications categorization on the basis of entity of analysis

Finally, we examined the main perspectives taken when exploring FSSCM issues.

Many research publications use the supply chain as the entity of analysis (EOA) (70 papers). However, a significant number (23) consider the whole supply network or the manufacturer's point of view (21); 18 are mainly conceptual; 10 are based on the distributor's perspective; 10 take a dyadic view (more than 1 EOA); 9 take the suppliers'/farmers' perspectives; the logistic industry is examined in 7; consumers in 5; and the remaining 3 papers do not use any of these EOA.

4. Discussion: main themes and trends in FSSCM

The increase and evolution of FSSC studies suggests that supply chains in the food sector are moving towards a sustainable approach. Several new trends have emerged in the field, which focus on both intra- and inter-firm dimensions ( Figure 3 ).

Increasingly, the multiplicity of stakeholders in FSSCM and the collaboration/coordination challenges this brings have been explored throughout the food supply chain phases. These include the sustainable purchasing relationships of food retailers ( Chkanikova, 2016 ); increasing legitimacy in the food industry ( Czinkota et al. , 2014 ); strategies for reducing food waste within the circular economy framework ( Dora, 2019 ); and tools for increasing collaboration and coordination throughout the food supply chain ( Vodenicharova, 2020 ). Collaboration has gained the attention of researchers exploring the competitive advantages derived from a sustainable approach by leveraging environmental information along the supply chain ( Solér et al. , 2010 ), the alignment of sourcing with marketing and branding strategies ( Croom et al. , 2007 ), and dynamic capabilities ( Beske et al. , 2014 ).

“Collaboration and coordination management”, “supplier management” and “sustainable development” are the most common issues, covered by over half of the total publications. These include collaboration with partners along the supply chain ( Pakdeechoho and Sukhotu, 2018 ), the criteria for selecting suppliers ( Wilhelm et al. , 2016 ), the alignment of supplier-producer procedures ( Vodenicharova, 2020 ), the overall efficiency of the supply chain ( Danny and Priscila, 2004 ), and collaborations adopting mandatory and voluntary standards when assessing environmental, social and economic performances ( Glover et al. , 2014 ; Touboulic and Walker, 2015 ; Govindan, 2018 ). Other recent emerging challenges include more general sustainability-related aspects, such as innovation and the circular economy. On the other hand, the inclusion of quality management in the field of FSCM seems to be scarce in academic literature ( Ting et al. , 2014 ; Siddh et al. , 2018 ; Feng et al. , 2020 ), even though, there are several authors who tried to build a more centred approach in reviewing quality issues inside the analysis of sustainable supply chain. For example, Manzini et al. (2014) highlighted the existing connection between food quality and environmental sustainability of supply chain strategies and tactics, while Winter and Knemeyer (2013) explored how sustainability can be included in supply chain quality and, Ilbery and Maye (2005) presented a list of important sustainable food standards linked with environmental quality, socially inclusiveness and other relevant items.

Besides, the findings suggest that an integration of intra- and inter-firm processes can be crucial for the effective sustainable performance of organizations, as if FSSCM is based on sustainability it can have a positive effect on all stages of the supply chain ( Erol et al. , 2011 ; Kahi et al. , 2017 ). Unlike traditional performance measurements, sustainable performance involves comprehensively considering social, economic, and environmental factors ( Sharma et al. , 2017 ; Siddh et al. , 2018 ). Pullman et al. (2009) focussed on how to improve the quality performance of the food supply chain, which in turn improves cost performance. Raut et al. (2019) analysed operational/technology-based and human resource-based performance indicators of the sustainable value chain that help those in the food sector minimize their effect on the environment while boosting their economic performance. Thus, when proposing new “green” performance measurements, food industry researchers should include the bases of sustainability in their analyses of FSSCM.

The development of these new FSSCM trends suggests that this field of research will continue to grow as many scholars and academics explore the specific features and perspectives applicable to developed countries. The literature review shows that few studies consider less developed countries, with just 1% having African authors. Developing economies, such as those in Asia, have however had more attention in recent years. Some studies show that a lack of infrastructure or inefficient logistics could result in more food waste and inefficient processes ( Naik and Suresh, 2018 ; Kumar et al. , 2020 ). This is a major issue in FSSCM, as it is expected that 90% of the global population will live in developing countries by 2050 ( PRB, 2020 ). Sustainability is therefore vital in the food global supply chains of these countries, which are characterized by strong interdependencies along the north-south axis.

Most scholars investigating the sustainability of the food supply chain directly collect their data using tools such as surveys, experiments, interviews, and focus groups. The case study is the most common method for these explorations, as indicated in previous research ( Ashby et al. , 2012 ; Massaroni et al. , 2015 ). This emphasis on case studies indicates the novel and fast-changing nature of the field, and that more in-depth investigations are required to identify its boundaries and foundations. However, modelling-based studies are increasing in number (e.g. Chen et al. , 2018 ) as they address the need for a more integrated understanding of sustainable supply chains ( Brandenburg et al. , 2014 ). In addition, the lack of specific theoretical frameworks in two-thirds of the studies indicates that the research field is still emerging, and thus extensive opportunities for research that bridges the gap between theory and practice are presented.

5. Implications and research directions

This systematic literature review offers several implications for practitioners, and insights for further research in the field of FSSCM.

Food supply chains make a significant contribution to the global economy and sustainable development, as they involve suppliers and other stakeholders from various industries working together so food can reach the final consumer ( Joshi et al. , 2020 ; Kamble et al. , 2020 ; Thomé et al. , 2020 ). Kamble et al. (2020) suggest that better economic performance and social wellbeing can be achieved by food suppliers, retailers and others only if critical post-harvest losses can be avoided by applying new methods linked with supply chain visibility and sustainable resources. Thus, the focus should be on the upstream of the supply chain, particularly in many under-developed and developing nations where agriculture is still the essential basis of the economy ( Taghikhah et al. , 2020 ). Some studies were identified as being conducted in developing geographic areas, but more should be encouraged due to the greater potential FSSCM can bring.

The specific directions identified include those of Kumar Sharma et al. (2019) , who stated that the circular economy and sustainability are complex and must be managed by decision makers and practitioners in both developed and developing nations. They proposed a model that can inform the implementation of circular economy-driven sustainability FSC activities in emerging and under-developed economies, particularly in India.

Asian et al. (2019) examined how the increasing costs of logistics, lower yields, and strategic barriers have a negative impact on the level of competitiveness of farmers in developing countries. The authors proposed an algorithm to help key decision makers address the challenges of the FSC and sustainable development. Further studies can also develop theories and practical tools based on specific features, as these geographic areas can support the food industry through new sustainable strategies and tactics.

Such strategies and tactics are high on the agendas of many types of companies, but the business models of start-ups differ from those of other organizations and thus affect their creation and implementation. Larger companies may be able to better sustain the impact of the evolving trends of FSSCM, but they may also be less flexible than start-ups in finding opportunities and innovating ( Suchek et al. , 2021 ).

As suggested in previous sections, researchers must also focus on assessing the reliability and trustworthiness of FSSCM theories, as we found that many papers focussed on theory building. However, these theories generally address specific facets and thus the results cannot be easily generalized. Our study enriches the research by reviewing the most common theoretical approaches (e.g. the stakeholder approach, triple bottom line, the life cycle approach), and others that are less used (i.e. RBV and KBV, institutional theory, resource dependency theory, decision theory-based framework, etc.). This requires further exploration as a need to build a more solid conceptual framework for FSSCM research has also emerged.

In terms of FSSCM measurement and control, our analysis reveals an increase in the development of standardized constructs, which can be used to monitor and control how companies involved in the FSC achieve a successful level of sustainable development ( Folkerts and Koehorst, 1998 ; Yakovleva et al. , 2012 ; Sharma et al. , 2017 ). This is required as most aspects of FSSCM are associated with government regulation, incentive policies, stakeholders' approval of pioneering “green” products/services and the associated cultural and social consequences, and entrepreneurs' inclinations to follow ground-breaking sustainable principles. These trends are often related to the market, and involve accessibility, the costs of raw materials, and new technology, which require specific knowledge and thus may incur huge costs that many companies cannot afford.

In terms of the EOA, we suggest that future empirical research should focus on intra-functional and intra-firm exploration at corporate and network levels, or on dyads that reveal the relationships between pairs of organizations (i.e. farms, manufacturers, distributors, etc.). Similarly, Siddh et al. (2017) also emphasized that empirical research should focus on exploring intra-firm and intra-functional relations, as integration between companies should be encouraged before sustainability at different levels of the FSC is achieved. Finally, the role of end consumers in the FSSCM is still largely unexplored but important, as they can prompt organizations, dyads and networks to adopt more efficient and effective methods of introducing sustainable innovations and identifying new niche opportunities in this area.

6. Conclusion

In this paper we provide a literature review of papers focussed on the various facets of the FSSCM. We identify relevant papers published over the past 23 years (1997 to early 2021), with the aim of informing academics and practitioners about the research landscape, gaps, and current and future trends in the FSSCM. The literature review considers 176 influential peer-reviewed articles using accurate selection procedures and content investigation.

The majority of the selected papers were published in the last eight years (2014–2021), probably due to the increased awareness of environmental problems and of the need to reduce hunger globally (Zero Hunger is Goal Two of the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda), the increased food risks, an awareness of the benefits of decreasing food wastage, health management and of the well-being of people in all geographical areas (Goal Three: Good Health and Well-being).

FSSCM research is undoubtedly increasing, but few studies succeed in combining the various sustainability constructs with the main elements of the FSCM, particularly in the context of developing/under-developed countries. Thus, there are opportunities to increase our understanding of the integrative factors, particularly in less-developed regions of the world.

Our research has various limitations, like most studies. First, we used the specific keywords “supply”, “food”, and “sustainabl*” to select the articles from the Scopus database. While this identified nearly 2000 articles, using different keywords may have a different outcome. Additionally, only one database was used, so researchers can explore others such as Web of Science and compare their findings to ours, and although many analyses were identified, other methods of bibliometric analysis and systematic literature review may offer different insights into the specific context. Thus, we suggest that researchers apply different bibliometric methods when addressing this research domain.

Steps of the systematic literature review

Main sustainability issues in the field of FSSCM

Trends in FSSCM research

Leading journals in FSSCM research

Applied tools/research methods in the field of FSSCM

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Acknowledgements

Although the views and ideas expressed in this article are those of Maria Palazzo and Agostino Vollero; “sections 1; 3; 3.1; 3.2; 3.6; 3.8; 4” are attributed to Maria Palazzo; while “sections 2; 3.3; 3.4; 3.5; 3.7; 3.9; 5; 6” are attributed to Agostino Vollero.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

This article is part of the research topic.

Conservation Agriculture for Sustainable Food Production Systems

Optimizing planting geometries in Eucalyptus-based food production systems for enhanced yield and carbon sequestration in northwestern India Provisionally Accepted

• 1 National Institute of Abiotic Stress Management (ICAR), India
• 2 Chaudhary Charan Singh Haryana Agricultural University, India
• 3 Faculty of Science, Zarqa University, Jordan
• 4 Central Coastal Agricultural Research Institute (ICAR), India
• 5 Central Arid Zone Research Institute (ICAR), India
• 6 Indian Institute of Soil and Water Conservation (ICAR), India
• 7 Department of Botany and Microbiology, College of Science, King Saud University, Saudi Arabia
• 8 College of Science, King Saud University, Saudi Arabia
• 9 Laboratory for Integrated Molecular Plant Physiology Research, Department of Biology, Faculty of Sciences, University of Antwerp, Belgium
• 10 Department of Agronomy, Faculty of Agriculture, Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan, Pakistan
• 11 Mahatma Phule Krishi Vidyapeeth, India
• 12 Forest Research Institute (FRI), India

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

The integration of trees into diverse land use systems holds potential for India to meet nationally determined contribution (NDC) targets under the Paris Climate Agreement. With a target of sequestering 2.5 to 3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent by 2030, the study focused on the widespread and economically viable eucalyptus-based agroforestry, practiced widely in various planting geometries tailored to meet industrial end-use requirements. In this context, a detailed study was conducted to quantify the influence of five planting geometries of eucalyptus on intercrops (Dhaincha - barley rotation) biomass, soil properties, and carbon stock of the system during 2009-2016. Results revealed that biomass accumulation of different tree components was 62.50–74.09% in stem; 6.59–9.14 % in branch; 3.18–5.73% in leaves; 12.20–20.44% and 1.71–3.48% in fine roots across the planting geometries. The mean carbon content of stem, branch, leaves and roots was 49.00, 47.00, 43.00 and 49.00 %, respectively. Over the 8–years period, geometry of 3×3 m performed better in terms of total biomass production (344.60 Mg ha− 1 by tree biomass and 62.53 Mg ha−1 by intercrops). The tree diameter at breast height and height (DBH2H) was found as a very good predictor of dry weight followed by DBH alone. Among various functions (linear, allometric, logistic, Gompertz, Chapman and exponential), the best-fit equation was allometric i.e. B=300.96*DBH2H0.93 (Adj R2- 0.96) for eucalyptus based on universal model adequacy and validation criteria. The carbon sequestration rate was maximum (20.79 Mg C ha–1 yr–1) in 3×3 m followed by 17×1×1 m. The total carbon stock of eucalypts–based system (tree+crop+soil) varied significantly under different planting geometries and sole crop rotation (dhaincha–barley). The higher carbon storage (237.27 Mg ha–1) obtained from 3×3 m spacing and further partitioning carbon stock in tree—166.29 Mg ha–1, crop—25.01 Mg ha–1 and soil—45.97 Mg ha–1. Tree-based systems were valuable components of agriculture, advocating for their widespread adoption to reduce CO2 emissions and generate income through carbon credits. These findings will provide crucial insights of sustainable land use practices and advance India’s commitment towards adaptation of climate change mitigation strategies.

Keywords: Biomass equations, Validation, Destructive sampling, agroforestry, Biomass productivity, carbon stock

Received: 14 Feb 2024; Accepted: 06 May 2024.

Copyright: © 2024 Chavan, Dhillon, Sirohi, Saleh, A R, Arumugam, Jinger, Halli, Pradhan, Kakade, Morade, Chichaghare, Rawale, Alokla, Alaraidh, AbdElgawad, Fahad, Nandgude and Singh. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Mx. Uthappa A R, Central Coastal Agricultural Research Institute (ICAR), Old Goa, India Mx. Shah Fahad, Department of Agronomy, Faculty of Agriculture, Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan

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• Published: 28 February 2022

Effect of COVID-19 on agricultural production and food security: A scientometric analysis

• Collins C. Okolie   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6633-6717 1 &
• Abiodun A. Ogundeji   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7356-5668 1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  9 , Article number:  64 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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• Environmental studies

Coronavirus disease has created an unexpected negative situation globally, impacting the agricultural sector, economy, human health, and food security. This study examined research on COVID-19 in relation to agricultural production and food security. Research articles published in Web of Science and Scopus were sourced, considering critical situations and circumstance posed by COVID-19 pandemic with regards to the shortage of agricultural production activities and threat to food security systems. In total, 174 published papers in BibTeX format were downloaded for further study. To assess the relevant documents, authors used “effects of COVID-19 on agricultural production and food security (ECAP-FS) as a search keyword for research published between 2016 and April 2021 utilising bibliometric innovative methods. The findings indicated an annual growth rate of about 56.64%, indicating that research on ECAP-FS increased over time within the study period. Nevertheless, the research output on ECAP-FS varied with 2020 accounting for 38.5%, followed by 2021 with 37.9% as at April 2021. The proposed four stage processes for merging two databases for bibliometric analyses clearly showed that one can run collaboration network analyses, authors coupling among other analyses by following our procedure and finally using net2VOSviewer, which is embedded in Rstudio software package. The study concluded that interruptions in agricultural food supply as a result of the pandemic impacted supply and demand shocks with negative impacts on all the four pillars of food security.

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Introduction.

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has created an unusual situation globally (Alam and Khatun, 2021 ). Barely a year ago early in the year 2020, the unusual nature of coronavirus caused most governments to implement stringent steps in their countries to restrain the virus’s spread. The novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) disease impacted economies throughout the world, disproportionately impacting individuals who were already susceptible to poverty and hunger (Laborde et al., 2020a ; Ceballos et al., 2020 ). In late December 2019, the virus was discovered in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China. The pandemic caused by COVID-19 presented a major danger to human health, the economy, and food security in both industrialised and emerging nations (Mottaleb et al., 2020 ; Carroll et al., 2020 ; Alam and Khatun, 2021 ). Lessons learned from China revealed that various COVID-19 countermeasures such as lockdown in the country hampered production. This poses a significant risk to the long-term food supply (FAO, 2020 ), and has a negative impact on the economy, resulting in economic decline and crisis (Bai, 2020 ). It is important to understand that certain precautional and control efforts compromise agricultural production (Singh et al., 2021 ).

The virus wreaked havoc on the agricultural production sector, which is at the heart of the food chain (Pu and Zhong, 2020 ). The global spread of coronavirus resulted in the greatest economic downturn since World War Two (Hanna et al., 2020 ; Xu et al., 2021 ). The epidemic’s major impact on agricultural labour input was the restriction of labour mobility. Farmers were not permitted to just go out and gather in any way except to purchase essentials. This resulted in a manpower scarcity and reduced mass production efficiency. For instance, due to a scarcity of migrant experts, producers from Sichuan, Hunan, and Hubei in the grain-producing districts in China (south-eastern coastal district) were not able to sow their crops in good time (Pu and Zhong, 2020 ). Furthermore, wheat and pulse harvesting in northwest India was hampered due to a lack of migrant labour (Dev, 2020 ). Vegetable farmers in Ethiopia incurred not just financial loss as a result of overstocked items, but also from a lack of vital inputs (Tamru et al., 2020 ). Before the pandemic, suppliers may have planted six hectares in a single day, but due to the difficulties in finding tractor drivers during the pandemic, they were only able to cover three hectares a day (Pu and Zhong, 2020 ). Any interruptions in agricultural food supply will indeed result in supply and demand shocks, which will have an immediate effect on the agricultural sector of the economy with long-term economic performance and food security implications (Gregorio and Ancog, 2020 ).

Food security refers to a situation where all individuals at all time have continuous physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to fulfil their dietary needs and food choices for an active and healthy lifestyle (Elsahoryi et al., 2020 ). Food security has been jeopardised both directly and indirectly as a result of the virus’s destabilisation of food systems and the effects of lockdowns on family revenue and physical access to food (Devereux et al., 2020 ). The presence of coronavirus disease has a negative impact on all the four pillars of food security, viz. availability of food, accessibility of food, utilisation of food, and stability of food (Nechifor et al., 2021 ; Laborde et al., 2020b ). According to Genkin and Mikheev ( 2020 ), the report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), World Trade Organization, and World Health Organization (WHO) note the threat of a food catastrophe triggered by the current coronavirus pandemic, with a risk of a global “food shortage” owing to interruptions in the trade industry’s supply chain. According to the report, global commerce contracted by roughly 20% in 2020, with 90–120 million human beings falling into severe destitution and over 300 million facing food security issues in emerging nations. To combat the COVID-19 pandemic, world leaders implemented steps to decrease the number of commodities carried by sea, air and land, as well as labour migration at national and global levels. These variables contributed to a widespread disturbance in agricultural output and food distribution systems, posing challenges to the transportation of food and agricultural resources (Genkin and Mikheev, 2020 ).

Present literature centred on the effect of coronavirus on food security or effect of coronavirus on agricultural production (Elsahoryi et al., 2020 ; Nchanji and Lutomia, 2021 ). Despite the growing body of research on coronavirus, agricultural production, and food security, few studies have attempted to conduct a thorough assessment of the literature and map the present level of scientific knowledge on the effect of coronavirus on agricultural production and food security (ECAP-FS). Hence, the goal of this research was to examine the effect of coronavirus on agricultural production and food security by employing bibliometric analyses techniques to recognise keywords in connection to two core aspects, namely the most prolific or productive writers and the most collaborative nations, and then to examine the strength of their association over the study period. The study characterised intellectual processes further by visualising and recognising the advancement of the co-citation network, cooperation network, and trends in ECAP-FS research. This research will not only aid in the identification of present research on ECAP-FS, but also contributes to an improved comprehension of the scientific knowledge of coronavirus and its impact on agricultural production, food security, and the investigation of its evolution via published papers included in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases. Because one database is unlikely to provide a comprehensive picture of knowledge and trends in a field, the authors recommend a four stage processes to achieve a merged database that integrates WoS and Scopus and then deletes identical publications using RStudio or R-package to perform author coupling, keywords co-occurrence network visualisation, university collaboration networks, and others using net2VOSviewer. This study will be among the few that explains how to integrate two datasets and utilise them to conduct different network associations in bibliometrix R-package (RStudio v.4.0.3 software).

Method and data collection

The scientometric technique was used to retrieve articles relating to the effect of coronavirus on agricultural production and food security. This method used resources from two different databases, WoS and Scopus, for the systematic reviews. Table 1 shows the eligibility and exclusion criteria that was used to access the relevant documents. The various steps employed in the review process were (databases, identification, screening, eligibility, merging, duplicate removal and included documents) (see Fig. 1 ). Processing and analysis of the data were then applied to the remaining documents. Scientometrics is defined as the research approach utilised in analysing and assessing science, innovation, and technology by applying statistics and quantitative analysis to explain the distribution and visualisation patterns of research within a specific nation, issue, field or institution (Orimoloye and Ololade, 2021 ). Scientometric evaluations have been used to analyse scientific trends and outputs, as well as the evolution of research, author productivity, journals, and nations, as well as to discover and measure international collaboration (Orimoloye and Ololade, 2021 ).

WoS: Web of Science.

WoS and Scopus were the two-database used for this study. WoS is a database collection administered by Thomson Reuters Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) that contains databases on humanities, social sciences, biology (i.e., Biosis), science (i.e., Core Collection) and computers (i.e., Inspec). WoS was previously the only and biggest accessible database for bibliometric analysis. However, Scopus that was launched by Elsevier, with ease of use in universities throughout the globe emerged as a key rival for doing such studies (Echchakoui, 2020 ). Scopus has the largest abstract and citation databases with over 22,800 journals from 5000 publishers worldwide was used in the review (Shaffril et al., 2018 ). Moreover, It is the most comprehensive interdisciplinary database of peer-reviewed literature in the social sciences, and is generally acknowledged and utilised for quantitative analyses (Guerrero-Baena et al., 2014 ).

Criteria for eligibility and exclusion

Various qualifying and exclusion criteria were considered. Title-based search for rapid visibility and retrieval was used. According to Ekundayo and Okoh ( 2018 ), a title-specific search offers the advantages of low loss, considerable retrieval, and sensitivity when compared to other types of searches such as a topic, field, or author search. First, concerning literature type, only journals and final articles were selected, which meant Article in Press, etc., were excluded. Secondly, non-English articles were excluded. Thirdly, a period of 6 years was used followed by the subject area, which focused on Environmental, Social, Agricultural, and Biological Sciences (Table 1 ) (Shaffril et al., 2018 ).

Systematic review process

To explore the current literature on ECAP-FS, we conducted a comprehensive literature review according to the rules provided by Tranfield et al. ( 2003 ). The systematic review process for this study involved four stages. The review process was performed in April 2021. The first stage was the selection of databases (WoS and Scopus). The second stage pinpointed keywords utilised for the search process. Based on prior research, keywords similar and related to the effect of COVID-19 on agricultural output and food security were used with a total of ( n  = 9, 421) published records found on WoS and Scopus, respectively (Table 2 ). The third stage was screening. Out of ( n  = 9, 421) papers eligible for evaluation at this stage, a total of ( n  = 7, 203) papers were excluded. The fourth stage was eligibility where the complete articles were accessible. Following a thorough review, a total of ( n  = 1, 46) publications were eliminated since some did not focus on the effect of coronavirus on agricultural production and food security. The fifth stage was merging the two documents ( n  = 6, 172 = 178). The sixth stage was the removal of duplicates ( n  = 4). The last round of evaluation yielded a total of ( n  = 174) papers for qualitative analysis (Fig. 1 ).

Processing and analysis of data

The research assessed data obtained for scientometric investigation utilising RStudio v.4.0.3 software with bibliometrix R-package and net2VOSviewer after reading the articles relevant to the study. The data were imported into RStudio, transformed to a bibliographic data frame, and normalised for duplicate matches (Aria and Cuccurullo, 2017 ; Ekundayo and Okoh, 2018 ). Net2VOSviewer (net,vos.path = NULL) embedded in RStudio v.4.0.3 software were used for visualisation. The VOSviewer programme created by Van Eck and Waltman ( 2009 ) is often used to visualise and evaluate a bibliometric network. Hamidah et al. ( 2021 ) and Zhang and Yuan ( 2019 ) made use of VOSviewer to analyse a bibliographic map on energy performance. Park and Nagy ( 2018 ) used VOSviewer to examine building control bibliographic data, and Van Eck and Waltman ( 2017 ) analysed citation-based clustering in the field of astronomy and astrophysics using VOSviewer. The research made use of Net2VOSviewer embedded in R studio to make visualisation maps, such as authors coupling, keyword co-occurrence network, and university collaboration network, based on bibliographic data. Each circle on the VOSviewer visual map represents a word. The term activity is represented by the circle and text size. The big circle and text show the chosen terms in a field. The distance between the two words reflects the degree of their association. In this case, the relationship between two words will be greater if the distance between them is small (Hamidah et al., 2021 ).

Web of Science and Scopus database merging for bibliometric analysis

The authors suggest the following four stage approach to combine the two databases shown in Fig. 1 and Table 3 .

As soon as required articles were sourced, we downloaded the documents separately from WoS and Scopus databases. For WoS, we clicked on export, which redirected us to another window where we selected “other file formats” under record content, and “BiTeX” under file format before we clicked export. For Scopus, we went to export document setting where we ticked all relevant boxes including “BibTeX” before clicking export. The second step was to transform (WoS.bib and Scopus.bib) to “bibtex” files. Here we used R or Rstudio software by loading the bibliometrix package “install.packages” (“bibliometrix”), and “library(bibliometrix)”, After that we specified the pathway using the command file1<- “path/savedrecs.bib” and file2 < - “path/scopus.bib” for WoS and Scopus files, respectively. After that we converted file (1&2) using command “f1<-convert2df(file1, dbsource = “isi”, format = “bibtex”)” and “f2<-convert2df(file2, dbsource = “scopus”, format = “bibtex”)” for WoS and Scopus respectively. We merged the two databases in R/Rstudio. For this operation to be successful, we used the command “j <-mergeDbSources(f1, f2, remove.duplicated = FALSE)”. Finally, the duplicate documents were removed using the command “M < -duplicatedMatching(j, Field = “TI”,tol = 0.95)”. We performed a bibliometric analysis for bibtex file in Rstudio, using Aria and Cuccurullo’s ( 2017 ) techniques and scripts in R, and utilising the net2VOSviewer for keywords co-occurrence network, collaboration networks of universities, authors coupling, amongst others.

Bibliometric analyses results

During the survey period, 174 papers were published on ECAP-FS; their characteristics are shown in Table 4 . The research had 851 authors, with a cooperation index of 5.1 and a document/author ratio of 0.20 (4.89 authors/document). Except for nine authors who published alone, all 842 authors were part of multi-author publications.

During the research period, an average of 6.0 citations per document were recorded. Lotka’s law scientific output for ECAP-FS study revealed a constant of 0.70 and beta coefficient of 3.88, with a Kolmogorov–Smirnoff goodness-of-fit of 0.94. Table 5 and Fig. 2 displays published research on ECAP-FS from 2016 to April 2021 in conjunction with the total citation of papers on average by year. The yearly pace of development was 56.64, with a mean overall of 12 ± 6, indicating that ECAP-FS research increased over time. This outcome agrees with the work of El Mohadebe et al. ( 2020 ) who stated that the number of published articles increased exponentially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The rise in COVID-19 research reflects that it is a major danger to human health, the economy, and food security in industrialised and emerging nations (Carroll et al., 2020 ; Mottaleb et al., 2020 ; Alam and Khatun, 2021 ).

ATC/Y average total citations of articles published per year. NB: The yearly percentage rate of increase was 56.64.

During the survey period, research production varied, peaking in 2020 with 38.5% (67/174) of the total research output, followed by 2021 with 66 research articles accounting for 37.9% (66/174) during the same time. This result is liable to change when additional papers pertaining to ECAP-FS are published in 2021. The average total number of citations for published papers changed over time, peaking in 2016 (average = 11.8). Furthermore, the findings of this analysis identified the top 20 most prolific authors from 2016 to April 2021. Table 6 shows Gong B as the most productive author over the time, with six papers accounting for 3.45% of the total research publications on ECAP-FS. The following were placed second on the list: Baudron F, Peng W, and Zhang S who published three research articles each accounting for 1.7% of the total published research articles within the study period. The rest of the 17 authors published two articles within the same year. The quantity of a researcher’s academic output demonstrates their efficacy and propensity for conducting quality research (Orimoloye et al., 2021a )

Citation analysis reveals how many times a specific research article has been cited in other scientific articles. More cited research articles are considered significantly more influential than articles with fewer citations (Mishra et al., 2017 ; Nyam et al., 2020 ). Table 7 shows the top 20 papers on ECAP-FS in terms of citations in the field throughout the time. The list was compiled using the publications with the most citations (Echchakoui, 2020 ). In this research on ECAP-FS, Foyer et al. 2016 “Nature Plants” placed first with a total of 244 citations. Hart et al. 2018 “Functional Ecology” took second place with 60 citations, followed by Smiraglia D. 2016 “Environmental Research” with 52 citations during the same time period. Millar NS 2016 “Oecologia” and Tesfahunegn GB 2016 “Applied Geography” rated fourth and fifth with 43 and 42 citations, respectively. With 39, 23 and 21 citations, respectively, KC et al. 2018 “Plos One,” Pu and Zhong, 2020 “Global Food Security,” and Provenza FD 2019 “Frontiers in Nutrition” placed sixth, seventh, and eighth. As shown in Table 8 , the leading active writers were connected with institutions in both emerging and developed countries, including China (28), the United States (19), the United Kingdom (12), Italy (9), Spain (8), Australia (5), India (5), and Mexico (5). With the exception of China, the majority of the articles were from developed countries. China, the United States of America, United Kingdom, Italy, and Spain, among other countries, contributed the most articles in ECAP-FS, which is line with the work of Mottaleb et al. ( 2020 ). According to Orimoloye et al. ( 2021b ), research funding and scholarships have had a significant impact on the research output of many countries. As a result, this study indicates that economic assistance could help in the advancement of research in the area of ECAP-FS. Furthermore, during the research period, the total citation of published papers on average by each nation differed from one nation to another. Table 9 shows the top 20 citations by nation for ECAP-FS research papers. The data indicated that the most mentioned nations were industrialised ones, while China, a developing country, placed second among the most often referenced nations. The exceptional success of China research suggests that the nation performs well in sponsoring field research, possibly because the coronavirus originated in Wuhan City of China (Mottalab et al., 2020). Italy leads the way with 112 total citations and an average article citation of 12.44 for research papers published during the study duration, China was second with 107 citations and an average article citation of 3.82. During the same time period, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ethiopia, and Canada were placed third, fourth, fifth, and sixth, with total number of citations (average article citations) of 81 (4.26), 76 (6.33), 47 (23.50), and 40 (13.33), respectively.

This analysis also uncovered the most relevant sources for published academic research on ECAP-FS between 2016 and April 2021, as shown in Table 10 . Sustainability (Switzerland) was first with a total of 23 scientific papers on ECAP-FS. Agricultural Systems and Journal of Cleaner Production were ranked second and third with a total of 13 and 10 articles respectively. Global Food Security and Science of The Total Environment were rated fourth with eight articles each. Land was ranked fifth with five articles while Food Security, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Plos One were ranked sixth with four published articles each. Environmental Research and Journal of Integrative Agriculture rated seventh with three published articles on ECAP-FS throughout the review period.

Concerns are growing about the influence of COVID-19 on agricultural production, which could pose a significant threat to long-term food security and food supply (Pu and Zhong, 2020 ). Table 11 summarises the top 20 academics’ most relevant terms. In addition, Table 11 displays the most important keywords linked to ECAP-FS research, including keywords-plus (ID) as well as author keywords (DE). COVID-19, Food Security, Agriculture, Climate Change, Sustainable Development, Agricultural Production, Biodiversity, China, and Sustainability were among the nine keywords shared by keywords-plus (ID) and author keywords (DE). Eleven keywords were peculiar to authors’ keywords (Resilience, Ecosystem Services, Food Systems, COVID-19 Pandemic, Food Supply Chain, India, Land Take, Life Cycle Assessment, Nutrition, Conservation, and Dietary Diversity), and nine keywords were unique to keywords-Plus (Food Supply, Human, Article, Food Production, Land Use, Agricultural Robots, Agricultural Land, Controlled Study, and Cultivation). The distinct author keywords explicitly defined what COVID-19 affected as well as the means or elements engaged in the process (Nutrition, Dietary Diversity, Ecosystem Services, Resilience, Conservation, Food Systems, and Food Supply Chain of People). COVID-19 ( n  = 27, 15.5%), Food Security ( n  = 25, 14.4%), Agriculture ( n  = 18, 10.3%), Climate Change ( n  = 9, 5.2%), Sustainable Development ( n  = 5, 2.9%), Agricultural Production ( n  = 4, 2.3%), Biodiversity ( n  = 4, 2.3%), China ( n  = 4, 2.3%), COVID-19 Pandemic ( n  = 4, 2.3%) were author keyword phrases related with the detection of ECAP-FS.

The keyword analysis identified Food Security in 35 (20.1%) and 25 (14.4%) published papers by keyword-plus and author keyword, respectively, while Agricultural was found in 28 (16.1%) and 18 (10.3%) published papers by keyword-plus and author keyword, respectively. By author keyword and keyword-plus, Agricultural Production was detected in 4 (2.3%) and 28 (16.1%) publications, respectively. In the ECAP-FS study field, Climate Change was detected in 26 (14.9%) and 9 (5.2%) papers by keyword-plus and author keyword, respectively. The review indicates that research on ECAP-FS emphasised these agricultural-related issues several times, implying that COVID-19 has an effect on agriculture, agricultural production, sustainable development, food security, and food supply of the general public, which is exacerbated by climate change, and is a major danger to food security, economy and human health (Mottaleb et al., 2020 ).

The connection between influential authors, keywords, journals, and trending topics was investigated using co-citation network analysis (Leydesdorff, 2009 ). Articles are said to be co-cited when they are cited and appear in other publications’ reference lists (Nyam et al., 2020 ). The top 20 authors coupling in Fig. 3 explains the authors coupling on ECAP-FS-related research. Every node in the network symbolises a distinct author who is linked to others. Connecting lines reflect author-to-author linking routes. The number of lines from each node correlates to the number of published papers that referenced the writer. The cluster of authors network, which comprises 20 nodes (authors), has no less than 18 interconnections. Other indicators of often expressed ideas and frameworks linked to ECAP-FS include nation collaboration (Fig. 4 ) and university collaboration network (Fig. 5 ).

The top 20 authors coupling on agricultural production and food security published articles. (Every node in the network symbolises a distinct author who is linked to others. Connecting lines reflect author-to author linking routes).

The top 27 nation collaboration networks on agricultural production and food security. (Each node represents a country, and the lines represent their collaboration).

The top 20 university collaboration networks on agricultural production and food security research.

Authors with multiple affiliations have made significant contributions to nation and university collaborative networks (Figs. 4 and 5 ). Our findings indicated that studies on ECAP-FS were conducted at institutions in both advanced and developing nations between 2016 and April 2021. The Wageningen University (Netherland), the China Agricultural University (China), the Zhejiang University (Asia), and University of Pretoria (South Africa) had the greatest collaboration network on ECAP-FS studies followed by the University of Western Australia (Australia), University of Leeds (UK), University of Alberta (Canada), University of Sydney (Australia), Case Western Reserve University (USA), Chinese University of Hong Kong (China) and the International Crop Research Institute. The University of Oxford was the only university that did not collaborate with any of the universities during the study period. Figure 4 depicts the networks of collaboration on ECAP-FS for 27 countries. The number of collaboration paths varied from one to 17. The number of partnerships was highest in the USA ( n  = 17), followed by China (n = 10), Australia ( n  = 8), the United Kingdom ( n  = 8), Canada ( n  = 5), the Netherlands ( n  = 4), Germany ( n  = 4), South Africa ( n  = 4), Uganda ( n  = 3), India ( n  = 3), Malaysia ( n  = 2), Denmark ( n  = 2), France ( n  = 2), Spain ( n  = 2), and New Zealand ( n  = 2). The remaining nations had one collaboration network. This outcome is consistent with El Mohadab et al. ( 2020 ) as the analysis of a nation’s collaboration is a vital type of analysis, because it allows for the visualisation of the most influential nations in a given field of research, revealing the level of scientific cooperation between the countries. The following network colour codes were prominent: light green for the USA network; light blue for the China network; purple for the Australia network; orange for the United Kingdom network; and brown for the Spain network.

Figure 6 depicts the top 30 keywords of co-occurrence network, the related visualisation and the association strength of ECAP-FS. The co-occurrence of author keywords was examined to illustrate the research hotspots in ECAP-FS. The threshold for keyword co-occurrence was set at 10, and 30 keywords out of 708 were categorised as visualisation elements. The distance between the components of each pairings indicated topic similarity and relative strength. Individual term clusters were allocated different colours of circles. The network in Fig. 6 depicts three different clusters, each reflecting a branch of research in the ECAP-FS literature. The number of publications in which the keywords co-occurred was shown by the connections between specific keywords. The main themes with the highest overall connection strength in the ECAP-FS literature were COVID-19, Food Security, Agriculture, and Climate Change.

The co-occurrence network visualisation of 30 keywords and their relationship strength of agricultural production and food security research.

The ECAP-FS scientific field has three subfields (clusters of author keywords), which are as follows:

The blue cluster includes terms such as COVID-19, Food Supply, Food Production, China, Food Security, and Agricultural Production.’

The red cluster grouped the keywords Agricultural Land, Catering Services, Environmental Protection, Humans, Meat, Human, Food Industry, Article, Female, Priority Journal, Procedures, Controlled Study, and Environmental Sustainability.

The green cluster grouped the keywords Economic and Social Effects, Agriculture, Agricultural Robots, Sustainable Development, Climate Change, Land Use, Greenhouse Gases, Ecosystem, and Biodiversity. The findings revealed a significant variation in the co-occurrence of author keywords in individual articles in the ECAP-FS literature. This demonstrated the scientific field’s multifaceted and multidimensional nature. This result is agreement with the work of Orimoloye et al. ( 2021b ).

Figure 7 depicts the frequency of word occurrence of the top 70 most utilised title keywords in ECAP-FS studies. During the research, a word cloud was generated using the titles of published articles that contained the most frequently used keywords in ECAP-FS research. This revealed the most commonly used word or phrase in ECAP-FS research. Within the word cloud on ECAP-FS research, various regions of connections and the most significant words used were determined. For example, COVID-19, food security, agriculture, climate change, ecosystem services, resilience, agricultural production, sustainable development, food system, and China were recognised as the most prevalent or prominent themes in ECAP-FS studies.

Word cloud or frequency of word occurrence of the top 70 most often used title keywords in agricultural production and food security research.

The COVID-19 pandemic has received significant recognition since the outbreak, and serious effort has been expended by researchers around the world in various fields. The present bibliometric analysis of COVID-19 examined the resulting effects on agricultural production and food security research trends from 2016 to April 2021 by means of data acquired from WoS and Scopus. According to our findings in ECAP-FS, there has been an exponential rise in research publications. This indicates that studies on ECAP-FS received increasing attention during last few years especially in 2020 and 2021, most likely due to COVID-19 pandemic related research by authors from different counties of the world like China, USA and the United Kingdom. Furthermore, most of the productive authors in ECAP-FS at the time of this research were from China, possibly because the pandemic was first discovered in Wuhan City.

The findings of this analysis revealed that few articles came from Africa. In terms of country and institution collaboration networks, few of the countries and institutions collaborated with the countries in Africa except for the University of Pretoria, which had a strong collaboration network on ECAP-FS research during the period of study. According to the word cloud analysis and frequency analysis of the frequently used keywords and keyword-plus demonstrated that the most topical issues in ECAP-FS are COVID-19, food security, agriculture, climate change, agricultural production, sustainable development, biodiversity and sustainability. These results demonstrated the most persistent issues related to ECAP-FS; this was buttressed by another conceptual framework indicator such as keyword co-occurrence networks.

The bibliometric survey performed in this study has some limitations, such as the use of two databases (Scopus and WoS), the strictness of the search keywords and search approach employed, as well as the exclusion of other document types (e.g., conference papers, books chapters, reviews, abstracts, meetings and notes, etc.) and published articles in languages other than English (French, Dutch, Chinese). Despite the limitations, this research seems to be the first bibliometric analysis on ECAP-FS-related studies, which adds to the evidence base and will drive further studies. Furthermore, WoS and Scopus have greater coverage than other databases, dependable indexing technology that reduces the “indexer effect,” and are highly regarded by scientific communities. Other databases, such as ScienceDirect, Education Resource Information Center (ERIC), and Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), should be evaluated in future studies.

Data availability

All data analysed are contained in the paper.

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Okolie, C.C., Ogundeji, A.A. Effect of COVID-19 on agricultural production and food security: A scientometric analysis. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 9 , 64 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01080-0

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The Zacks Paper and Related Products industry comprises companies that manufacture and sell paper and paper products. The industry is highly diversified in terms of products ranging from graphic paper and packaging paper to absorbent hygiene products. Graphic papers, which include printing and writing papers, and newsprint, are utilized for communication purposes. The industry provides packaging solutions for liquid, food, pharmaceutical, beauty, household, commercial and industrial products. It also produces fluff and specialty pulps utilized in absorbent hygiene products, tissues and paper products. The industry caters to a wide array of industries, including food and beverage, farming, home and personal care, health, retail, e-commerce and transport. Industry players meet customers’ shipping, storage and display requirements with sustainable solutions.

Major Trends Shaping the Future of the Paper and Related Products Industry

E-commerce & Consumer Products to Support Packaging Demand : The industry’s significant exposure to consumer-focused markets, such as food, beverages and healthcare, ensures steady earnings growth. With the rise of e-commerce, packaging has gained the utmost importance, as it helps maintain the integrity of the product and withstand the complexities of delivery. According to Statista, global e-commerce sales were $5.8 trillion in 2023, and this figure is expected to reach $8 trillion by 2027, seeing a CAGR of 8.4%. This presents a major growth opportunity for the Paper and Related Products industry. In 2022, e-commerce accounted for nearly 19% of retail sales worldwide and this share is expected to increase to 25% by 2027. The United States is expected to lead the retail e-commerce development, witnessing a CAGR of 11.82% over 2024-2028. The current valuation of the U.S. e-commerce market is $843 billion and it is anticipated to surpass the $1-trillion mark in 2026. India and Mexico are expected to follow the suit, seeing a CAGR of 11.79% and 11.71%, respectively.

Rise in M&A Activity to Transform the Paper and Packaging Landscape : Recently, there has been a surge in merger and acquisition activity within the industry as companies position themselves to seize growth opportunities, and enhance their packaging and sustainability offerings, among other strategic objectives. WestRock’s pending merger with Smurfit Kappa Group Plc will create one of the world’s largest paper and packaging companies with an unmatched geographic reach spanning 42 countries. Given this scale and equipped with the two companies’ highly complementary portfolios and innovative sustainability capabilities, the merged entity is likely to be the global “Go-To ” packaging partner for companies and customers across the globe. International Paper ( ( IP Quick Quote IP - Free Report ) ) has entered an agreement to acquire the entire issued share capital of DS Smith, outbidding rival Mondi Plc . This marks a strategic move to strengthen its corrugated packaging business in Europe and prioritize sustainable packaging. Meanwhile, per reports, Suzano has approached International Paper about a potential all-cash offer.

Sustainability Acts as the Key Driver : Increasing demand for sustainable packaging options and eco-friendly packaging solutions will support the paper market in the days ahead. The paper industry has already begun incorporating recycled content into production methods. By maximizing recycling, the industry will be able to implement environmentally and economically sustainable production methods. Investment in breakthrough technologies will propel the demand for high-quality paper products. Pricing Actions, Improving Efficiency to Offset Cost Inflation : The industry is witnessing rising costs of transportation, chemical and fuel, and supply-chain headwinds. Therefore, industry players are increasingly focusing on pricing actions and cost reduction, and resorting to automation in manufacturing to boost productivity and efficiency.

Zacks Industry Rank Indicates Bright Prospects

The Zacks Paper and Related Products industry is a 12-stock group within the broader Basic Materials sector. The industry currently carries a Zacks Industry Rank #12, which places it in the top 5% of the 252 Zacks industries. The group’s Zacks Industry Rank, basically the average of the Zacks Rank of all the member stocks, indicates bullish prospects in the near term. Our research shows that the top 50% of the Zacks-ranked industries outperforms the bottom 50% by a factor of more than 2 to 1. Before we present a few Paper and Related Products stocks that investors can keep an eye on, it is worth looking at the industry’s stock-market performance and its valuation picture.

Industry Versus S&P 500 & Sector

The Paper and Related Products industry has outperformed the sector and the S&P 500 over the past year. The stocks in this industry have gained 41.9%, whereas the Basic Materials sector has moved up 10%. The S&P 500 has grown 26.3% in the said time frame.

One-Year Price Performance

Industry's Current Valuation

On the basis of the trailing 12-month EV/EBITDA ratio, a commonly-used multiple for valuing Paper and Related Products companies, we see that the industry is currently trading at 8.61X compared with the S&P 500’s 14.00X and the Basic Material sector’s trailing 12-month EV/EBITDA of 11.73X. This is shown in the charts below.

Enterprise Value/EBITDA (EV/EBITDA) Ratio (TTM)

Over the last five years, the industry traded as high as 11.25X and as low as 3.98X, the median being 7.02X.  

4 Paper and Related Products Stocks to Watch

Sylvamo : Stronger order books, and higher pulp and paper prices will aid its top-line growth. The company has initiated a cost-reduction program called Project Horizon, which is focused on streamlining its organization and cost structures in an effort to make a leaner, stronger company. SLVM is on track to realize savings of at least $110 million by the end of 2024. Around $80 million of the target will come from operational improvements in its mills and supply chains, and the balance from the reduction in selling and administrative expenses. The company continues to lower its debt levels and maintains a strong financial position that enables it to invest in its business. It has a pipeline of more than $200 million of high-return capital projects, which will boost its earnings and cash flow profile. The company’s shares have gained 55% in the past year. Earnings estimates for Sylvamo’s fiscal 2024 have moved 7% north over the past 30 days. Memphis, TN-based SLVM has a trailing four-quarter earnings surprise of 24.3%, on average. The company sports a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) at present. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here .

Price & Consensus: SLVM

Klabin : In the first quarter of 2024, the company achieved a total sales volume of around 922,000 tons, up 5% year over year. The paperboard segment made a significant contribution, with a 15% increase in volume sold, reflecting the ramp-up of Paper Machine 28. In September 2023, KLBAY inaugurated the Puma II project, with R$12.9 billion invested in the installation of two paper machines — MP27 and MP28 — with a total annual production capacity of 910,000 tons of paper. The MP28 machine also marked Klabin’s debut in the white paperboard market, reinforcing the expansion of its product portfolio. In the corrugated cardboard segment, KLBAY recorded a 5.6% increase in volume sold in the first quarter, in sync with the growth trend of the Brazilian corrugated cardboard market. Klabin recently began operations at its new corrugated cardboard packaging factory, Figueira Project, located in Piracicaba, São Paulo. The unit has an annual production capacity of 240 thousand tons per year and will allow KLBAY to reach 1.2 million tons of corrugated cardboard conversion capacity per year. The company’s efforts to improve efficiency in its operations and lowering costs will also aid earnings. KLBAY shares have gained 6% in the past year. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the São Paulo, Brazil-based company’s fiscal 2024 earnings has moved up 61% over the past 30 days. The consensus estimate suggests year-over-year growth of 24.7%. Klabin currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).

Price & Consensus: KLBAY

Rayonier Advanced Materials : In the High Purity Cellulose segment, average sales prices for cellulose specialties are expected to increase as the company prioritizes value over volume. Sales volumes will gain from the closure of a competitor’s plant and a modest increase in ethers sales. The company’s bioethanol facility in Tartas, France, became operational in the first quarter of 2024 and is expected to deliver $3-$4 million of EBITDA in 2024, growing to $8-$10 million beginning in 2025. The Paperboard segment is expected to benefit from stable prices and higher volumes, reflecting customer demand. In October 2023, the company announced that it was exploring the potential sale of its Paperboard and High-Yield Pulp assets located at its Temiscaming site. This will align its portfolio with its long-term growth strategy, and provide flexibility to pay down debt, reduce leverage and minimize earnings volatility. The indefinite suspension of operations at the Temiscaming High Purity Cellulose plant, announced on Apr 29, 2024, is anticipated to mitigate the plant’s ongoing operating losses and high capital needs, thereby improving RYAM’s consolidated free cash flow. It is focused on lowering debt levels, and investing in high-return projects and acquisitions to drive growth.

Earnings estimates for fiscal 2024 for Jacksonville, FL-based Rayonier Advanced Materials indicate year-over-year growth of 58%. Estimates have been unchanged over the past 30 days. RYAM carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) at present.

Price & Consensus: RYAM

Stora Enso : The company’s sales were impacted in the first quarter of 2024 due to the political strike in Finland. Stora Enso anticipates a gradual recovery in market conditions in 2024, with increased demand for consumer boards, higher pulp demand and prices. It initiated a profit improvement program in February 2024, which is progressing well. The annual profit improvement target has been increased to EUR 120 million from the initial EUR 80 million, driven by additional fixed cost reductions. The consumer board investment at the Oulu site in Finland is progressing on schedule. Production is expected to start in the first half of 2025, with the full capacity estimated to be reached during 2027. It will support SEOAY’s long-term strategy to build market share in renewable and circular packaging solutions, which matter the most to its customers. The company plans to improve its cash flow through working capital management and intends to lower debt levels. SEOAY shares have gained 8.8% in the past year. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2024 for the Helsinki, Finland-based company has moved up 2% in the past 30 days. The consensus estimate for Stora Enso indicates year-over-year growth of 159%. SEOAY currently carries a Zacks Rank #3.

Price & Consensus: SEOAY

See More Zacks Research for These Tickers

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International Paper Company (IP) - free report >>

Klabin SA (KLBAY) - free report >>

Stora Enso Oyj (SEOAY) - free report >>

Rayonier Advanced Materials Inc. (RYAM) - free report >>

Sylvamo Corporation (SLVM) - free report >>

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