About this Research Topic

Background

Understanding the capacity of food systems to undertake a transformation towards sustainability requires understanding how resources stream in and out of the systems. As complex socio-economic structures, food and agricultural value chains are important means for channeling resources, knowledge, and agency in and out of rural areas. Given their prominent role on the development agendas, there is mixed evidence as to what extent value chains and their actors can contribute to improving the livelihoods in poor rural and urban areas. In order to shape sustainable living places, transformative capacities and good governance are important mainstays. Transformative agri-food value chains are robust and often act as the sole transmission belt for returning capital, resources and identity back into vulnerable areas. Moreover, domestic or regional chains may provide urban consumers with fresh quality food that also contributes to regional identity.

Agri-food value chain actors can act as a catalyst for sustainable local development. The goal of this Research Topic is therefore to identify the transformative capacities of the most vulnerable actors of domestic and regional agri-food chains. Transformative capacities are defined in the sense of the ability of relevant value chain actors to initiate and shape their own interpretation of sustainable development. The domain-specific understanding of female farmers, young agripreneurs, informal vendors, and other neglected actors around local sustainable development must be put into perspective. Of particular interest are informal value chain actors around food crops, especially underutilized products (orphan crops, local specialties). Innovative business models illustrate these actors’ level of social inclusion, their greening potential, their solutions to efficiency issues, and their formal requirements.

This Research Topic deals exclusively with the transformative capacities of agri-food value chain actors and their potential for promoting sustainable rural development and sustainable urban food consumption. The Research Topic welcomes manuscripts that analyse the transformative capacities, enablers and disablers, mechanisms for sharing information, risk and benefits, and sustainability standards of specific agri-food value chains. We also seek research around underutilized and neglected food products, i.e. products that are neglected by policy and do not yet sufficiently benefit from or contribute to the market.

Articles with the following main topics are of particular interest

1. Concepts of transformative capacities of agri-food value chain as drivers of sustainable food systems and local development

2. Methods to empirically assess sustainability perspectives of local value chain actors

3. Methods for conducting participatory research on the transformative capacity of agri-food value chain actors

4. How to build the agency of agri-food value chain actors from vulnerable groups -including strategies and solutions, experiments, co-research, transformative knowledge, value chain stakeholder dialogues and platforms

5. Food agency in rural and urban food systems, including collective action in rural and urban settings

6. The role of agri-food value chain actors in greening the economy, with particular emphasis on reduction of food loss and waste, agroecological intensification, and protecting agro-biodiversity

7. Upgrading endeavors emphasizing on mid- and downstream segments and neglected value chain actors

8. Producer-consumer linkages, particularly urban-rural linkages, including aspects of ethical eating, reducing food alienation, building food identity and food pride

Keywords: agri-food value chain, sustainability, sustainable local development, Food agency

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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