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Introduction

Over the last 4 years, the humanitarian livelihood and worldwide economies have been victims of multiple disasters that had disrupted utmost businesses including Fresh and Short Food Supply Chains (FSFSC) (Srivastava, 2023). Various academic journals have floated Special Issues (SI) focusing on different theories and models that assist practitioners in mitigating the ongoing pandemic impact on Supply Chain Resilience (SCR) (Hobbs et al. 2020), Food (Rahman et al. 2022) and Sustainable Agro-Food supply chains (Bakhshi et al. 2022), and humanitarian operations such as relief funds, and medical and food supplies in affected territories (Shah et al. 2023). A plethora of literature suggests the subsistence of Sustainable Livelihood (SL) through FSFSC across developed countries and needs to be replicated in developing ones as the remote terrains are still unreachable with necessary fresh, hygienic, and healthy food and consumables (Prakash et al., 2020; Paciarotti and Torregiani, 2022). Further, the global focus of FSFSC and sustainable development is needed to shift towards rural livelihood as mankind cannot survive without food, vegetables, grocery, dairy, and short-life products (Deconinck et al. 2021). Various aspects such as supply chain network-restructuring (Dolgui and Ivanonv, 2020), advancement of technologies (Yela Aránega et al. 2022), green packaging (Zeng, 2022), food loss-wastage (Kör et al. 2022), and Resilience (Garzón- Jiménez and Zorio-Grima, 2022) applied to developing economies, but SL is still, inadequately explored. Though sufficient research bases exist on sustainable businesses for the developed economies and FSFSC disruptions (Kumar et al. 2023) still, none were found to bridge the gaps between global vs local context, urban vs rural livelihood, availability vs wastages, and solutions for consumable food items. It has been proved by Lusiantoro et al. (2022) that information sharing among different stakeholders of FSFSC may improve performance. Also, the implementation guidelines defined with various roles and responsibilities of each stakeholder would be helpful to ensure quality livelihood for rural society. Therefore, it is possible to re-design a collaborative FSFSC that joins the food producers-intermediates- and consumers tightly involved in sustainability, focusing on the rural context, economy, and environmental aspects for SL improvements (Tiscini et al. 2020). 

Finally, the government and the public are on the losing side of policies pertaining to United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDGs), mostly in the rural lives of developing countries (Lang et al. 2022). Hence, it is thought that there is a need to establish a connection between global and local supply networks, which vitally affect the SCR and SL of society. The outcomes of the proposal may be used by the organisations, policy and law-makers, and other parts of the developed countries, which helps to build a more meaningful and practically workable FSFSC towards achieving SL and RSC, and respective UN-SDGs.

In Summary, this SI demands researchers to probe broad research questions as: 
Is this the time to relook at global SCR practices and its replication to FSFSC through the lens of SL?
Can existing short food supply chain models be applied to improve SL and SCR in FSFSC? If yes, then how?

 

List of topic areas

A broad objective of this special issue is to understand how FSFSC practices affect the societal livelihood of rural geographies, business resilience, organisational sustainability and economics of least developed nations. The inclusive papers may contain themes of conceptual, empirical, case studies, mathematical modelling, and literature reviews discussing challenges faced by FSFSC. The scope may revolve around supply chain decisions linking SCR and SL in support of UN SDG(s) such as Sustainable communities, Healthier lives, Zero hunger, and Responsible production and consumption (However, not limited to this).
 

• Rethinking and re-designing storage, packaging, and distribution practices for the FSFSC
• Innovative sourcing models and collaborative network strategies for the FSFSCs
• Impact on rural livelihoods affecting sustainability practices for short shelf life and perishables
• Government policies in response to designing efficient FSFSC to enhance rural developments economically, socially and environmentally
• Ethical response of SMEs and start-ups toward enhancing SCR, SL and green sustainability
• Pre-and-Post pandemic practices to mitigate associated barriers in SCR and SL
• Sustainability-controlled measures to enhance resiliency in the FSFSC management
• Role and contribution of Industry 4.0 technology for designing resilient FSFSC 
• Comparing the economic and environmental impact of designing sustainable policies: urban livelihoods vs rural livelihoods

Guest Editors 

Dr. Bhavin Shah,
Operations and Supply Chain Management Group, Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Sirmaur, India.
[email protected]

Dr. Vimal Kumar,
Department of Information Management, Chaoyang University of Technology, Taiwan (ROC).
[email protected] 

Dr. Pratima Verma,
Department of Strategic Management, Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode-673570,India.
[email protected]

Prof. Vikas Kumar,
Faculty of Business, Law and Social Sciences, Birmingham City University, UK.
[email protected] 

 

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available by clicking the button below.   

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Author guidelines must be strictly followed.

Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”. 

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

 

Key Deadlines

Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 01 November 2023
Closing date for manuscripts submission: 31 May 2024    
Closing date for abstract submission: 29 February 2024    
Email for abstract submissions: [email protected]