Modeling inclusive food supply chains toward sustainable ecosystem planning

The increasing global food demand is forcing the food industry to identify new effective strategies for production and distribution, as was already experienced in the 1960s and 1970s with the birth of green chemistry and the explosion of fossil-fueled agriculture. The globalization of the food trade has bridged the barriers between production and consumption without respecting the balance of natural resources, resulting in enlarged gaps between developed and developing countries. In the food sector many issues affect the three dimensions of sustainability: economic, environmental, and social. These include land-use change and deforestation to widen farms, pastures, and biofuel cultivations, land grabbing to establish intensive agriculture, clean water consumption, soil and air pollution, lack of supply chain infrastructures, volatile prices, and climate change. Together these issues make current food supply chains (FSCs) unsustainable over the long term and challenge the future of the food industries and society as well. Such issues also reveal the lack of connections and coordination among actors involved in FSCs and open debate about the neglected role of the physical and logistic/distribution infrastructures in addressing long-term sustainability targets. This chapter illustrates a hierarchical framework aimed at modeling production and distribution food ecosystems through a set of interdisciplinary parameters and decision variables. The decision levers identified in this framework describe how the food ecosystem behaves according to an input-output flow analysis. The framework formulates a set of planning decision problems via mixed linear programming. The definition of the inclusive food ecosystem inspires collecting multidisciplinary parameters that impose collaboration between decision-makers. Furthermore, as part of the ecosystem, logistics and distribution processes are involved in the planning issues beyond the common perception that sees an FSC as a sequence of independent stages.