The objective of the paper is to contribute to a better understanding of the governance of the food networks focusing on two related aspect: the integration among the agents and the adaptation in the face of emerging disturbances. The paper aims at addressing the problem on what are the role of...

Evaluating the rural communities social context capacity to manage changes coming from external agents is of paramount importance for effective Social Sustainability strategies identification. A literature survey was carried out on the Resilience approach definition and its application to the...

Food cooperatives play an important role in local food networks as business organizations that use innovative business strategies to market local foods to their members and consumers. We utilize data from a national study of the members of eight food cooperatives in the U.S. The objective of...

This paper investigates the effect of information flow on corn futures price variability for the period January 2004 -July 2011. The theoretical framework is the Mixture Distribution Hypothesis, that posits a joint dependence of return volatility and information. The main contribution of this...

competitiveness and innovativeness of companies and regions. The economic benefits achieved by companies participating in a cluster are varied and depend on the individual's experience, human and intellectual capital, organizational efficiency, etc. However, clusters are an important mechanism...

Quality assurance management in the food industry is complex, as it is the total of activities and decisions performed in an organisation to produce and maintain a safe product with the desired quality level against minimal costs (Luning, 2006). It includes: i) quality design, ii) quality...

Technological regimes define the technological environment in which innovative and learning activities take place within each sector of the economy. However, in our view technological regimes must be interpreted and elaborated by each organisation operating in a specific sector in order to be...

São Tomé e Principe is a small country in the middle of the Atlantic and exactly located at the Equator. It is a country where food consumption has been mainly dependent upon local production (where nature is very exuberant), but where imports, donations and globalization are determinant...

Recent crises in the agricultural sector, such as the 2011 German dioxin scandal and deaths from EHEC or the last swine fever outbreak in Germany in 2006, have caused immense economic damage. As a result, German veterinary authorities at the district, state, and federal levels have been put in...