Agri-Food Supply Chain Management: Literature Review

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present a critical review of prior literature relating to agri-food supply chain management. An in-depth analysis has been carried out to identify the influential information from the literature. This paper has identified gaps to be explored about agricultural supply chain management (SCM) practices which may be used by researchers to enrich theory construction and practitioners may concentrate on establishing the extent and frontiers of agri-food SCM. This research work is the first attempt to make a critical literature review of available literature on agri-food SCM practices for developing countries like India. The research articles and other materials related to the agri-food supply chain management were collected from online data bases like Scopus, EBSCO and Google Scholar for the period of 10 years (2006-2016). The study performs content analysis and is followed by descriptive analysis. In the next phase, the literature in the field of agri-food supply chain management is classified into four broad categories viz. general literature review of agri-food supply chain, policies affecting the segments of agri-food supply chain, individual segments of agri-food SCM (structure of supply chain segments and conduct of supply chain segments) and performance of supply chain segments. These four categories are comprehensively reviewed and elaborated the research gap in the literature based on agri-food supply chain management. Finally, potato supply chain of India is considered as a case example for comprehensive analysis and elaborated in detail.