Special issue: Plenary papers of the XVth EAAE Congress, Parma, 2017 Theme: Towards Sustainable Agri-Food Systems: Balancing between Markets and Society
该特刊收录了欧洲农业经济学大会的全体论文，探讨农业食品系统面临的权衡，包括供应链可持续性、消费者对可持续标准的反应以及政策改革，适合关注农业经济与食品政策的学者。
The growing need to balance the competing demands that confront the agri-food system in Europe as well as the rest of the world is ever increasing. Furthermore, the competing demands inevitably bring with them the need to consider complex trade-offs. The plenary papers that we sought all examine key trade-offs that confront the agri-food system. In particular, we identified three themes that we consider to be of importance and interest to agricultural economist: (i) sustainability issues in food supply chains and international trade; (ii) consumer responses to sustainability standards and technological innovations and (iii) agricultural policy reform or food systems reform? It is our hope that the assembled papers will enable the profession to advance the contributions that we can make in addressing the complex trade-offs that confront the agri-food system. The first paper of this congress issue consists of the presidential address by Le Mouel and her co-author Forslund. They discuss a selection of the literature on the challenges for the agri-food system to feed the world population in 2050 and point out avenues for future research. The remainder of this congress issue is composed of six invited papers divided into three specific themes. The first theme ‘Balancing markets and society: sustainability issues in food supply chains and international trade’ contains two papers. The first paper (Lecture in honour of Giovanni Anania) by Salvatici and Nenci examines aspects of sustainability with regard to trade. In an extensive review of the literature this paper provides a ‘road map’ highlighting the importance of global value chains as well as the impacts of trade liberalisation. The paper concludes with a pertinent and timely observation from Giovanni Anania: “a great many of the possible solutions to the outstanding problems are already available: it is “merely” a question of using them… Thus, as far as the future of modelling international agricultural markets and trade policies is concerned, we can look forward with reasonable, yet cautious, optimism” (Anania, 2001, page 30).