Sustainable Agri-food Supply Chain Management

This course is a part of Sustainable Agribusiness, a 7-course MicroMasters series from edX.

Sustainable agri-food chains should operate in a manner that exploits and optimizes the synergies among environmental protection, social fairness and economic growth. Today, societal stakeholders demand the management of a sustainable agri-food supply chain to incorporate a diverse and often inter-related set of issues relating to sustainable development. There is surmounting global pressure for corporate responsibility to transcend product quality and extend to areas of labor standards, health and safety, environmental sustainability, non-financial accounting and reporting, procurement, supplier relations, product lifecycles and environmental practices. Principles of accountability, transparency and stakeholder engagement are highly relevant to sustainable agri-food supply chain management. Sustainable agri-food supply chain management covers the concept of sustainability from the field to the supply chain level by providing learners with tools for improving their company’s competitiveness, sustainability and responsibility towards stakeholder expectations.

A key priority in corporate strategic design is for an organization to emerge as socially responsible and sustainable through environment protection with a focus on maintenance of biodiversity and prevention of landscape damage. As well as reducing and controlling the environmental footprint of their agri-food supply chains. In order to develop sustainable and competitive agri-food supply chains the learner will explore the unique attributes of sustainable agri-food supply chains (SAFSCs) that differentiate them from other supply chains. Insight will be provided to the learner on the three dimensions of sustainability; economic, social, and environmental that competitive SAFSCs need to accommodate. In response to pressures for transparency and accountability, learners who take on the role of a sustainable agri-food supply chain manager, will need to know how to measure, benchmark, and report environmental sustainability performance of their supply chains. This course provides an in‐depth examination of SAFSCs and the related decision‐making.

What you'll learn

• Apply supply chain management principles in a sustainable way that protects the environment
• Measure environmental sustainability performance of supply chains
• Analyze the importance of ethics and transparency in supply chain management