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Sustainable Agriculture: The Food Chain Chapter j 24 507

In the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries
in which sustainability might be threatened by such physiological industrial
evolution of food chain, measures to mitigate the negative effects are often
adopted. For instance, the European Union and United States have introduced
and financed agricultural policy measures devoted to strengthen environment-
friendly production (i.e., organic agriculture and low-impact agriculture, both
characterized by lower input necessities and lower output level). However, the
debate on the environmental effects of these agricultural practices displays
different opinions regarding cost/benefit results. Nevertheless, there is no
doubt that these policies have generated negative externalities on less devel-
oped countries: the curtailment of total production (the European Union and
the United States play a key role in the global context of most commodity
production) obviously causes a rise in prices hard to cope with especially for
developing countries.
Hence, a small increase in environmental sustainability in a specific
country may induce a loss of global sustainability.
Economic growth in Western countries allows private companies to
adopt marketing strategies oriented to stimulate and increase the de-
4
mand. With respect to food sector, an increase in consumption often does
not imply a growth in welfare, thus causing a double cost for the con-
sumer: the cost for a higher demand for food and the recovery cost for the
sanitary sector (due to food-related pathologies) as a tax payer. However,
food processing industry, retail sector, and media unanimously play a key
role in changing consumer habits toward a high-demand consumption
style.
Indeed the consumer is encouraged by offers, price discounts, supersized
portions, and strategic use of an anticipated “best before” date. Consumer is
induced to buy an unnecessary amount of goods that inevitably becomes waste
to be managed with additional resource consumption. 5
On the contrary, in developing countries a similar amount of food is
wasted due to the unfit storage and distribution sector. Insects and spoilage
cause loss of one-third of the southeastern harvest, and 35%e40% of food
harvested in India is lost due to the lack of cold storage systems in retail
sector (Godfray et al., 2010). Overall, recent estimates indicate that one-
third (equal to 1.3 billion of tons) of food produced for human consumption
is ether lost or wasted along the global food system (Gustavsson et al.,
2011).

4. The search of profit maximization strategy requires companies to adopt a behavior to in-
crease revenues via an increase in the sold quantity, an increase in prices, or even both.
Therefore a company’s survival strictly depends on the increase in consumers’
consumption.
5. Around 30% of food is wasted in developed countries (Segre and Gaiani, 2011).