ANALYSIS AND DESIGN OF FRAMEWORK FOR CIRCULAR FOOD SUPPLY CHAIN IN INDIA

Abstract

The food industry is so huge that it touches nearly every corner around the globe. The climate emergency as issued by the UN for the entire world due to the increasing carbon emissions. This is the result of unsustainable practices and overuse of the limited resources. Intending to bring social, economic, and environmental sustainability, a total of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 2030 and 169 targets was framed at the United Nations in September 2015, where 193 countries agreed with the mission of creating the world a better place to live. The goals are integrated in such a way that, the aim of making food supply chain sustainable will contribute to the outcomes of other goals i.e., SDG 3 (Good health and well-being), SDG 6 (clean water and sanitation), SDG 7 (affordable and clean energy), SDG 9 (industry, innovation, and infrastructure), SDG 11 (sustainable cities and communities), SDG 12 (sustainable consumption and production), SDG 13 (climate action), SDG 14 (life below water) and SDG 15 (life on land). India’s agriculture sector is majorly dependent on seasonal rainfall, and due to the climatic shifts and interruptions in the rain patterns, the food sector is hit majorly. An average of 1.9% and 1.2% per decade yield reductions are recorded globally due to climate shifts (IPCC, 2018; Kong and Wang, 2022). In India, 87% of carbon emissions in the agriculture sector come from the production phase, followed by the preparation phase (10%), and the rest in processing (2%) and transportation phase (1%) (Pathak et al., 2012). The dependency on coal for energy production needs to be reduced, and the shift toward renewable energy sources requires an hour. India at the 26th Conference of Parties held in Glasgow, UK in 2021, declared that by 2030 India would meet its fifty percent requirement from renewable energy to install 500 gigawatts (GW) of energy capacity and thus, will reduce the carbon intensity by 45% by reducing carbon emissions by one billion tonnes. The ever-increasing carbon emissions lead to global warming, impacting major areas like habitat, water resources, food production, and social concerns (Lee et al., 2021; Faubert et al., 2020). The past research suggests that food industry faces various challenges such as poor logistic network, limited expertise in information and technology, lack of cold chain and storage facilities, traceability issues, uncertainties in the food supply chain, etc. Contemplating at the concerns of the food supply chain, the study aims at obtaining the challenges of the food supply chain, finding the novel strategies to overcome these challenges. Thus, this study is an effort to find the possibilities for making the food supply chain sustainable.