The Role of Logistics Management in Food Supply Chains

Food supply chains are essential for human survival. However, the path from ‘farm to fork’ is a challenge to society due to the distance between markets and producers, traditional production processes, acquisition costs, household income, and so on. Globalisation intends to reduce these issues through the specialisation of production areas, use of machinery and chemical compounds, low-labour cost, and efficient logistics network. But this means more transportation, gas emissions, and high dependence on foreign countries. The objective of this chapter is to discuss the impact of logistics management in food supply chains using two case studies: Soybean and Beef production. To do so, we collected the volume of production in 2019 from the Food and Agriculture Organisation from the United Nations, and the volume of exports by origin state, port, and country destination from the Brazilian Ministry of Economy. Brazil was chosen for analysis due to its important role in world agriculture/livestock production, its importance as a producer and exporter of goods, and the situation of being a developing country in Latin America with enormous geographic size. Moreover, we used Social Network Analysis to understand the relationship among these players. Our findings indicated a great number of importers in the network, but China has a central role in soybean and beef exports. This influence causes an imbalance flow of these commodities in the network and causes a dependence of agriculture producers for single marketing.