Erika Ribašauskienė’s research while affiliated with Lietuvos Socialinių Tyrimų Centras and other places

Responding to disruptive events is important to maintain supply chain viability. It is of the utmost importance to maintain functioning of agrifood supply chains as they provide essential goods for maintaining the population. However, there is a diverse pool of possible strategies to ensure the viability of agribusiness and agrifood supply chains. This paper seeks to identify the most relevant strategies for ensuring agrifood supply chain viability amid disruptive events. The case of Lithuania is analysed with a focus on the sustainability of the whole agri-food supply chain. Expert interviews involving farmers, associations, public sector representatives and academia are carried out to identify an effective policy path. Innovation, cooperation, diversification and knowledge-building are assessed as the candidate strategy options.

Disruptive events may be critical to supply chains as they may not be viable enough to sustain the challenges. Public support is often offered in order to increase the viability of supply chains. This is particularly important in the context of agri-food supply chains that are crucial for food security. This article proposes a novel framework for the assessment of agri-food products' supply chain viability during various disruptive external effects. A proposed method is built on the complex and sophisticated expert evaluation processing technique refined by Monte Carlo simulation. The practical applicability of the proposed framework lies in the fact that the viability of all stages of agri-food supply chains is being assessed separately. Thus, it can be applied to both short and long supply chains. The method was tested by evaluating the effects of COVID-19 and the Ukraine war on the viability of Lithuanian agri-food supply chains. The results show that most of the negative factors arise from increased energy consumption in the agri-food sector. Positive effects were also observed indicating slightly increased production outputs, which should not be directly associated with the disruptive effects of COVID-19 or the Ukraine war, but rather with the ability of Lithuanian agri-food producers to maintain production activities uninterrupted. Index Terms-Agri-food supply chain, disruptive events, multicriteria decision-making, simulation, supply chain viability.

Food loss and waste is relevant for all stages of a food supply chain. Methodological and empirical solutions are needed to properly quantify these losses. The present paper embarks on the quantification of food loss in the Lithuanian food processing sector. This issue has not received substantial coverage in the literature yet, even though the transition economies face serious food losses due to malfunctioning markets and limited understanding of the issue of food loss and waste in general. In this paper, by exploiting the questionnaire survey, the food loss rates in the major sub-sectors of the Lithuanian food industry are assessed and the root causes behind food loss are identified. The results are then extrapolated to provide insights into the extent of food loss in the Lithuanian food industry as a whole. The results suggest that an estimated 10.9 thousand tonnes of food, or 4 kg per capita, may be lost at the processing level each year in the country. Issues related to processing operations as well as product non-compliance with commercial standards appear as the underlying causes for food loss.

This paper focuses on the state-of-the-art analysis of the concepts relevant to the functioning of agricultural supply chains. The viable supply chains concept is considered to be the most comprehensive one that encompasses sustainability, agility and resilience. However, this concept has scarcely been applied to agricultural supply chains. Thus, we discuss the theoretical foundations and empirical manifestations of the related concepts and propose a framework for analysis of agricultural supply chain viability. The methods and indicators are discussed in a critical manner. We show that the considerations on the level of aggregation, parts of the supply chain covered and data sources are important when designing analytical tools for agricultural supply chain viability. Finally, a potential case study of agricultural supply chain viability is discussed in the light of the theoretical findings and empirical context.

Research on economic resilience in agriculture is quite complicated due to the interdisciplinary nature of the notion. In agricultural, climate change, sustainability and food security research it appears as an endogenous phenomenon rather as the main one. This study aims to contribute to conceptualization of economic resilience in agriculture, revealing current and identifying future research directions. Bibliometric analysis supplemented with a literature overview serve this purpose. Results confirm the ambiguity and immaturity of economic resilience concept and its secondary position within overall agricultural resilience research framework.

This paper explores the issue of food waste in the Lithuanian retail sector. A questionnaire survey was designed in order to collect the relevant data from both the largest retail chains with stores around the country and companies with small-scale stores in rural areas. The present case is interesting as the literature on Central and Eastern European countries is scarce in the sense of the quantification of food waste. In this paper, the amounts of food waste among different food product categories are discussed and then extrapolated to approximate food waste in retail trade for Lithuania by using sales revenue as a key parameter. The results suggest that food waste in the Lithuanian retail sector amounts to 36.4 thousand tonnes or 13.0 kg per capita per year. Fruits and vegetables account for more than a half (63%), whereas meat (products) come next representing some 9% of food waste. Therefore, these products can be considered as the major targets for valorisation schemes and other measures aimed at mitigation of food waste.

Food loss and waste occur along the whole food supply chain and need to be addressed by dedicated strategies. Among all the stages of the food supply chain, food loss in primary production has been the least studied to date. In order to address this gap, this paper focuses on on-farm food loss, using Lithuania as a case study. The research comprises eleven crop products and five livestock products prevailing in Lithuanian agricultural production. A survey-based method is utilized to collect primary data from farmers. The final data set consists of 408 completely answered questionnaires. The survey-based data are merged with those from the Farm Accountancy Data Network in order to devise an effective framework for estimating self-reported on-farm food loss. The results show that there exists substantial variation in on-farm food loss rates ranging from less than 1% for milk to slightly more than 20% for beets. Environmental factors and those related to consumer and buyer requirements are the main reasons for losses of crop products, while diseases appear as the main causes of death for animals. The food loss and waste reduction measures are derived based on the results of the survey.

This paper proposes an integrated approach towards rapid decision-making in the agricultural sector aimed at improvement of its resilience. Methodologically, we seek to devise a framework that is able to take the uncertainty regarding policy preferences into account. Empirically, we focus on the effects of COVID-19 on agriculture. First, we propose a multi-criteria decision-making framework following the Pugh matrix approach for group decision-making. The Monte Carlo simulation is used to check the effects of the perturbations in the criteria weights. Then, we identify the factors behind agricultural resilience and organize them into the three groups (food security, agricultural viability, decent jobs). The expert survey is carried out to elicit the ratings in regard to the expected effects of the policy measures with respect to dimensions of agricultural resilience. The case of Lithuania is considered in the empirical analysis. The existing and newly proposed agricultural policy measures are taken into account. The measures related to alleviation of the financial burden (e.g., credit payment deferral) appear to be the most effective in accordance with the expert ratings.

The agriculture in Eastern Europe has seen a number of economic and social transitions. This research examines the gender inequality in agriculture by taking the case of an Eastern European country – Lithuania – as an example. The questionnaire survey was employed in order to check the existence of gender inequality. The study focuses on the young farmers as they are more likely to implement innovations and shape the future agricultural activities. The demand for advisory services and participation in the Common Agricultural Policy measures were used to compare the activities and perceptions of men and women young farmers. We found that there are no significant differences in participation of support measures and demand for advisory services across the genders. This suggests Lithuanian agricultural sector is equally beneficial for men and women young farmers. Given the differences in the educational background, a positive effect is anticipated if women were more empowered in Lithuanian agriculture. Women’s participation in agriculture could increase environmental awareness, pro-pensity to innovate and economic resilience.