Methodological Approaches To Analysis Of Food Supply And Distribution Systems
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This work is intended to provide an overview of the ways different disciplines approach analysis of food supply and distribution systems (FSDSs), showing the conceptual and methodological tools used. The list of approaches is admittedly incomplete and the description brief. The aim of the description is twofold: to define the area(s) covered by each discipline; and describe the specific role each can play in an interdisciplinary approach to research on FSDSs. Research focuses on some g eneral questions: Which disciplines are concerned with this subject? What are the bases on which they approach it? What methodologies do they use? What type of results do they reach? Are they alternatives, or complementary to one another? On what level(s) are they effective? Some portions of the present work are based on documents drawn up by specialists for this purpose (the geographical, nutritional and legal approaches). The following approaches are examined: economic (neoclassica l, pipeline, evolutionary), historical, geographical, nutritional and legal. The pipeline approach is further divided into a socio-economic and geographical approach (a special section is also devoted to the latter). The point of this whole essay in methodological description lies not so much in the reading of each approach as in their juxtaposition. The various approaches belong to a wide range of scientific fields, but come together when the FSDSs are considered not as an abstrac t activity but as the outcome of dynamic processes arising in a given environment in some area, at a given moment in its development, and managed by agents with specific aims.