Eco-certification and transparency in global food supply chains

This chapter portrays the information flow for sustainability issues along the globalized food supply chain and explores the eco-certification decisions of farm businesses, viewing them as the first upstream chain participant. This examination is based on the literature to connect eco-certification with transparency and to portray traceability schemes for sustainability issues in food supply chains, followed by information technology-based systems and applications supporting traceability. The third section presents the ecocertification decisions at the supply chain level in four subsections. It first builds a theoretical framework regarding the downstream firms ' sustainability-related decisions by offering conceptual definitions. Next the farm business decision logic is given, followed by the discrete choice model. The specialization of the model is presented in the third subsection, followed by the results, discussions, and implications for practitioners. Some conclusions and implications for future research are offered in the last section.