Barriers for achieving sustainable agri supply chain: study in context to Indian MSMEs

ABSTRACT

The micro, small, and medium enterprise (MSME) in the agriculture sector have become one of the most important pillars of the Indian economy as they provide employment opportunities with little capital outlay. This study identifies barriers to achieving sustainability in the Agri supply chain in India. The scope of the study was increased to determine the contextual relationships between the barriers and to rank them in relation to one another. The list of 11 barriers was enlisted after thorough literature and interaction with experts using the fuzzy-Delphi method. The causal relationship has been developed using Wings methodology. The results show that lack of information and mismanagement in handling the products after harvesting are crucial barriers to achieving sustainability in the Agri supply chain. The novelty of this work lies in identification of barriers achieving sustainability in Agri supply chain using integrated fuzzy-Delphi-Wings method. The stakeholders in the Agri supply chain will benefit from the research findings as they plan the strategic deployment of sustainability practices to achieve long-term competitive advantage.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainability
• agri-supply chain
• MSMEs
• decision making
• India

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study.