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1. Introduction
Agriculture and farming dates back to thousands of years. In 10,000 BC, the first agricultural revolution happened, which is also known as the Neolithic Revolution, and humans transitioned from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture. The latest agricultural revolution happened from 1943 to late 1970s, also known as the Green Revolution (i.e. a series of research, development of technology, management of agriculture and industrialized agriculture production which had happened all over the world). The agriculture supply chain (ASC) concept has been in use for 1,000 years but it has gained attention only after the development of supply chain management (SCM) by Keith Oliver, a consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton (Blanchard, 2010). The Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (2005) defines SCM as an integrating function with a primary responsibility for linking major business functions and business processes within and across companies into a cohesive and high-performing business model. Over the years, the definition of SCM has been modified but is still limited to manufactured products and services with a little attention being paid towards agriculture. Agriculture produce constitutes a major part of the world economy and is the raw material for many industries (Shukla and Jharkharia, 2013). Subsequently, SCM has been embraced for agricultural development purposes.
According to Chandrasekaran and Raghuram (2014), agricultural supply chain management (ASCM) includes a number of processes such as supply management, production management and demand management to ultimately satisfy the customers through a competitive distribution channel. Tsolakis et al. (2014) has covered all the aspects of ASC in his definition and defined ASC as a set of activities in a “farm-to-fork” sequence including farming (i.e. land cultivation and production of crops), processing/production, testing, packaging, warehousing, transportation, distribution and marketing. The different terminologies for ASC used by different authors in their research work are food supply chain (Bosona and Gebresenbet, 2013; Aung and Chang, 2014a; Chen, 2015; Etemadnia et al., 2015; Blizkovsky and Berendes, 2016; Zirham and Palomba, 2016), agriculture value chain (Ali, 2012; Minten et al., 2014; Brewin, 2016), post-harvest supply chain (Morris et al., 2001; Rolle, 2006a; Sivakumar and Wall, 2013; Bill et al., 2014; Mvumi et al., 2016), fruit supply chain (Herlambang et al., 2006; Savino et al., 2015;...