Fostering Organic Farming Sustainability throughout Alternative Food Networks (AFNs)

This chapter’s purpose is to present preliminary results from an on-going research aiming at empirically investigate the role of Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) to support the development of organic sector, and to contribute to enhance the sustainability approaches of small farmers. It focuses on how the AFNs can boost sustainability in food consumption models and create an integrated way to support the long-term competitiveness of organic farmers, responding, at the same time, to consumers’ expectations. Through a mixed case-based method, the authors propose an analysis of the sustainability dimensions of organic farming and the sustainability characteristics of AFNs as agro-food system, alternative to the conventional supply chains of the modern distribution. Moreover, the research thought is to identify the organic sustainability perception from the consumers’ point of view, as well as their motivations behind the decision to purchase organic products into a wide range of innovative AFN, namely “Food Assembly”.