Female agriculture in the short food supply chain: a new path towards the sustainability empowerment

This work will analyze the female entrepreneurship phenomenon, in terms of dynamics, structural capacities and sustainability empowerment, in the specific field of the short food supply chain of fruit and vegetables products. The crisis of the prevailing agricultural model led to a reformulation of social economic development priorities: in this context, there is the experience of the short food supply chain, born as a reaction to the crisis of intensive agricultural models and to the longing expressed both by the consumers, out for fresh, safe and high quality products, and by the manufacturers, desirous to establish a direct trust-based relation. By considering the ever greater presence of women managing Italian farms, the research tries to understand if and how women's role could be decisive also for the short food supply chain, and thus it analyzes some Campania case studies to verify if women can concretely promote the cultural and economical development of a specific area, by leading the agricultural system towards the well being sustainability. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).