Sustainable public procurement and constrained agricultural entrepreneurship

Abstract

This paper analyzes the relevance of green public procurement (GPP) in boosting the transition to more sustainable and innovative regional and localized agrifood systems. Many scholars have emphasized the importance of the GPP in stimulating various positive effects and impacts on the sustainability of agrifood systems. Framed within the context of the sustainable competitiveness of localized agrifood systems, the GPP represents an excellent opportunity for a more sustainable farming sector. If well exploited, it may relaunch smallholder farms' competitiveness on a regional scale. Moreover, the GPP effectively addresses sustainability issues like fighting food insecurity and reducing food waste. The possibility of adhering to these localized modes of food provisioning engenders constrained rural entrepreneurship due to the regulatory system which mandates compliance by the farming sector. The paper provides an empirical analysis of the region Lazio of Italy to evidence the eventual propensity of regional farms and eventual entry barriers. The results of the analysis show, on the one side, high interest primarily within regional organic farms; on the other side, the results evidence that compliance with mandatory regulation and organizational and logistic assets represent the principal limit to exploit this opportunity fully. Consequently, reduced exploitation of this opportunity is translated into a rate of transition to more sustainable regional farming systems.