Analysis of Financial Flow for Small Producers of Colombian Coffee: A Systemic Approach

Background

In humanitarian support organizations and actions, we find three main types of logistics problems: (1) social improvement logistics, related to distributing products to support everyday needs of poor and sensible populations and improve their social welfare, (2) humanitarian logistics in disasters (Kovács and Spens, 2007), which deals to efficiently and quickly react to a disaster and support populations in an emergency and sometimes dangerous situations and (3) post-disaster logistics, which aims to support populations in re-location and reconstruction of their daily lives after a disaster (Holguín-Veras et al., 2012). Although humanitarian logistics (both for disasters or post-disaster) is nowadays a popular research subject (Kovács and Spens, 2009; Apte, 2010; Chandes and Paché, 2010; Holguín-Veras et al., 2016), we find a lower scientific interest for social welfare logistics. Indeed, we find a first statement on the importance of logistics in supporting the social welfare, or social improvement, made by Orwell and Dawes (2007), after what we observe only three works related explicitly to the logistics of social improvement: Stock (1990) is the fist, to the best of our knowledge, that states the poor contribution of logistics research to evidence its contribution to social welfare; Adivar et al. (2010) focus on the notion of supply chain for social improvement and welfare; finally, Maldonado and Moya (2013) show the importance of combining social welfare policies with reverse logistics in developing and improving food banks actions and logistics schemes.