Agritourism and Sustainability: Improving Resilience and Antifragility of Rural Areas

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue deals with the role of agritourism in improving the resilience and antifragility of rural areas.

An agritourism farm is a contact point between tourists interested in enjoying rural territories and a network of local actors, mainly constituted of small family businesses, who have found an alternative channel through which to sell their products/services (Barbieri, 2019). Agritourism and, more generally, rural tourism represent a growing profitable market capable of guaranteeing additional income opportunities to rural firms, exploiting a trend in tourism demand characterized by increasing attention to rural cultural heritage and genuine food to slowly enjoy in the countryside (Ammirato and Felicetti, 2014). Agritourism represents an authentic form of rural tourism, allowing tourists to enjoy authentic rural experiences, participate in traditional farm life events (e.g., harvesting, feeding, and the preparation of preserves), be in contact with animals and nature, and enjoy food produced as well as cooked on a farm (Phillip et al., 2010). Furthermore, agritourism can represent leverage to exploit for the sustainable development of rural areas whose contributions go beyond additional income opportunities, investing in social and environmental issues as job occasions, enhancing quality of life, revitalizing community pride, encouraging the adoption of new working practices, injecting new vitality into sometimes-weakened economies, the ethical exploitation of natural resources, recycling, zero-emission productions, etc. (Lane, 2009).

In supporting these hunches, Ammirato et al. (2020), by means of a systematic literature review of 192 high-quality papers related to agritourism issues, found that the 10 topics in the current agritourism literature could be grouped into three main themes according to the “perspective” addressed in a paper: economic, environmental, and social. Such clustering confirms the strong relationship between agritourism and sustainability, since the three literature streams addressed the three traditional dimensions of sustainability in line with the goals of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (United Nations, 2020). Results further confirm that agritourism could lead to a reduction in poverty through tourism, generating employment opportunities, creating synergies with the agriculture and local service provider sectors, achieving gender equality, and stimulating the development of basic infrastructures, such as roads, ports, and airport facilities.

Additionally, the research also highlighted some weaknesses in the scientific literature. First, the environmental dimension is generally weakly addressed by scholars. Second, there is a lack of comprehensive and multidisciplinary studies capable of evaluating the impact of agritourism activities on all of the dimensions of the sustainable development of rural areas.

Moreover, since 2020 two unexpected and disruptive events, the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, have been changing the global economic system's rules, and, at the moment, it is quite impossible to forecast their final impacts on sustainability issues.

The aim of this SI is to stimulate the discussion about how agritourism is changing in recent years and about the role of agritourism in supporting reaching the goals of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Moreover, the SI calls for papers that highlight the contributions of agritourism in supporting resilience and antifragility at the micro (farm) and macro (rural system) levels during the current uncertain times.

Possible topics are as follows:

• Sustainable agritourism.
• Agritourism in the post-pandemic era.
• Rural tourism experiences.
• Case studies of agritourism facing sustainability.
• Integrated rural development.
• Sustainable rural networks.
• Resilience/antifragility in agritourism farms.
• Agritourism and rural networks.
• Wine and food tourism, wine routes, and experiences.

Dr. Salvatore Ammirato
Dr. Alberto Michele Felicetti
Dr. Roberto Linzalone
Guest Editors

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