Journal of Security and Sustainability Issues

Market entities promote ecological logistics by adapting to the legal changes taking place in Europe, seeing an opportunity in such actions to build positive relationships with consumers. The foundations of the concept of corporate social responsibility, emphasizing the reduction of energy consumption in favor of clean production, limiting post-production pollution emissions, reducing CO2 emissions from transport and warehouse activities, on the one hand, translate into cost reduction for the producer, improvement of the company’s competitive position, and the establishment of lasting relationships with customers. On the other hand, they pose challenges where economic efficiency is a key factor. The aim of the article is to analyze the impact of CSR concepts on the efficiency and security of logistics supply chains.

The paper addresses one of the most important elements of the government’s social functions, namely, food policies in the context of agricultural import substitution. The authors analyse the state of food security in modern Kazakhstan. National interests in the food sector are analysed, as well as the main threats and risks in ensuring food security. Having analysed the state of food security in modern Kazakhstan, the authors draw a conclusion regarding a number of issues existing today in the analysed sphere, which call for solutions.

The article is devoted to the study of the state environmental security in national and globalization aspects. It has been established that the environmental security of the state is a status of every person’s security, society, state and nature from excessive danger to the environment, i.e. the preservation and protection of vital activity, individual’s interests and his environment from negative anthropogenic and natural consequences, which is an important component of the state security. It is established that together with the concept of “environmental security” there is a concept of “environmental modernization” as overcoming of negative impacts on environment from the industrial society by transformation of the latter with help of the latest technologies. The existing threats to Ukraine’s environmental security, identified in the National Security Strategy of Ukraine in 2015 have been determined. The need for additional attention to the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine was emphasized as one of the threats to the states’s economic security, which is in line with the provisions of the United Nations Resolution “Environmental Protection in Areas Affected by Armed Conflict”. It is noted that the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources only formally fulfills the task of assessing the environmental status, unlike Finland and Sweden. The issue of public participation of Ukraine in environmental management is still debatable, as defined by the Law of Ukraine “On Environmental Protection”, it remains only formal, although, for example, the public is actively involved in the management of this field in China. Accordingly, it was proposed not only compliting tasks by the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources to develop a single list of indicators at EU level for assessing the environment status, but also to involve the public in full participation in environmental management.

Our paper focuses on the issues of food security and agricultural trade. Specifically, we tackle the issue of economic selfsufficiency of a country using an example of the import ban on agricultural production as one form of economic sanctions. Our paper attempts to estimate the impact of sanctions in separate regions, rather then on the aggregate country level. We propose an original methodology of estimating allocation of import ban effects based on the OECD Customer Support Estimate (CSE). Our results demonstrate that in case of some agricultural products (e.g. potatoes) consumers in most of Russian regions were net beneficiaries before 2014, but the magnitude of the benefits decreased significantly after the introduction of sanctions. This provided Russian agricultural producers with more support arising from the market price differential. All in all, we find no significant evidence of the import ban impact, however after 2014 the cumulative cost paid by consumers in different regions declined significantly due to other factors, leaving consumers in the position of net beneficiaries. Our results demonstrate that despite the economic sanctions are important, they do not affect food security of neither of conflicting parties.

Agriculture constitutes a very important sector in the Slovak economy that generates in addition to the basic food production also services, provides jobs, has a significant impact on regional development and provides nutrition of the population. One of decisive factors influencing the economic stability of agriculture is production efficiency which is strongly linked to support policy, through which partially is ensured the financial availability of enterprises. The use of subsidies by the EU is very important tool for ensuring economic sustainability of agriculture in the Slovak Republic conditions. The aim of this paper is economic evaluation of primary agricultural production in manufacturing and economic conditions in the Slovak Republic and their alternative comparison with selected EU Member States. The paper also refers to differences in level of subsidies in selected countries in the EU and their impact on possibilities of investing funds into the production development. Our calculations showed that without the intervention of the Common Agricultural Policy of the EU (especially subsidy policy) would be Slovak agriculture economically unprofitable, what could lead to its failure.