The agri-food supply chain has come under increasing pressure to adapt to several complex challenges. These include feeding a rapidly growing population, minimizing environmental impacts, and ensuring food safety. Traditional methods of food production and distribution are beginning to fall short of the demands for more sustainable and efficient operations. To address these issues, emerging technologies are offering innovative solutions aimed at improving productivity, transparency, and resource management across the sector. As a result, digital technologies are becoming key drivers of transformation in the agri-food supply chain.

This paper explores the transformative role of emerging technologies in the agri-food supply chain, with a focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain, and Industry 4.0 technologies. These innovations promise to revolutionize the sector by improving operational efficiency, sustainability, and transparency, addressing the growing challenges of food security and environmental impact. Through a systematic literature review and Q-Score evaluation of 23 studies, the research analyzes how these technologies enhance predictive maintenance, real-time decision-making, and food traceability, while also identifying barriers to their adoption, particularly for smallholder farmers and rural regions.

The findings highlight AI's role in improving demand forecasting and resource optimization, IoT's contribution to real-time monitoring and waste reduction, and Blockchain's capacity to ensure food safety and reduce fraud through enhanced traceability. Despite these advances, challenges such as high implementation costs, technical expertise gaps, and infrastructure limitations persist. The research concludes by offering recommendations to policymakers and industry stakeholders to facilitate technology adoption, focusing on financial support, infrastructure development, and training initiatives. Future research is encouraged to further explore the long-term impacts of these technologies and their scalability for smallholder farmers.

Acknowledgement:
Funded by the European Union. This publication is part of the TALLHEDA project that has received funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101136578. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency (REA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Keywords: Education Needs, Emerging Technologies, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain, Industry 4.0, Agriculture 4.0, Supply Chains.