Agribusiness最新文献

Food labeling is intended to clarify information for consumers, yet sometimes labeling can be misleading. This study examines US consumer choice for labeled and unlabeled products across meat animal species in which differing regulations exist by species regarding hormone use in production and where consumer perception of hormone use by species varies. In the case of hormone use in US meat animal production, pork and poultry products labeled as being produced with no added hormones must also state that federal regulations prohibit the use of hormones in production. However, this required information is often obscured on retail labels. Results from expected utility models indicate that after consumers receive information regarding regulations and actual hormone use across species, the difference in utility and in willingness to pay for products labeled “produced with no added hormones” versus unlabeled product is lower for products where hormone use is restricted by federal regulations  [EconLit Citations: Q13, D12, Q18].

Using data from a nationally representative household survey, this study investigates whether changes in food-at-home (FAH) purchases occurred following the introduction, modification, and implementation of the Chilean food labeling and marketing regulations. This study further examines whether changes in sugar, sodium, saturated fat, or calorie intake occurred. The results provide evidence of some improvements in dietary intake. In particular, sugar intake decreased primarily due to food modifications—that emerged as a supply response to regulations. This improvement in dietary intake was only found among those households who mainly buy FAH or shop mostly at grocery stores. Considering that across all households, nearly 10% of total FAH calories come from products with added sugars, the results suggest that there are missing opportunities that policy could leverage to improve food choices, especially among those less likely to be influenced by existing regulations—those who mainly spend on food away from home or those who primarily shop at alternative FAH outlets. [EconLit Citations: D22, L51, Q13].

Agrifood traceability of farms is extremely difficult owing to the small scale and dispersibility of farms. Fortunately, wholesale markets play an irreplaceable role in agrifood systems and in upstream traceability in many developing countries. This study first explores the mechanism of food safety liabilities related to the adoption of upstream traceability to farms. Then, the effects of public regulation by the government and private regulation by the market platform on wholesale vendors' adoption of traceability are investigated empirically. A unique panel dataset comprising 9287 food safety tests for 396 vendors from a wholesale market is used in the empirical analysis. The results show that vendors behave opportunistically by lowering their level of traceability when they expect a smaller possibility of being sampled. Given the same strength of regulation intensity, the effect of government regulation is larger than that of the market. The experience of failure in recent sampling tests motivates vendors to adopt higher levels of traceability. Recommendations regarding the frequency of food safety sampling tests conducted by the government and wholesale markets are proposed [EconLit Citations: Q18, L53].

The Ethiopian commodity exchange market (ECX) was launched in 2008, and since then it has rolled out warehouse services for various commodities in different markets. In this study, our objective is to examine the effect of ECX's warehouse services on spatial and intra-temporal integration of agricultural markets. To this effect, we apply the difference-in-difference approach on monthly retail price collected from sample markets. The results show that the warehouse service provision is associated with improved spatial market integration for chickpea and haricot bean, but not in the case of soya bean, sesame, and coffee. The results further show the warehouse service has no statistically significant impact on intra-temporal market integration except for sesame. The implications of the study results are discussed. [EconLit Citations: D4, Q1, O1].

Policymakers and economists envisage effective price transmission across markets or stakeholders in supply chains as a vital contributor to market efficiency. The paper explores the vertical price transmission in the perishables supply chain in India using weekly data on farm, wholesale and retail prices collected from main production and consumption markets. We estimate the asymmetries in price transmission using the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lags model and found the asymmetry in both magnitude and speed in the case of wholesale–retail chain of Onion and Potato, asymmetry in magnitude in wholesale–retail chain of Tomato, and asymmetry in speed in farm–wholesale chain of Potato. The results of asymmetric coefficient, long-run elasticity of price transmission, speed of adjustment and implied half-life of disequilibrium indicated that farm–wholesale chain is more efficient than wholesale–retail chain. Further, market chains of Onion and Tomato are more efficient than Potato chains. The magnitude of the adjustment was found to be larger for the long-run positive shock in wholesale–retail market chain of Onion, Potato and Tomato, and it concluded that retailers enjoy an advantage over wholesalers as well as farmers. We draw interesting policy considerations for the perishables sector [EconLit Citations: Q11, Q13, C32].

Seafood products are mainly provided through trade to international markets and Norway is the major international player for the export of salmon products. It is argued that fresh or chilled salmon, which are perishable products and Norway's main seafood export, need stable trade partners to safely and properly reach consumption markets. In this study, the firm-to-firm level trade transactional data for both exporters and importers for the 2005–2018 period was utilized for a trade duration analysis. The Kaplan–Meier survival estimators, Cox proportional hazard model, and frailty model were used to study the stability of trade relations between the partners through survival and hazard models. The study considers the heterogeneous firm trade model along with a theoretical framework. The results show that, on average, the trade duration for the salmon trade between firms is 2.39 years, which is relatively low for a perishable product such as salmon. It shows that the market entry and exit is relatively fast, and that the survival rate between the EU as a major demand market and non-EU countries is not very different. However, core and periphery markets can be defined by considering the survival rate, as major processing hubs in the EU, such as Poland and France as core markets, have higher survival rates compared with other countries that can be considered peripheries. Both extensive and intensive margins were found to reduce the hazard ratio. Different hazard ratios were also found between different types of exporter or ones utilizing different means of transport. We conclude that the trade duration between the partners can be increased if the competition in the market increases, which is probably possible in markets like the United States where other exporters such as Chile are available.

The Luenberger–Hicks–Moorsteen (LHM) total factor productivity (TFP) indicator has sound theoretical properties, but its decomposition yields indeterminate components of technical change and scale efficiency change that can become infeasible. The current paper decomposes the approximating Bennet indicator, which results in determinate components of technical change, technical efficiency change, scale efficiency change and mix efficiency change that are always feasible. The application focuses on the German dairy-processing sector, an important postfarm supply chain actor. We compute 558 growth rates for the period 2011–2020. The results show that the LHM-approximating Bennet indicator decreases by on average 1.14% p.a., with substantial annual fluctuations. The underlying components of output- and input-oriented technical change also fluctuate substantially, and often conflict. Moreover, output- and input-oriented TFP efficiency change fluctuate moderately on average, which is mainly driven by scale efficiency change and mix efficiency change. The components of technical efficiency change remain relatively stable on average. Indeterminateness is a relevant problem when decomposing the original LHM indicator for the current sample: depending on the specification, the proportion of infeasibilities when decomposing the original LHM indicator ranges between 6.09% and 15.95%. Our proposed determinate decomposition is thus a valuable complement. [EconLit Citations: D24, D25, Q13].

The European Union (EU) farm-to-fork strategy aims to empower consumers to make sustainable food choices, among others, through harmonizing voluntary green claims and labels and potentially introducing a common sustainable claims and labels framework for food products. The literature on the current use of sustainability claims and labels (SCLs) in the EU market is scarce. This paper analyzes the trend developments of SCLs in product launches by food companies across different product groups and countries. The analyses are based on Mintel Global New Product Database on newly introduced products with SCLs, covering 24 food product categories and 19 European countries over the 2005–2021 period. The results show that, on aggregate, across all covered countries and products, the share of product launches with SCLs increased by 2.83% annually from 2005 to 2021. This trend varies greatly among countries, product categories and SCL types. Further, the results show that products covering environmental only SCLs make the highest contribution to the overall sustainability trend (68.2%), followed by products with a combination of both environmental and social SCLs (27.5%), whereas only social SCLs have a minor representation (4.2%). [EconLit Citations: Q18, Q01].

Consumers usually have little knowledge about eco-labels, and eco-labeled foods are still relatively uncommon. This study explores whether providing information about eco-labels can improve consumers’ valuations of eco-labeled foods. We tested three types of information—selfish (health related), altruistic (environment related), and combined (both)—and used a sample of 4523 Chinese consumers. Our results indicate that all three types of information increase consumers’ valuations of eco-labeled foods. Consumers express the largest valuation for eco-labeled foods when provided with selfish information, followed by altruistic information and combined information. We also found heterogeneous responses to all information treatments, with high-income consumers being more responsive to selfish information, while more highly educated consumers are more sensitive to combined information. We discuss the implications for designing policies to develop eco-labeled food markets, for example, by using redundant or identity-based information on the labels, especially in developing economies. [EconLit Citations: D12, Q13, Q18]

The establishment of agricultural cooperatives is widely viewed as an institutional arrangement to remove constraints that prevent smallholders from accessing profitable business opportunities in agriculture. Agricultural cooperatives in China offer a wide range of services within the framework of contract farming and vertical integration. This study empirically examines the multiple roles of China's cooperatives in improving farm production efficiency and conserving the agricultural environment. Considering that agricultural cooperatives' services can be broadly divided into biological and machinery services, we specify a stochastic frontier production function in a special form, called the separated Cobb–Douglas. The empirical results present clear evidence that Chinese agricultural cooperatives play essential roles in increasing biochemical technical efficiency and protecting the agroecological environment. However, the involvement of cooperatives as vertical integrators is demonstrated to have a detrimental effect on biochemical technical efficiency. The pressing challenge for agricultural cooperative development in China is to accommodate the conflicting consequences that their entry into farming has on biochemical and machinery technical efficiencies. This has strong policy implications, although our study has certain limitations in terms of the narrow focus on a single specific region. [EconLit Citations: C26, Q12, Q13, Q15, Q18].