Presents recent evidence of supply chain developments in the UK fresh produce industry, based on interviews with chief executives from some of the country's most successful suppliers. A number of success factors were evident, to varying degrees, in all of the companies interviewed. These included: continuous investment (despite increasingly tight margins), good staff (to drive the process of innovation and develop good trading relationships with key customers), volume growth (to fund the necessary investments and provide a degree of confidence in the future), improvement of measurement and control of costs (in the pursuit of further gains in efficiency), and innovation (not just the product offer but also the level of service and the way of doing business with key customers).

A model for the solar coronal magnetic field is proposed where multiple directed loops evolve in space and time. Loops injected at small scales are anchored by footpoints of opposite polarity moving randomly on a surface. Nearby footpoints of the same polarity aggregate, and loops can reconnect when they collide. This may trigger a cascade of further reconnection, representing a solar flare. Numerical simulations show that a power law distribution of flare energies emerges, associated with a scale-free network of loops, indicating self-organized criticality.

Consumer concern for “ethical products”, or ethical aspects of the goods which they purchase, is a subject of increasing interest and research,which is here illustrated by an examination of the Fair Trade movement, with special reference to coffee as an indicative commodity. Kate Bird, is currently Lecturer in the Development Administration Group, School of Public Policy, Birmingham University, Birmingham B15 2TT, England, having previously worked abroad and written her MSc dissertation at Wye College on fair trade in coffee products. Dr Hughest holds the Sainsbury Chair in Agribusiness and Food Marketing at Wye College, University of London, Wye, Ashford, Kent TN25 5AH, England (email: D.Hughes@wye.ac.uk), where he is also Director of the Food Industry Management Group. He has wide international experience of food management issues.