Private agri-food standards: Implications for food policy and the agri-food system

Henson, Spencer; Reardon, Thomas

doi:10.1016/j.foodpol.2005.05.002

Cited by 500 publications

(344 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…The result has been vertical integration as well as greater horizontal integration across businesses (Bijman and Joly, 2001). Downstream, the market for agricultural output has been substantially internationalised as a consequence of successive agreements on tariffs and trade, but also as a result of new food manufacturing technologies and changes in long distance transportation (Nadvi, 2004;Henson and Reardon, 2005). The consequence has been an increase in both vertical and horizontal integration to mirror that occurring upstream in the agri-food chain.…”

Section: Background Literature and Research Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Small Towns and Agriculture: Understanding the Spatial Pattern of Farm Linkages

Pangbourne

Roberts

2014

European Planning Studies

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Agricultural policy and farm lobby groups often stress the role of farm production in sustaining local economies. This paper considers the spatial pattern of upstream and downstream agricultural transactions of farms in North East Scotland and, in particular, the extent to which they take place within the locality of the farm holding.Three alternative definitions of "local" are considered: a distance based measure; a measure which takes into account the location of the farm in relation to the nearest town; and finally a new measure which takes into account the location of agribusinesses and defining a transaction as local if the farmer buys from (sells to) the nearest available input supplier (output purchaser). The results highlight the importance of allowing for context when explaining farmer purchasing and sales decisions with the final measure indicating a far higher proportion of local transactions as compared to the two other, more commonly-utilised, measures.However they also reveal a highly complex pattern of production-related linkages in the region with many farmers choosing to bypass their most proximate agribusinesses.Certain towns are found to dominate agriculture-related transactions in the region reflecting the spatial concentration of upstream and downstream agribusinesses. The findings provide new insights into theoretical debates on the role of small towns in the urban system and changing the changing importance of geographical distance in determining business transactions.

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Section: Background Literature and Research Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Small Towns and Agriculture: Understanding the Spatial Pattern of Farm Linkages

Pangbourne

Roberts

2014

European Planning Studies

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“…Neoliberalism in the agro-food sector has intensified private governance through quality standards and certification protocols, supplementing and substituting governmental regulations on food (see e.g. Busch, 2010;Tallontire, 2007;Henson and Reardon, 2005).…”

Section: Governance Of Global Agro-food Value Chainsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultivating Compliance: Governance of North Indian Organic Basmati Smallholders in a Global Value Chain

et al. 2013

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Tommaso (2013) Cultivating compliance: governance of North Indian organic basmati smallholders in a global value chain. Environment and Planning A, 45 (8). pp. 1912-1928. ISSN 0308-518X This version is available from Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/48173/ This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version. Copyright and reuse:Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University.Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. Smallholders in a Global Value Chain AbstractWe study (re)arrangements of a local socio-technical setting entailed in the making of a globalized commodity. Focussing on a global value chain (GVC) for organic basmati rice, we study how farmers' practices are governed through product and process standards, organic certification protocols, and contracts with buyer firms. We analyse how farmers' entry into the GVC reconfigures their agencements (defined as heterogeneous arrangements of human and non-human agencies that are associated with each other). These reconfigurations entail the severance of some associations among procedural and material elements of the agencements and the formation of new associations, in order to produce cultivation practices that are accurately described by the GVC's standards and protocols.Based on ethnography of two farmers in Uttarakhand, North India, we find that the same standards were enacted differently on the two farmers' fields, producing variable degrees of (selective) compliance with the 'official' GVC standards. We argue that the disjuncture between the standards' 'official' scripts and actual cultivation practices must be nurtured for allowing farmers' agencements to align their practices with local socio-technical relations and farm-ecology. Furthermore, we find that compliance and disjuncture was facilitated by many practices and associations that were officially 'ungoverned' by the GCC. Abstract word count: 198 wordsArticle word count: 9780 (including references) 3

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“…The increasing role of modern retail outlets, food safety and quality standards, vertical market integration, and international trade in high-value products characterize these changes Hobbs and Young, 2000). The growing role of food safety and quality standards was examined by Henson and Reardon (2005), and Unnevehr (2000) highlighted the difficulties for developing countries in accessing export markets. Also, the analysis of contract agriculture in developing countries has received increasing attention, especially with a view to the small farm sector (Swinnen, 2007;Sartorius and Kirsten, 2007).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linkages in Vegetable Marketing System of Tan Yen, Bac Giang, Viet Nam

Nguyen¹,

Ngo²,

Anh³

2015

GJAS

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In the past few years, production and marketing activities between Tan Yen vegetable farmers and processing companies have gradually gained local authorities attention. The Bacgiang People's Committee, Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, the Farmers Union, and the Bacgiang Vegetable Processing Company Association conducted hearings in which commune leaders, local government officials, and academics offered their perspectives on how the recent development of the vegetable processing sector have affected the economic efficiency of each factors chained in the system. Vegetable producers are concerned that recent growing incidence of contract non-compliance taking part in the processing companies has caused lower benefit they earn from the sector. Processing companies argue that the unstable customer market and world price fluctuation reflect their costs of doing business. Contract farming in the marketing system, as the new practice, is supposed to have a long-term relationship with continued commitment. However, institutional structure, information on functions and especially linkages between actors, the governance mechanism, and the integral part of local government intervention are necessary to mention but, limited in research. For this reason, this study attempted to describe Tan Yen vegetable marketing system in a systematic, structural, social, and behavioral way. With combined methodologies, the analysis was focused on evaluating the system's linkages among participated actors to place under the context of sustainable livelihood for the small vegetable producers. The conclusion is that the system has relatively weak linkages between actors involved and inefficiency for small producers.

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Private agri-food standards: Implications for food policy and the agri-food system

Cited by 500 publications

References 25 publications

Small Towns and Agriculture: Understanding the Spatial Pattern of Farm Linkages

Small Towns and Agriculture: Understanding the Spatial Pattern of Farm Linkages

Cultivating Compliance: Governance of North Indian Organic Basmati Smallholders in a Global Value Chain

Linkages in Vegetable Marketing System of Tan Yen, Bac Giang, Viet Nam

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