The dynamics of vertical coordination in agri-food supply chains in transition countries.

Semi-Subsistence Farming: An Elusive Concept Posing Thorny Policy Questions

“…The European Commission implicitly adopted this threshold in their definition in Article 34(1) of the Council Regulation on Support for Rural Development by the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EC No. 1698⁄ 2005 where semisubsistence farms are defined as 'agricultural holdings which produce primarily for their own consumption and also market a proportion of their output' (Official Journal of the European Union, 21.10.2005). This definition is the basis for the eligibility for the transitional measure 141 for support to semi-subsistence farms in the NMS undergoing restructuring.…”

“…To participate in the chain, farmers have to adopt various public and private standards. Swinnen (2005) emphasises that, although this is not an absolute constraint to the market participation of small farms, the process of vertical coordination affects them adversely owing to the high transaction costs for the downstream sector, the need for more assistance to farmers per unit output and the limited capacity of these farms for the new investments necessary to satisfy the quality standards.…”

Access to finance for organic producers in Serbia: Demand side

“…Literature on access to inance in the agriculture and organic production in transitional countries is mainly focused on the supply side of the problem, usually including banks and microinance institutions. Development organizations (USAID, EBRD, OECD) are mainly dealing with the constraints and statistics, while researchers are focused on the relationship between credit supply and farm productivity, farm inputs and outputs, investments and other aspects of rural development (for details see Swinnen, Gow, 1999;Swinnen, 2007;Latruffe, 2005;Latruffe et al, 2010). It is reasonable to expect that almost all studies have found positive relationship between an increased access to inance and improvement of analyzed parameters.…”

Farmers’ Bargaining Power and Input Prices: What Can We Learn from Self-Reported Assessments?1

“…Using this proxy allowed us also to go beyond the standard proxies used in the literature to capture the farmers' bargaining power, i.e., the farm size, or the distance between farmers and their contractors. In effect, we could much better control for other determinants of farmers' bargaining power such as having personal contacts, the length of the relationship or negotiating skills (for the discussion about the importance of these factors, see, e.g., Dries et al 2009;Gorton et al 2014;Sauer et al 2012;Swinnen 2007). To best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to empirically investigate farmers-input suppliers relations using this approach.…”