During the last two decades an increasing amount of large-scale farming operations have emerged all over the world: from (Eastern) Europe, to South America, China and the countries of the Former Soviet Union. These agribusinesses go under the name of mega-farms or agroholdings: horizontally or vertically integrated operations with farm sizes of up to 500,000 hectares and sometimes even more. These types of farms are not only found in crop farming, but also in animal husbandry. Although some information on agroholdings and other forms of mega-farming operations is available, a systematic analysis of their prevalence, economic performance as well as their social and environmental implications in an international perspective is missing. In this special issue of the International Food and Agribusiness Management Review we present a number of papers that highlight the different aspects of such farms. In this editorial we introduce the topic of agroholdings and place the papers in within the context of the available literature. We end with the presentation of a research agenda for the future.
The paper argues that transparency of large corporate farms operating in transition economies is the factor that affects their competitive position as it helps to preserve access to international equity markets and to reduce uncertainty that arises from imperfect local input markets. We demonstrate that the corporate transparency of large farms is an issue of both public interest and private investor interest and decompose the construct of transparency respectively. Because firms tend to exhibit heterogeneous transparency strategies when facing common sets of pressures, we draw upon four case studies of different Ukrainian agroholdings using the suggested decomposition of the transparency construct. We find that large farms may benefit substantially in the long run if they establish effective corporate governance mechanisms and provide more evidence that they contribute positively to corporate social responsibility and rural development.
This study examines traditional food chain goals and explores the match with general consumer perceptions and preferences in relation to traditional food as a food product category. Chain goals were selected using focus group discussions and in-depth interviews (84 chain members, three European countries, five traditional food categories), as well as a literature review and a small scale survey (26 chain members, three European countries, three traditional food categories). Consumer data was gathered in six European countries via qualitative focus group discussions (95 participants), word association tests (721 participants), and a quantitative survey (4,828 participants). The study identifies five key chain goals: “To maintain traditionalism,” “To increase efficiency,” “To improve responsiveness,” “To improve quality,” and “To create chain balance.” Traditionalism and quality goals were relevant and important to consumers, whereas efficiency, responsiveness, and chain balance goals were not directly recognized by or apparent to them. [EconLit citations: D12; D74; L14]. (C) 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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