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• Economic Performances of German Agri-Food Businesses: an Extension of Existing Discourses on the Topic

  67-80

  Vincent Berendes

  Petr Blizkovsky

  Views:

  196

  Considering the circumstance that literature dealing with the economic performance of agri-food businesses in general, or particularly with the German agricultural sector, mainly deals with strictly agricultural-related theory in order to explain the economic success of agri-food businesses, the present paper aims to extend existing discourses to further areas of thought. Consequently, the characteristics: a) increased size of agribusiness, b) pull-strategies, c) the development of new markets and d) focus on the processing industry, that all correspond to the current picture of the German agricultural sector and are considered to be significantly responsible for recently managing to outpace the French agri-food sector, will be first explained in their success against the background of mainly non-agricultural-related literature. By doing so helpful and rather unnoted perspectives can be contributed to existing discourses. Second, the paper presents scatter plots which portray correlations between a) the added value of agriculture and the regular labor force, b) the added value of agriculture and the number of agricultural holdings and c) the added value of agriculture and the number of enterprises concerning milk consumption. Corresponding scatter plots which show different developments in Germany and France can be related to the findings of the first part of the paper and allow new perspectives in existing discourses as well.

  JEL Classification: Q10

• Economics of fairness within the food supply chain in context of the EU

  107-116

  Petr Blizkovsky

  Vincent Berendes

  Views:

  240

  The paper broaches the issue of unfair trading practices (UTPs) at the expense of, economically spoken, weaker actors among the food supply chain in context of the EU. For illustrating the concept of UTPs and delivering a theoretical basis for scrutinizing the term of fairness in respective trading practices the paper suggests the three variables 1) bargaining power, 2) market power/anti competitive practices and 3) unequal gain distribution. Subsequently the article presents selected national food-specific legislative based reactions towards UTPs evolved in context of the three variables. Ultimately the paper presents a qualitatively generated hypothesis which presumes that legislative food-specific measurements focussing on protecting suppliers lead to a beneficial monetary share for farmers, by means of influencing the producer price to a monetarily advantageous extent. The hypothesis was generated unprejudiced in the run-up to the paper. The research design which led to the hypothesis mentioned will be presented.