Initiative and conservatism, complementary strategies for small and medium-sized resilient family producers

Jean Ruffier (), Jorge Walter and Hernán Manson
Additional contact information
Jean Ruffier: ISEOR - Institut de Socio-économie des Entreprises et des ORganisations - Institut de socio-économie des entreprises et des organisations
Hernán Manson: ITC (UNCTAD-WTO) - International Trade Center - WTO - UNCTAD

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: In a research undertaken in the early 2000s, we observed a change in existing regulations in the European Union (specifically, the appearance of Eurep Gap norms and mandatory traceability) faced by small and medium off-season fruit exporting companies from Uruguay and Argentina. For producers to be able to make the necessary investments, some of their main clients –we will refer in this paper to the prototypical case of the French supermarket Carrefour– changed the type of contract they used to sign with them (common in captive value chains) and adopted a type of contract more frequent in relational chains. The new contracts were based in a cahier de charges agreed with the producers regarding the changes to be implemented, offering a price stability guarantee as a counterpart for the period necessary to implement them. Did this mean that producers abandoned their traditional products and production modes? By means of a historical analysis of their exporting trajectories, the study of the chains –made from the point of view of the producers– revealed, on the contrary, that their resilience (understood as their ability to face difficult situations, remaining competitive) depended in the long term from a prudent combination of offensive strategies –as the one mentioned in the beginning– and defensive ones, based on maintaining old and local productions and distribution channels (not always), less profitable than exporting.

Keywords: Global Value Chains; Quality Adaptation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-03-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-01879351
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Laemos, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Mar 2018, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-01879351/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01879351

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().