The trade-off between chain performance and fragility considering coordination strategies of agri-food chains: a South African egg chain's case study

Letlama Setene and Daniel du P.S. Jordaan

International Food and Agribusiness Management Review, 2021, vol. 24, issue 3

Abstract: The mainstream strategy in the coordination of agri-food chains has traditionally focused more on the enhancement of chain performance by adopting lean and highly integrated strategies. These strategies are premised on the principle that governance structures are the result of tactics that economize on transaction costs in exchanges in chains. Due to existing interdependencies between chain players such strategies expose these chains to detrimentally disruptive uncertainty. This paper adopted a heuristic stress-testing approach to measure the fragility of South African egg value chain and performed a comparative fragility analysis of two coordination approaches in the egg chain. Additionally, the analysis of results indicated that the egg chain strategy with high levels of interdependencies between its chain players as significantly fragile. Precisely, the difference between the chain strategies was associated with a variety of differences at the factor and chain player levels that led up to a higher overall chain fragility of the chain with higher levels of interdependency. Inevitably, the paper propositions that there is a trade-off between chain performance and fragility. The results of the study affirmed that there is a trade-off between chain performance and fragility which needs to be balanced.

Keywords: Agribusiness; International Development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/316288/files/ifamr2021.0015.pdf (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:ags:ifaamr:316288

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.316288

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Food and Agribusiness Management Review from International Food and Agribusiness Management Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().