Farmers' strategies in globalization markets: Empirical results from Germany

Philipp Inderhees and Ludwig Theuvsen

No 10053, 98th Seminar, June 29-July 2, 2006, Chania, Crete, Greece from European Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: Today the European agrofood sector is increasingly confronted with the threats as well as the opportunities of liberalizing markets. Therefore, competitiveness on global markets is becoming of paramount importance for European farmers. The challenges of global markets are accompanied by a growing array of new developments in farmers' economic and political environments, such as accelerating structural changes in the farm and agribusiness sectors, a new EU agricultural policy (decoupling and cross- compliance) and new market opportunities due to the breakthrough of renewable energies. In this paper we deal with strategic decision- making by German farmers who are confronted with new threats and opportunities. We develop a theoretical framework of strategic farm management based on the differentiation between different levels of strategic management, namely corporate, competitive, functional, and cooperative strategies. We present the results of a large- scale empirical study in the German state of North Rhine- Westphalia. The empirical results show that farmers employ a broad spectrum of corporate, competitive, functional and cooperative strategies to reposition their farms in the face of changing economic and political environments. Factor analysis reveals five dominant strategic factors and cluster analysis five strategic groups in the region under survey. The results of the study allow farmers to benchmark their farms and to identify strategic gaps in the face of globalizing markets.

Keywords: Farm Management; Marketing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/10053/files/sp06in01.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:eaae98:10053

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.10053

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 98th Seminar, June 29-July 2, 2006, Chania, Crete, Greece from European Association of Agricultural Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().