Cooperatives are a specific type of organization. For a century, they represented an important means of organisational and strategic structuring of agricultural and food sectors in France. By the early 1990s, an accelerated process of concentration is observed between agricultural cooperatives....

Madagascar has a tradition of agricultural trade (coffee, vanilla, cloves). In the 90s, the country started developing non-traditional exports, such as lychees, to the European Union (EU), thereby generating substantial cash revenues for small producers. In 2005, access to the EU market became...

Purpose: French wine cooperatives show differences of corporate objectives, but also common ones with private wine merchants, as they face a common economic environment. The traditional controlling and financial models do not seem adequate to measure ‘sustainable social economy’ performances...

In the fresh produce long distance international trade, market intermediaries are still a key actor while modern retailers have little backward integrated into the import activity. Difficulty to negotiate a price at the FOB level, three or four weeks before fresh produce are consumed, leads...

Rising consumer interest for ethical and/or responsible products and the growing interweaving of social and environmental issues question the ability of scientific methods to correctly assess social impacts. To this day however, no consensus has yet been reached on relevant indicators to assess...

Sustainability standards are flooding global agricultural markets. Standards however, are not recent: standards for the exchange of grain and tropical products emerged in the 19th century. The objective of this article is to analyze, in a historical perspective, the implications of the...

After a survey of the main agribusiness global value chain analysis methods, the authors propose a larger pattern from the global value chain concept developed by Gereffi. They focus on the necessity of a quantified economic characterization and a diachronic study of the global value chain. This...