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Andrew Fearne: Andrew Fearne is a Senior Lecturer in the Food Industry Management Group, Wye College, University of London, UK
1 Introduction
The development of collaborative marketing ventures in the agri-food chain in many countries is a response to the economic pressures that are driving the evolution of the chain and encouraging greater vertical and horizontal co-ordination. To some, such vertical collaborative ventures ("linkages", "alliances", "value-added chains" or "partnerships") are seen as a compromise in market organisation between the extremes of open market trading (which has characterised agricultural commodities) and complete vertical integration. To others, given the independent-minded nature of any farm and agricultural businesses in countries such as the UK, they offer an alternative less rigid way of co-ordinating the market[1].
An important feature of the UK beef industry in the 1990s has been the emergence of partnerships between producers, abattoirs and supermarkets. In recent years these partnerships have extended further up the supply chain to include breeders and feed compounders. These partnerships have been difficult to establish and slow to develop - they currently account for approximately one fifth of beef production - but the momentum behind them is gathering and there is a growing acceptance that partnership arrangements are the only sustainable form of trading relationship in the long term.
This case study of the UK beef industry aims to illustrate why partnership schemes have developed, how they operate and some of the major problems which arise. Information was collected from a survey of more than 2,000 farmers and semi-structured interviews with some of the country's largest beef processers and meat buyers from the major supermarkets, over a period of six months, from August 1997 to February 1998.
2 The structure of the British beef industry
There are currently just more than 70,000 specialist beef producers in the UK, producing around 700,000 tonnes of beef and veal. There are almost 2 million specialist beef cattle (around 60 per cent of British beef comes from the dairy herd). The average specialist beef holding has 26 suckler cows (see Table I).
The UK beef sector has been severely affected by the BSE crisis, which has resulted in a marked decline in production in the face of dwindling domestic consumer confidence, the world-wide ban on...