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Abstract:

Agricultural commodity markets are moving increasingly towards market-focused arrangements. Agricultural markets have always been characterised by uncertainty and arrangements to counter this are by no means new forms of economic practice. Nevertheless, recent changes to supra-national and national-level policy support suggests that agricultural sectors are likely to become more market-orientated in the future, with much less state intervention. This paper conceptualises these emerging agri-economic geographies as new forms of institutional governance. More specifically, we highlight the role of contractualisation (vertical relations) and the evolution of cooperative forms of governance (horizontal relations) in agri-food economies, and their potential to create new spaces of agri-food governance that enable producers to manage market uncertainty and increased exposure to global economic relations. The paper therefore extends earlier commodity chain analysis of governance proposed by Gereffi et al and others, by placing it in the context of contemporary agri-food chains in Europe. Findings from a major on-going H2020-funded project, SUFISA, are presented to support this argument, with analysis of new forms of institutional governance examined empirically by extensive qualitative and quantitative analysis of three agricultural commodity markets (dairy, arable and fruits) in different European regions. The analysis is presented primarily from a farmer perspective to show how forms of contractualisation, collective action, the use of market data, futures and other risk management strategies are emerging at the farm and food chain level. The paper concludes by highlighting the multi-level nature of institutional arrangements in agri-food economies and their dynamism as socio-material properties.