Cooperation in the agrofood industry: the case of ternera del Maestrazgo

Abstract

This paper describes the importance of the agrofood sector an cooperatives in Europe, with particular interest in Spain. This part gives a framework to the analysis of a representative farm in the beef sector located in Puertomingalvo. Using real data we compute the profit function of the farm and propose diverse scenarios. Our study shows that this kind of firms depend mostly on subsidies. A proposal is to create a cooperative that allows farmers to sell their product charging higher prices following a strategy of vertical integration. In particular we focus in a cooperative in Cantavieja, "Carnes del Maestrazgo" that is making efforts oriented to this objective but had many difficulties in keeping cooperation from farmers. As a tool to analyze the difficulties for cooperation we design a framed field experiment to observe the attitude of farmers.