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From the protests in the streets of Genoa, Quebec and Seattle to the U.S. Senate, one doesn’t have to look far to find opposition to globalization and concentration.“… [D]o something about antitrust, the concentration that is clogging the free market …”1was one plea in the Senate debate of the Wellstone Amendment 2752. The proposal to place a moratorium on large agribusiness mergers and to establish a commission to review agricultural mergers, concentration, and market power was defeated 71 to 21 but provides an indicator of the concern felt in some quarters. Similar legislative proposals have been made in the European Union and again in the United States. Globalization and concentration have changed the agri-food sector. To experience global competitors, a firm does not have to enter new markets; the competitors will come to the firm. Adapting to the changing global landscape requires managers and policymakers to view the world differently, understand the factors behind the changes and plan how best to alter corporate strategy or government policy to meet the new challenges.

Innovative new products offer agri-food producers and processors an opportunity to differentiate their output from the commodities prevalent in the sector. Unfortunately, many new products do not live up to initial expectations and are eventually abandoned. However, even with products that are doomed to fail, there is occasionally a period of time after their introduction when strong, but fallacious, indicators of success appear. Sometimes the initial appearance of success is so strong that new entrants rush in, increasing demand and prices for production capacity, thereby strengthening the illusion of industry success. Eventually, supply catches up to the unsupported demand and the bubble bursts. The fall is often dramatic and painful. This paper provides a retrospective examination of the economic factors surrounding one example of such a situation, the Ontario emu bubble between 1993 and 1996.

This document contains the PowerPoint presentation given by the authors at the 2002 WCC-72 meetings, regarding innovation in the Canadian Agri-Food sector. Definitions relating to the dimensions and process of innovation as well as a case study are presented.

A summary report of the presentations and the discussion at the national workshop on innovation in the Canadian economy and the Canadian agriculture and food sector held on September 26-27, 2002 in Guelph, Ontario. This report is the second product of a joint collaborative agreement between the Research and Analysis Directorate of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) and the Department of Agricultural Economics and Business of the University of Guelph. The first product of the collaborative agreement was the organizing and holding of the workshop. This report provides a summary and a synthesis of the presentations and the discussions at the workshop.

40 leaves (some unnumbered) : ; Includes bibliographical references (leaves 40). ; "August, 1993". This research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada under Grant No. A5474. Cycle time management and reduction, CTM, is the manufacturing philosophy that follows TQM and JIT. CTM seeks to reduce the total time required to perform all the activities that occur during order processing, design, supply management, production and distribution of a product or service. Three models are developed for supporting CTM -- a simple stochastic model, a Markov chain model and a queueing model. The models must be fitted to the manufacturing environment in which they will be used. Three manufacturing environments -- make to order, assemble to order and make to stock -- are described. When a CTM model is applied to a manufacturing environment it identifies the activities that represent the largest components of cycle time. Those activities are then targeted for cycle time reduction.

This thesis is an investigation of agrifood value chain projects, and the effect public funding programs and incentives have on their conceptualization, implementation, operation, and results. This exploratory study utilizes five case studies from across the agrifood sector to gain an understanding of the benefits, costs, difficulties, and motivations behind these complex and expensive collaborative projects. This was accomplished using semi-structured interviews, along with an examination of supporting project proposals, progress reports, and other documentation. The results indicate that collaborating with partners is quite difficult, prone to failure, tends to exceed cost projections, and is difficult to manage. The conclusion is that developing a collaborative value chain initiative with the express purpose of securing cheap or free public funding often results in a needlessly complicated and difficult project that might have been better served by securing private investment.

Traceability is often perceived by food industry executives as an additional cost of doing business, one to be avoided if possible. However, a traceability system can in fact improve supply chain and marketing performance, as well as increase food safety and recall performance. This research was undertaken to understand how variables related to regulations, recall improvement, market response and supply chain improvement impact the perceived net benefits of traceability. Analysis of the results of a plant level survey of the Canadian dairy processing industry revealed that processors generally perceived net benefits from traceability and those who were looking for broader benefits than simply meeting regulatory requirements or reducing number of recalls actually perceived higher net benefits than those who only adopted for those reasons. The results of the study indicate that there is reason for food industry managers to re-evaluate their perceptions of the true costs and benefits of traceability and to take greater advantage of the benefits of such systems.