CHAPTER 5: INDUSTRIES, DISTRIBUTION, LOGISTIC

The agribusiness system no longer really has a center, or origin, as the “primary” nature of production might suggest. Rather, it reveals multiple sequences of companies of all sizes; the link with production is, however, an obligation, a must. We have just seen that agribusiness cooperatives are an impetus for agro-production and that, conversely, very large firms are concerned about the permanence of their link with production. In the first case, agribusiness is a “raison d’être”; not in the second, where it is, however, a sine qua non condition, as long as the object of the firm remains food (this point is not a detail: Danone is the result of successive transformations of BSN, operators in the glass, whose strategy was for a moment, from the container to the contents, from the glass to the beer, then to the agriculture production in general, which is not quite the case anymore today). In addition, companies that absolutely need agribusiness are very diverse in size and influence over their agricultural supplier, sometimes confined to the role of subcontractors (but cooperatives have agro-production subsidiary). We will explore this part of the agribusiness system in depth in this chapter…