The objective of this paper is to assess food systems performance in Mediterranean countries to deliver safe food (fresh produce), and to demonstrate the capacity to the satisfaction of private customers and public regulators. To that end, an international benchmarking exercise was developed to...

Nowadays, the increasing demand by customers and consumers for information on food quality and safety determines, to a certain degree, the structure of the food chain. Traceability is considered as a tool to reach and keep consumers' confidence, which became a central issue to restore consumers'...

China opened its pork import market to Spain in 2007. With this background, we introduce the concept of the Spanish‐Chinese Export‐Import pork chain. An explorative study based on the interview of 22 Spanish meat companies and two experts from meat exporting promotion institutions is...

Milk consumption patterns are changing in Portugal. Factors like convenience, quality and safety increasingly constitute the basis for the Portuguese consumer purchasing decision. Demand for organic milk products (OMP) is emerging while most of these products are supplied by foreign companies....

International wine market is becoming one of the more dynamic in beverages sector. This paper is a summary of the research developed during 2004-2006 at the UPM with Argentinean exporters. The selection of UK market was due to the high degree of competition between international wines: European,...

The wine value chain is characterized by its traditional nature. The transformation of the raw material makes lasting products with a high added value, which entails large price differences between producers and consumers. Given the socioeconomic important of this sector, it has specially been...

The following paper shows the work in progress in the frame of the specific support action Program “E-Trust”. A initial qualitative study was carried out in order to find out evidences and opinions about the performance of e-commerce in the agricultural and food sector. The paper shows a...

This study explores consumer demand for organic milk products (OMP) and prospective developments in OMP supply chain in Portugal. Consumer demand is approached through a survey accomplished with a stratified sample of 625 consumers from the Porto Metropolitan area (north Portugal), whose...

Developing country producers face several constraints related to food safety standards imposed by developed countries. The purpose of this study is to identify factors affecting export flows with respect to food safety standards; and to measure the effects of food safety standards on exports....

There is no single 'best way' of policy development. Bottom-up approaches to policy design and a broad debate among stakeholders facilitate policy learning and innovation. A novel approach of a bottom-up policy design process involving stakeholders is introduced. First results obtained by this...