Melania Salazar-Ordóñez

Analysing granulated brown sugar – panela – market in Western Honduras

Purpose – Starting from a territorial development project in Western Honduras (Copan and Ocotepeque), farmers aimed to increase and add value to agricultural production by producing and commercializing granulated brown sugar (panela). The Western Honduras sugar market was studied, from the supply and demand side, in order to particularly understand consumer preference which is considered a key to increase smallholder farmers’ income in rural areas. Design/methodology/approach – The research included a qualitative study by means of six visits for observation and data compilation to stores, four face-to-face open semi-structured interviews with store owners and a focus group with local producers to acquire a global picture of the main regional sugar market characteristics from the supply side. Moreover a quantitative analysis applying a Choice Experiment to study consumer preferences was performed acquiring higher knowledge from the demand side. Findings – First, it was found that Honduras sugar market coul...

Assessing the Potential Effects of the European Union Multilevel Approach to the Coexistence Policy

European Union (EU) coexistence policy is based on the principle of subsidiarity, which implies a multilevel governance framework. Different legislative approaches have been developed in EU Member States. These legal rules are oriented to both preventing on-farm adventitious admixture (ex-ante regulations) and reducing potential economic consequences (ex-post liability). So coexistence deals with a subject of negative externalities involving an issue of property-right allocation between farmers. Considering the impacts that coexistence policy has on GM (genetically modified) crop adoption rates and the generation of trade distortions, potential effects of the EU coexistence framework are reviewed from a theoretical property-right allocation view. Derived from the analysis, property-right allocation is focused on non-GM farmers according to EU regulation enforcement, which tends to rigid coexistence measures. Nonetheless, the multilevel EU framework has led Member States to pursue their aims: trade interests and social legitimation.

Survey data on consumer behaviour in olive oil markets : The role of product knowledge and brand credence

This paper presents data conducted to analyse consumer behaviour in agri-food markets, where product differentiation failures occur, with the aim of disentangling the roles played by both consumer information and inferences made from informational stimuli. We thus examined consumer knowledge structures and brand credence related to attitudes towards a particular foodstuff and a product alternative, as well as the actual consumption of the foodstuff. To do so, the selected case study was the olive oil markets in Spain, given that products such as extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) and refined olive oil (ROO), that differ in terms of intrinsic features, become undifferentiated. The data of the observed variables were collected from 700 regular buyers from an online panel at the household level in southern Spain. The data were processed using both Excel for checking, cleaning and descriptive purposes and ADANCO 2.0 (Dijkstra and Henseler, 2015) [1] for performing the model estimations.