Tag: dairy sector

Studies on the impact assessment of subsidy schemes on farm performance indicators show contradictory results. Some studies indicate improvements in farm efficiency, while others highlight distortions and negative externalities. This paper analyses the impact of budgetary support provided to dairy farms in Albania based on a structured farm survey. The impact is assessed using causal forest, an adaptation of Breiman’s random forest algorithm for treatment effect estimation. Results suggest that subsidies positively impact the number of milking cows, output (quantity of milk sold), and revenues but have no impact on employment, yields, investment, or future investment plans. The study suggests that public support to dairy farmers should be conditioned on technology improvement measures and CAP-like cross-compliance obligations.

Kosovo and Albania, in a manner similar to other Western Balkan countries, face serious challenges in relation to national food safety and control in terms of legislation, infrastructure, institutional capacity and private investments. Consequently, food safety is a major concern for consumers in this region. The objective of this study was to gain a better understanding of consumer perspectives on food safety and quality. Two surveys, one with consumers in Prishtina and one in Tirana, targeted more than 600 consumers. Despite the prevalent problems with food safety, Kosovars perceive domestic dairy products as significantly better than Albanians do when compared with imported food products. Conversely, Albanian consumers use food safety- and quality-related information about cheese and milk more frequently. The most frequently used safety and quality cues for both samples are expiry date, domestic and local origin and brand reputation. Food safety certificates are used by Albanians more often than by Kosovars, and international food standards such as ISO, HACCP or Global GAP are mostly unknown to both consumer groups.

There are problems in the functioning of the food supply chain related to price transmission and value-added distribution. Vertical price transmission analysis is an important research area in the aspect of the assessment of impact on the welfare at the producer, processor and retailer levels. The paper investigates vertical price transmission along the whole milk supply chain after the end of European Union milk quotas in the Slovak market using a vector error correction model. Monthly farm-gate, processor and retail prices in the Slovak Republic covering the period from 2010 to 2016 were used in the analysis. Using the Johansen co-integration technique, empirical evidence has been found for two co-integration equations between farm-gate, processor and retail prices. We show that short-term and long-term bilateral causal relationships exist between prices at different market stages. The estimation of the price transmission elasticity supports the assumption that price changes are not transmitted efficiently from one level to another. However, symmetric price transmission exists between farm-gate and processor prices for whole milk in the long term. The perfect price transmission may also be due to recently emerging and strengthening the producer organisations that enable producers support their bargaining position in the supply chain.