(introduction...)
2.22 Food products, raw materials, production, marketing
infrastructure, and marketing services have intrinsic technical and economic
properties which, particularly in developing countries, frequently lead
producers and marketing entities to experience severe problems related to
production and market risk, inadequate or asymmetric information, transaction
costs, logistics, and overall marketing costs. Each can therefore serve as major
barriers to production, exchange, and coordination in commodity systems. In this
section, we briefly discuss some of these intrinsic problems in food marketing--
problems which will commonly arise even in favorable policy
environments.