The large decrease in sales by florists with only a small change in farm level sales is due to a significant change in retail market shares for floral products. Specifically, other outlets such as supermarkets gained market share for floral products at the expense of individual florists. The situation for lawn and garden equipment and supplies stores is much different than florists or other retailers of nursery products. While total sales decreased after the peak occurring in 2007, the number of retail licenses continued to increase. This is not the case for other retailers handling nursery products. As shown in Table 2, there are fewer producers as well as incidental and specialized nursery retailers. The number of retailers licensed to sell nursery stock decreased from a total of 6,471 in 2003 to 3,022 in 2013, a 3,449 reduction in number of outlets. Given much smaller reductions in wholesale nursery sales, the surviving retailers are larger on average and probably have smaller operating margins than was typical for florists. This very significant reduction in the number of California retailers handling nursery and floral products has implications for both producers and consumers. Some producers undoubtedly lost their major retail customers while many lost important retail outlets. The impact of the loss of outlets was not uniform but it was widespread. This consolidation of outlets may offer some economies in distribution but the short-run impact on floral and nursery product sales will be negative. Products are not as available at the consumer level as previously, which tends to reduce consumer choice and negatively impact impulse buying. A change from specialized to multi-product retailers tends to reduce customer service and may reduce product assortments. And, finally, the changes noted may be associated with more market power in the hands of surviving retailers. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, the governments of the central and eastern European Countries all aspire to join the European Union . These aspirations were given strong encouragement at the EU’s 1993 Copenhagen Summit,blueberry container size at which time associated CEECs were told they would eventually gain membership.
Along the path to accession, however, lie difficult policy choices and delicate negotiations concerning the pace and terms of economic integration. Of these, among the most challenging are those affecting the fate of agriculture in the emerging market economies. Accession to the EU has historically implied the integration of the new member into the community’s Common Agricultural Policy , a complicated system of interventions whose most prominent and expensive features are designed to support prices of program commoditiesl through intervention purchases, and to shield markets from external competition through tariff barriers. As in previous accession negotiations, EU negotiators will be concerned about the impact of accession agreements on the EU treasury, while CEEC governments will be attentive to their implications for national budgets. Furthermore, many producer groups in the West will be nervous about granting market access to Eastern competitors; the political clout of these interests will constrain the negotiations. As with the accession of southern members Greece, Portugal, and Spain, the new members would be substantially poorer and less technically developed than those currently in the Union, raising the possibility of the need for substantial technical assistance. In the case of the CEECs, other issues arise that have no clear precedent. First, there is the unusual size and importance of agriculture in these countries. Depending on the chosen measure, these nations would increase the size of the Union’s agricultural economy by roughly one third. 1 In each nation, agriculture accounts for a larger share of employment and GOP than is typical in the current Union. Second, these countries share with their western neighbors a similar continental, temperate climate, and similar growing conditions. In the long run, after a period of restructuring, their agricultural sectors could display patterns of comparative advantage similar to those in the current EU member states, a prospect that makes concerns about competition even more pronounced than in past expansions . Third, these countries are presently going through a profound process of economic transformation that hopes to shed the legacy of the socialist period in favor of a market-based system of production. Eastern governments will have to consider how an accession agreement will affect the ongoing process of market development and enterprise restructuring currently unfolding in these emerging economies.
Finally, the requirements of the Uruguay Round of the GAIT -will be an important new factor regulating agricultural trade, imposing new constraints on allowable treaty terms. The overall success of the accession accords may be determined primarily by factors outside agriculture. Nonetheless, the treatment of agriculture promises to playa central, and delicate, role in the accession negotiations. Nearly a decade after the region embraced market economics, their agricultural sectors continue to struggle with the transition from a socialist production system. While it is problematic to make generalizations across the entire region, we can identify a few of the key characteristics of today’s CEEC agriculture that are likely to have first-order impacts on the prospects for long term performance . Farm enterprises in these countries can be broadly grouped, by size, into two types: large enterprises that are primarily the successors to state and collective farms organized during the socialist period; and smaller, usually privately-owned, operations. These latter farms, sometimes covering less than one hectare, have often been established by former members of the collective farms who have taken their land out of collective enterprises in an attempt to “make it on their own.” Both types of farms are typically under capitalized, or have a mix of capital goods inappropriate to the kind of production in which they are engaged. In the face of woefully imperfect capital markets, farms are typically unable to undertake investments to improve their efficiency, even in cases in which such investment would be profitable , depending, of course, on the cost of debt.Credit constraints are a particularly severe problem for the smaller farms, which tend to lack either demonstrable collateral or social clout. Persistent problems with land titling, and generally with the development of a market for land, impede the ability to offer land as collateral, further exacerbating problems in the market for long-term credit. Capital market imperfections are, therefore, one of the key barriers preventing an improvement in the technical efficiency of East European farms, which consistently lags that in the EU.
These problems are aggravated by the poorly developed state of public goods in rural areas, including transport and storage infrastructure and market information . In the socialist period, much of this rural infrastructure was provided from within the large enterprises. A system of infrastructure supporting independent farms has not yet emerged. These features the split between large and small farms, the low level of technical development on most farms, imperfections in market for agricultural fmance, poor provision of public goods, and a history of government-controlled prices-define the landscape of agriculture in Central and Eastern Europe. These are the initial concerns that government policymakers in the region have to consider as they chart their agricultural strategies over the coming years. Official statements from CEEC policymakers have expressed multiple goals for agriculture during the transition. To the Czech Ministry of Agriculture, for example, an ideal scenario would include the transformation of agriculture along free-market lines; preparation for eventual integration to the EU’s CAP program, and maintenance of a “domestic equilibrium” that would keep farm incomes and output from collapsing during an excessively violent transition . A central motivation for the present paper is the observation, under-appreciated in policy circles, that these goals may be Inconsistent, and that there are points of tension between the goal of creating agricultural economies that respond rationally to market signals,growing raspberries in container and the desire to bring agriculture into alignment with the heavily-regulated CAP programs of the EU. In particular, a single-minded focus on convergence to EU norms can inappropriately distract policymakers from steps that create incentives to improve productive efficiency. Policies that encourage the restructuring of agricultural enterprise during the interim period prior to joining CAP allow factors to flow toward efficient uses. The terms of agriculture under the treaties of accession will have important implications for CEEC decision makers choosing pre-accession agricultural support policies. If CAP is maintained substantially unchanged from its current form , then producers in the new environment will enjoy higher prices, supported through commodity subsidy programs and trade barriers. If a version of CAP covered Central and Eastern Europe, the current owners of land would reap windfall profits, as these benefits became capitalized into land values . . CEEC governments have a number of instruments that they can deploy in order to encourage such transformation. They can adopt policies to encourage the reorganization of agricultural enterprises, to move from a system dominated by huge state and cooperative agricultural enterprises into one more responsive to market signals, including a mix of large and small farms. CEEC governments can also control spen~ing on relevant public goods such as public information and rural infrastructure. They can vary the degree of the economy’s openness to foreign trade, through the erection of tariff and import quotas, export subsidies, and other trade management activities. Commodity price supports and other market manipulation schemes will also continue to offer their rent-seeking temptations.
Indeed, price supports and tariff barriers can have desirable effects, from the theory of the second-best: in the presence of a distortion in one input market-that for credit-a government imposed distortion in the output market can have beneficial effects, by transferring resources to producers that are able to use it efficiently. At the same time, however, distortive policies can create price instability. In this context, free trade can substitute for price supports as a market stabilizing mechanism, operating more effectively and at lower cost. Both distortive and laissezfaire approaches may, however, compare unfavorably with policies that address market imperfections directly. Of course, use of any instruments has associated costs, both directly taxing the government treasury and indirectly imposing adjustment burdens on society. Thus, in bargaining over the treatment of agriculture in accession, and in selecting appropriate pre-accession policies, CEEC policymakers must therefore be prepared to juggle a complicated set of interactions and trade offs. The nature of these trade offs can be clarified through a heuristic version of a comparative statics exercise. Suppose that a government knew with certainty the date and terms under which it would join the CAP, and was cbntemplating a restructuring program that would appropriately position the agricultural sector for successful entry. For a given date of entry, a relatively aggressive restructuring program would create multiple effects, including an increase in the efficiency and flexibility of the agricultural sector; an increase in producer profits and aggregate national wealth in the long term following CAP integration; a short-term decrease in output, as established patterns of production are disrupted; an ambiguous effect on output in the long term; and an increase in the short-term costs of adjustment, including social costs such as unemployment. The government’s fundamental decision problem is how to balance these trade offs, i.e., how to deploy judiciously the policy instruments at its disposal in order to position the agricultural sector for a successful entry into CAP while keeping it robust during the interim period and, perhaps, subsequent to a major reform in the CAP. To be sure, a number of questions concerning the interaction between the terms of accession to the EU and pre-accession policies naturally arise. Let us assume that the CAP will not be altered in the near term and, therefore, that the program’s current form represents a credible policy commitment by the EU, both to its own farmers and to prospective member states of Eastern Europe. 2 How will alternative accession scenarios impact the budgets of the EU and the CEEC national governments, respectively? Under what forms of the accession contract, if any, should the CEECs use the pre-accession period to mimic the EU by adopting CAP-like policies? Do price supports encourage or inhibit efficiency-enhancing restructuring of farm enterprises? Should the restructuring process receive public subsidy? In other words, how should the burdens of the restructuring process be divided between the public and private sectors?