The Concept of Terroir as the Basis of Corporate Strategy in Agribusiness: The European Social, Economic and Institutional Model

At the beginning of the current decade, more than half of the world’s population live in a tertiary agro-industrial food system founded on long value chains in which a handful of very large retail companies practice quasi-integration between the consumers and the food supply mechanism as a whole (Rastoin and Ghersi, 2010). Food is therefore on the verge of becoming a trivialized function as a result of the globalization of products mass-produced by a small number of very large multinational agribusiness groups whose strategy is founded on standardization, economies of scale and the formatting of consumer behaviour1 in a context of increasingly financialized governance. Nevertheless, in many countries, consumers are still attached to qualitative and social criteria in relation to their food. A survey conducted by BVA in France in 2006 indicated that ‘food must above all be a pleasurable experience’ (62 per cent of all answers). This concept, harking back to the most ancient civilizations (Mediterranean, Asian and pre-Columbian), is somewhat at odds with the utilitarian view of the ‘new worlds’ although when income increases, this point of view concerning the hierarchy of food attributes quickly becomes increasingly prevalent in all countries. The Eurobarometer of 2006 asserted that ‘aiming to produce healthy food presenting no risk to the population’ should be the priority for farmers (51 per cent) and for the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union (41 per cent).