The food chain of sheep and policy implications on the sheep sector in Syria in highlight of international arrangements

The sheep sector in Syria is considered as one of the most important sectors in animal production because it is the first source of meat, the second source of milk, and an export-oriented sector. Therefore, the need has emerged to study its supply chain in order to identify its weaknesses and bottlenecks and make suggestions for improvement. Accordingly, the theoretical background of food marketing is briefly presented including the functions and tools used by analyzing the marketing process. Hereby, the focus is on the approaches used by analyzing the food chains from various perspectives. In this context, the major actors of the food system are overviewed, and the stages of the commodity chain analysis (CCA) are illustrated by the means of the Syrian sheep chains. As a benchmark, international comparisons are conducted; however, because of the drawbacks of the CCA, a complementary section about benefit-cost analysis is added. In this section, the main aspects of multiple regression analysis, its problems, and its testing methods were included. Moreover, the various approaches included in the literature about the estimation of supply and demand highlight the meat and milk sub-sectors. Consequently, the above-mentioned tools are applied to the Syrian sheep sector. Thus, the agents operating in the sheep meat and sheep milk chains, their economic behaviors, the changing structure, and their performance are depicted. Then, applications on sheep meat and sheep milk sub-sectors were conducted. In this context, the supply and demand of sheep meat and sheep milk were estimated; equilibrium price and quantity for sheep meat were determined; the effects of the equilibrium price on the agents' performances of the sheep meat chain were calculated; and a sensitivity analysis of the market equilibrium was made. As a result, a variety of bottlenecks in the chains were explored such as quality, transportation, farm-size, performance, and organization problems. Finally, recommendations were made to avoid the difficulties in the chains highlighting the establishment of an adequate marketing database and reorganization of the Syrian cooperative sector.