Exploration and exploitation. Complementary strategies for small and medium-sized resilient family producers[Mise en place d'un contrat qualité et résilience des petits et moyens producteurs : l'exemple de la démarche qualité Carrefour dans la production d'agrumes sur les berges de l'Uruguay]

We are trying to evaluate the benefits and risks for small and medium producers when firming a quality agreement with a dominant actor in their value chains. For that purpose, we will use a onresearch undertaken in the early 2000s, small and medium off-season fruit exporting companies from Uruguay and Argentina. For producers to be able to export, they needed to make the necessary investments, in order to cope with European changes in existing regulations. Some of their main clients-we will refer in this paper to the prototypical case of the French supermarket Carrefour-changed the type of contract they used to sign with them (common in captive value chains) and adopted a type of contract more frequent in relational chains. The new contracts were based in a cahier de charges agreed with the producers regarding the changes to be implemented, offering a price stability guarantee as a counterpart for the period necessary to implement them. Did this mean that producers abandoned their traditional products and production modes? By means of a historical analysis of their exporting trajectories, the study of the chains-made from the point of view of the producers-revealed, on the contrary, that their resilience (understood as their ability to face difficult situations, remaining competitive) depended in the long term from a prudent combination of offensive strategies-as the one mentioned in the beginning-and defensive ones, based on maintaining old and local productions and distribution channels (not always), less profitable than exporting. Introducción A comienzos de la década pasada se presentó una coyuntura excepcional a la vez en el mercado doméstico y en los mercados internacionales. Tras varios años de estancamiento, y luego caída del producto bruto interno, la muy fuerte devaluación 1 realizada por el Gobierno argentino en 2002 puso fin a una década de convertibilidad peso-dólar 2 , valorizó fuertemente las exportaciones y encareció las importaciones, protegiendo el mercado interno. Ese mismo año la Unión Europea implementó la exigencia de trazabilidad en las exportaciones de alimentos frescos en contraestación provenientes del hemisferio sud, mientras los comerciantes 1 Un dólar = tres pesos. 2 Un dólar = un peso.