Preise, Mengen und Margen: Konjunktur- und Strukturentwicklung in Wertschöpfungsketten der Agrar- und Ernährungswirtschaft

Agricultural products generally reach consumers in a more or less processed form, so that other value components are also included in the final product. In view of the challenges facing the agricultural sector, high political and social importance is often attributed to agricultural production shares in the sales revenue for food products as an indicator of the ongoing structural changes. Against this background, the Thünen Institute has been calculating the value-added contribution of agriculture to selected products and product groups of agricultural value chains for over 50 years. This paper firstly examines different methods of calculating the shares and compares them with each other in order to assess their respective informative value. Secondly, it asks what the calculated farm shares of the last decades can tell us about market developments in selected agricultural value chains. Thirdly, the data on which the share calculation is based, supplemented by some other central market indicators, are analysed in order to gain further insights into the price formation processes. Finally, based on the experience with these analyses, a proposal for an extended monitoring of markets along agricultural value chains is developed. We show that the results of the farm share calculation are primarily suitable for providing a first insight into the structural changes in the sector. The strongest decline in production shares between 1970 and 2020 is recorded with table potatoes and shell eggs, the products that were still marketed directly by agriculture to a relatively high extent for a relatively long time. The outsourcing of these and other functions from farms is a first cause of the long-term decline in agricultural production shares. The second cause is the particularly sharp drop in production costs with the strong labour-saving technical progress in agriculture; and the third cause is the changing consumption preferences with economic growth, which lead, for example, to an increasing preference for processed foods. The fact that the trend of decreasing production shares seems to have stopped roughly since the turn of the millennium is also due to globalisation and digitalisation, as a result of which strong labour- saving progress can now be observed across the board in all sectors of the value chain. As a result, the production costs of agriculture are no longer falling more sharply than those for services or for processing. Our further analyses with the data from the Thünen farm share calculation and some supplementary data show above all how strongly price developments are shaped by the specific market conditions in each case. Conversely, this means that the price correlations provide a good basis for characterising and monitoring agricultural value chains along three dimensions. These three dimensions are (1) domestic structural development (technical progress, specialisation and income development), (2) the importance of the world market for the respective value chain and (3) the extent and symmetry in the transmission of price changes along the value chain. In fact, our results provide first indications of possible asymmetries in price transmission. We observe preferential transmission of positive or negative price developments at the different stages of the value chains, both to the detriment and in favour of consumers and producers. In conclusion, while there are many questions related to farm shares in value added in food products, there are few that can be answered by analysing these shares and their development alone. However, systematic monitoring of prices and selected contextual data, complemented by selected analyses, may well help to improve our understanding of the development of value chains and the factors that influence them.