Structural changes in the agricultural industries: How do we measure, analyze and understand them?

The U.S. food production and distribution industry is in the midst of major structural change-changes in product characteristics, in worldwide production and consumption, in technology, in size of operation, and in geographic location. And the pace of change seems to be increasing. Production is changing from an industry dominated by family-based, small-scale, relatively independent firms to one of larger firms that are more tightly aligned across the production and distribution value chain. Food retailing is increasingly more customer responsive, more service focused, and more global in ownership. And the input supply and product processing sectors are becoming more consolidated, more concentrated, and more integrated. What are the important dimensions of these changes, and what critical managerial and public policy issues do they raise? What are the motivations behind the decisions of economic agents that are creating or causing most of these changes-economies of size, economies of scope, rent appropriation, strategic positioning, financial engineering, supply or value chain formation, risk management or mitigation, market power/control exploitation, or most likely some combination of these motivations? And how do we analyze, understand, and predict the characteristics and consequences of these changes for the future of the industry? Can the traditional conceptual frameworks, data sets and ex post-based empirical analysis techniques that have served us well as agricultural economists provide the analytical capacity to understand these profound structural changes? These are the focal points of this discussion.