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Book of Abstracts First Legume Society Conference 2013: A Legume Odyssey Novi Sad, Serbia, 9-11 May 2013
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Leguminosis facing lock-in effects: enhancing food chain coordination to unlock?
François Charrier 1 , Marie-Benoît Magrini 2 , M’hand Fares 2 , Jean-Marc Meynard 3
1 INRA SAD, UR LRDE, Corte, France
2 INRA SAD, UMR AGIR, Toulouse, France
3 INRA SAD, UMR Agronomie, Versailles-Grignon, France
Facing agro-environmental issues, evolution of French agrosystems towards more sustainability is
through the development of cultures such as protein pea (Pisum sativum). Whereas it was a staple
nutriment for several livestock production in France during the 1980’s, cultivated surfaces have
been dramatically decreasing for two decades, despite the agroecological interests of this culture
(N-fixation) and the nutritional interests of the raw material for various animal breeding
(particularly pork and poultry industries). This diagnosis gets public researchers to question the
conditions of emergence/re-emergence and development of new crops in cultural systems. This
paper aims to present an original study on how the organisational forms of food chains may lead
to generate “lock-in” mechanisms, preventing stakeholders of the upstream of the chain to adopt
of a new crop in their system. Mobilising key concepts from transition theories and from neoinstitutional
economics, we analysed several agrofood chains organisational forms, highlighting
the fact that French production system is “locked” around production paradigms that affect the
ability of producers to diversify their rotations. The discussion deals with the relevancy of
enhancing several coordination mechanisms (contracts, production specifications, labels) to
provide remunerated outcomes for diversified crops, in order to, in fine, unlock the system.
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