Agribusiness

Dr Guillaume BAGNAROSA, Director for Agribusiness

BAGNAROSA ESCOver the past decades, increasing agricultural knowledge and numerous innovation systems in the agribusiness have ensured that the international food system provides adequate supplies of food for an always growing population. Beyond this central role played by the sector in food security, agribusiness has also contributed to the global economic development and the worldwide poverty alleviation by being and remaining one of the main industrial sectors.
However, and as a result of the increasing awareness of environmental threats and of food safety combined with the agribusiness digitalisation from production to processing and to retail, all the processes and infrastructures involved in the globalised food system witness rapid transformations and new constraints raising simultaneously new challenges and opportunities.

Mission

While the world needs to produce at least 50% more food to feed 9 billion people by 2050, the climate change could cut crop yields by more than 25%. Moreover, the land, biodiversity, oceans, forests, and other forms of natural capital are being depleted at unprecedented rates. Unless we change our consumption patterns, how we grow our food and manage our natural capital, food security—especially for the world’s poorest—will be at risk. This alarming situation depicted by the World Bank also justifies that the United Nations list among the humanity’s greatest challenges:

  • the Climate changes and shifting weather patterns that threaten food production;
  • the Food Security with a growing population;
  • the Water management which is critical for food production, healthy ecosystems and for human survival itself;
  • or the Oceans and the law of the seas which constitutes a source of nourishment for the life it helped generate.

Agribusinesses and consumers naturally play a central role in mitigating or adapting to the associated risks or by efficiently exploiting the natural capital available on our planet. To answer the numerous questions hovering above the Agribusiness and meaningfully reframe the world in which we live, Rennes SB Agribusiness researchers aspire to publish impactful academic research in agricultural and environmental fields to subsequently convey and diffuse it among Rennes SB students and thus the top managers of tomorrow.

Objectives

The strategy of the Agribusiness Area of Excellence has the ultimate objective of building an international reputation from a position of local influence. To do so, we think that developing a strong theoretical and applied research environment where faculty members collaboration with both students and companies is considered and stimulated will help in achieving impactful publications and more importantly the recognition, through the intermediary of our students, of our expertise by industrials and public institutions.
Furthermore, while Rennes School of Business is located in one of the most important regions in Europe for Agribusinesses we must today provide answers and support this eco-system by providing innovative solutions and building strong and fruitful interactions with this industry. The combination of the Agribusiness expertise of our faculty members as well as the other local academic partners on this field and Brittany’s strong agricultural economy constitutes a unique opportunity to attract corporate interest, to contribute to the international academic research and eventually to propose to our students relevant and innovative programs related to the highly innovative and central agri-food industry with in the background one of the most important environmental challenge of our time.

Research topics

1. Sustainable & Responsible Agribusiness

(Principal investigator: Ricardo Azambuja)
This sub-area focuses on analysing and offering alternatives to the undesirable repercussions generated by agricultural production models. Currently we work on the following problems and settings:
o What are the social and environmental negative externalities generated by the dominant agricultural paradigm, and what are the sustainable and responsible alternatives to it? Some ongoing empirical fieldworks are among permaculture initiatives in France and Japan, and in producers of palm oil in Southeast Asia and of sugarcane in Eastern Africa.
o What are the green and responsible opportunities which could help agribusinesses to reduce their emissions and diversify their sources of revenues in a sustainable manner?

2. Agri-food

(Principal investigator: Sheila Matson)
This sub-area focuses on consumer experiences of food and food services. It includes sensorial and emotional aspects as well as cultural features influencing the consumers decisions or judgements. Behaviours relating to local food and currencies, healthy foods, ethical food and ethnic foods practices are also investigated.
o Which luxury and international brand marketing strategies in the consumer and retail/food service industries?
o What is the impact of digitalisation on the food chain?
o How cultural aspects influenced experiences of food and food services?

3. Agricultural Economics

(Principal investigator: Roman Matkovsky)
In this subarea we focus on the microeconomic and macroeconomic mechanisms related to Agribusiness, ecological issues and economic aspects of sustainable information and communication technologies (ICTs) use in agriculture (E-agriculture). We notably aims to answer:
o How do the different actors of the agricultural sector interact and through which mechanisms do they converge towards a temporary market equilibrium?
o How does agricultural policy influence the global economic equilibrium?
o How to optimize food consumption and resources/land use?
o What is the economic side of an impact of new technologies, particularly distributed ledger technology (DLT), on productivity, demand and supply in the agriculture domain?

4. Innovating in Agribusiness

(Principal investigator: Antonella La Rocca)
In this area we focus on innovations in Agribusiness with particular attention on the inter-organizational/network dimension of these processes. The agri-food sector includes input suppliers, producers, logistics providers, wholesalers, retailers, exporters / importers and marketing companies, that form the agri-food value networks.
o in such a context, how companies with different priorities, agendas and positions in the value network are Innovating?
o how do agri-food value networks (incl. companies’ business models) change as consequence of technological development (e.g. data-driven agricultural production and digitalisation of the agriculture) and new (policy-driven) trends such as sustainable agriculture?

5. Agricultural Operations Engineering

(Principal investigator: Guillaume Bagnarosa)
In this subarea we will focus on all the operational aspects, from the purchasing and the commodity trading to the supply chain optimisation using statistical and mathematical tools. This study of the operational process investigates currently the following problems:
o Which trading strategies and risk management tools could be efficiently implemented to reduce agribusinesses operational margins volatility?
o What could be the optimal storage and hedging policy once taken into account uncertainty at several level (uncertainty of the input and output prices and quantities, of the demand and the production…)?
o How could climate risk be taken into consideration and properly managed by agribusiness managers?

Associate researchers

Latest publications

  • Xiong, J., Wu, X. and Hu, B.,2020. Understanding Heterogeneous Consumer Preferences in Chinese Milk Markets: A Latent Class Approach. Journal of Agricultural Economics, 71(1), pp.184-198.
  • Bagnarosa, G., Marowka, M., Peters, G.W. and Kantas, N., 2020. Factor Augmented Bayesian Cointegration Model: a case study on the Soybean Crush Spread. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C., Forthcoming.
  • Bagnarosa, G., Ames, M., Matsui, T., Peters, G.W. and Shevchenko, P.V., 2020. Which Risk Factors Drive Oil Futures Price Curves?. Energy Economics, Forthcoming.
  • Hernandez, J.A., Shahzad, S.J.H., Uddin, G.S. and Kang, S.H., 2019. Can agricultural and precious metal commodities diversify and hedge extreme downside and upside oil market risk? An extreme quantile approach. Resources Policy, 62, pp.588-601.
  • Xiong, J., Wu, X., Li, H. and Wu, H., 2019. The myth of retail pricing policy for developing organic vegetable markets. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 51, pp.8-13.
  • Bagnarosa G., Gohin A., 2019. La diversité des instruments innovants à la disposition des agriculteurs. Innovations Agronomiques, 77, 61-74, INRAe.
  • Azambuja, R., Roux-Rosier, A. and Islam, G., 2018. Alternative visions: Permaculture as imaginaries of the Anthropocene. Organization, 25(4), pp.550-572.
  • Hernandez, J.A., Shahzad, S.J.H., Al-Yahyaee, K.H. and Jammazi, R., 2018. Asymmetric risk spillovers between oil and agricultural commodities. Energy policy, 118, pp.182-198.
  • Matson-Barkat, S. and Robert-Demontrond, P., 2018. Who’s on the tourists’ menu? Exploring the social significance of restaurant experiences for tourists. Tourism Management, 69, pp.566-578.
  • Alexakis, C., Bagnarosa, G. and Dowling, M., 2017. Do cointegrated commodities bubble together? the case of hog, corn, and soybean. Finance Research Letters, 23, pp.96-102.
  • Eyiah-Donkor, E., Cotter, J. and Potì, V., 2017. Predictability and diversification benefits of investing in commodity and currency futures. International Review of Financial Analysis, 50, pp.52-66.

Young researchers / PhD

PhDs:

  • Mickaël POULIQUEN
  • Romain MENIER
  • Thibaud GARNIER
  • Suikai GAO
  • Xinquan ZHOU

Post-doc:

  • Amina CHELLY (jointly with the AoE G3D)

Partners

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Contact

For more information, please contact: Dr Guillaume Bagnarosaguillaume.bagnarosa@rennes-sb.com