Opportunities for value chain research in sugar industries

In agriculture, value chain research provides a capacity to increase efficiencies, business integration, responsiveness and ultimately market competitiveness. In sugar, such research has expanded rapidly over the past two decades, and has been motivated by low world sugar prices and rising costs of production. In this paper, we highlight the future opportunities in value chain research to achieve more profitable and sustainable sugar industries in different countries. We do this by: (a) conducting an extensive review of value chain research in sugar; (b) assessing the change resulting from chain research using case studies in the Australian and South African sugar industries; highlighting challenges to value chain research; and (c) considering opportunities and methodologies used in other industries. The paper makes several conclusions and recommendations. In particular we show that value chain opportunities require more than just a technical solution, and need collective participation from across the chain, and usually evolutionary change management. Also, we show that whilst value chain thinking and research in sugar has targeted to achieving a lean system, there are potentially greater benefits in developing an agile chain. From a modelling perspective, we highlight the future prospects of multi-agent approaches to accommodating complexities of addressing value chain opportunities in sugar. While the focus of this paper is on sugar value chains, much of the information is relevant to chains of other agricultural commodities.