![]() ![]() I had a hard time making it through even the prologue. But, Leonard fails to fully appreciate the trade-offs presented by contracting (loss of some freedom for more guarantee of income), the economic forces that led to this business model (desire to keep plants and full capacity and need for risk shifting), the economic motivation for tournament contracts (in a principal-agent problem, the principal (Tyson) cannot perfectly observe effort on the part of the grower), or the ultimate beneficiaries of this system (it is not primarily Tyson but you and I the food consumer). To be sure, there are facets of vertical integration that are undesirable. Where Leonard goes off the rails is in his one-sided critique of vertical integration and contracting. ![]() As far as that goes, I found the book interesting and informative. The book is largely a history of Tyson foods. Thus, I thought now was as good a time as any to weigh in a bit. However, the thoughts by Aleks Schaefer in this review appearing in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, mirrored many of my own. I refrained from writing a review, in part because I feared it might come across as an angry diatribe, and also because I had a hard time succinctly distilling my thoughts. Back in the spring I read Christopher Leonard's book The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business. ![]()
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