Page 73 - Biorefinery 2030 Future Prospects for the Bioeconomy (2015)

2 Changes in the Environment that made the Bazancourt-Pomacle Biorefinery 41

The production of the Bazancourt-Pomacle Biorefinery provides an alternative
to fossil fuels, and nonetheless maintains its vocation to supply the food markets.
While it is often claimed that the common good, good sense and the spirit of
cooperation were the foundations of the different initiatives that led to the develop-
ment of the site and its originality, other factors obviously played their part.

2 Changes in the Environment that made the Bazancourt-
Pomacle Biorefinery

According to Filippi et al. (2008), for several decades French agricultural
cooperatives have faced a radically changing environment, including reforms of
the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the growing power of the hypermarket
sector. The different players on the Bazancourt-Pomacle site have not escaped this
trend and face both exogenous (market volatility, CAP, WTO regulations), and
endogenous (financial organisation, trial and error) factors of change.
This section will present the changes the cooperatives have had to face, and then
describe the strategies used to tackle these regulatory, competitive and industrial
mutations.

2.1 Exogenous Factors

Three main exogenous factors have influenced the strategy of firms on the
Bazancourt-Pomacle site: World Trade Organisation regulations, reform of the
Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), and the volatility of agricultural product prices.

2.1.1 WTO Regulations 28
The 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) applied to agriculture,
but in practice, the contracting parties excluded this sector from application of the
principles set out in the general agreement. As the CAP had rapidly generated
surpluses, the European Community was asked to dismantle its system of subsidies
to avoid harming the American market (Emorine 2006).
The Uruguay round included this sector in multilateral trade negotiations
(Bureau et al. 2007). In 1994, the Marrakech agreement gave a new multilateral
frame for the progressive deregulation of agriculture. At this time agriculture
benefitted from its own agreement, the Agreement on Agriculture.
The WTO member states undertook to apply a programme to reform agricultural
policies in force between 1995 and 2000 in developed countries. This programme
targeted three main areas:

28
Source: http://www.europarl.europa.eu