Journal of Agricultural & Food Industrial Organization

Editorial

As concentration, industrialization, and globalization continue to reshape the horizontal and vertical relationships within the food supply chain, agricultural economists are revising both their views of traditional markets as well as their traditional tools of analysis. At the core of this revision is strategic interactions between principals and agents, strategic interdependence between rival firms, and strategic trade policy between competing nations, all in a setting plagued by incomplete and/or imperfect information structures. Add to that biotechnology, electronic commerce, as well as the shift in focus from raw agricultural commodities to branded products, and the conclusion is that a "new" agricultural economics is needed for an increasingly complex "new" agriculture.

JAFIO's mission is to provide a peer-reviewed, scholarly, international forum to address this new complexity with the added benefits of 1) electronic submission, 2) professional and constructive reviews by specialists in the topic area, 3) a response guaranteed in 10 weeks, 4) no galleys to proofread, and 5) instant publication upon acceptance. Through electronic submission, revision, and publication, manuscripts will no longer become obsolete because of lengthy reviews and/or waiting in the print line, as they often do in traditional paper journals.

I invite all of you to submit your latest work to JAFIO. The Journal welcomes empirical as well as theoretical articles, notes, and perspectives.

Azzeddine Azzam
Editor