A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECT OF SELLING CONSORTIUMS IN THE PORK INDUSTRY ON PROFITABILITY: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY IN KZN. By

The pork industry in South Africa is faced with many challenges some of which have been exacerbated with the trend toward globalisation. The success of the individual farmer is dependent upon co-operative agreements, achieving economies of scale, adding value to the commodity product pork and producing the end product efficiently enough to be competitive in the long-term whilst adjusting to the highly volatile market. The objective of this study was to determine whether the use of a marketing consortium was in principle an appropriate means of increasing profitability of individual farming operations. A secondary objective was to determine what the processing companies thought of the proposed selling consortium and how they would react to the concentration of supply that would result from the formation of a marketing consortium. The secondary research was based on a literature survey of current pork journals, articles from South African pork magazines, statistics from industry reports, textbooks on international trade and marketing, the Internet and newspapers. To evaluate the findings of the literature survey, a questionnaire using Likert type scale