SRUC and The University of Glasgow - Mitigating producers’ income fluctuations through collaborative supply chains in the dairy sector (Readvertised)

Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) in partnership with the University of Glasgow is offering this exciting PhD studentship for a term of 3.5 years.

Milk quotas were introduced in 1984 to the EU dairy market to control the structural surpluses that resulted from imbalances between supply and demand for milk, encouraged by subsidies to the sector. These quotas ended on 31st March 2015 in the midst of a trend of decreasing milk prices and increasing price volatility leaving the sector to operate closer to free market conditions. The reaction of the European Commission (besides granting funds to mitigate the situation) has been to start discussions on approaches to help producers to reduce their exposure to market volatility (e.g. the use of dairy futures markets). Mechanisms such as future prices, deal only with price risk and not with production risk. Moreover, it is well known that farmers do not favour participating in futures markets. In this context, the establishment of collaborative supply chains has proved an effective tool to reduce market uncertainties; however, whilst this sort of supply chain arrangement is more common in other industries, they are still infrequent in the food and drink industry. The topic of this studentship is to explore barriers to the development of collaborative supply chains, focusing on the dairy sector, as they can help reduce farmers’ income variability.

The methods to be used in this studentship are mixed (quantitative and qualitative). The quantitative method will consist of characterising income volatility that supply chain stakeholders are currently facing using different datasets (e.g. a milk price contracts dataset, farm accounting survey, Kantar Worldpanel database). The qualitative part will develop a survey to study the relationships along the supply chain in order to identify barriers to fostering collaborative supply chains.

Applicants should have a minimum of a 2.1 undergraduate degree or equivalent in economics, agricultural economics, marketing or supply chain management and have/expect to achieve a Masters degree in the area of economics or agricultural economics. The successful candidate should also be highly self-motivated and be prepared to engage with, and be sensitive to, a range of stakeholders in the dairy supply chain.

Award
The successful candidate will be registered through the Department of Economics in the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow. The studentship offers a stipend of £14,296 per annum, and a research support grant of £750 per annum. The expected start date is January 2017. The student will be based either at SRUC’s King’s Buildings campus in Edinburgh or the Department of Economics at the University of Glasgow.