Economic Impact of Federal Marketing Orders — The Florida Winter Tomato Case

Abstract

Marketing agreements and orders have been used for several decades by various commodity groups in an effort to stabilize and increase the level of farm income. These programs are tools to be used in a “self-help” fashion. They do not automatically solve an industry's marketing problems. For instance, if an industry has continuous interseasonal supply control difficulties, a marketing agreement may actually aggravate the problem it was intended to solve. However, intraseasonal volume controls can relieve short-run imbalances in supply while not adversely affecting consumers. Merging long-run and short-run perspectives is the problem that creates difficulty in program evaluation.