'This Little Piggy Went to Market; This Little Piggy Stayed Home': Contracts and Live-Hog Markets in Illinois, 1993-2000

摘要

Live U.S. hog market prices were unstable in the 1990s and crashed in the fall/winter of 1998-99. I situate the 1998-99 crash in the context of ongoing long-term integration of a U.S. pork filiere and, using ethnographic data collected from Illinois contract hog producers, describe the role of market and production contracting in the unstable livehog markets of the 1990s. Production and market contracting in the 1990s linked large animal producers and large packers through new nonmarket channels. Asa result, unstable markets and then the 1998-99 crash affected smaller, spot-market-selling hog producers more severely than it did larger producers. My analysis speaks to the structure of power in agricultural markets where contracts are used and warnsagainst economistic understandings of markets that do not consider how different actors are related to commodity markets.