Analysis of enterprise relationships in food industry cluster based on niche theory
Abstract
In recent years, the Chinese government and local governments in China at all levels actively promote the construction of food industry cluster Demonstration Park. Many problems accompanied with the continuous development of industrial clusters, such as the proliferation of homogeneous enterprises and products, the lack of organic links and symbiosis relationship among enterprises, resource depletion and environmental degradation, triggering niche overlap and vicious competition. All these phenomenon leads to industry cluster an acute shortage power of competitive and innovation. In this paper, we take the livestock and poultry industry cluster as the research object, use niche theory to analyze enterprise niche inclusion, overlap and separation relationships. As well as through the neutral theory in the equilibrium state to explain the cluster of enterprises in the competition, cooperation and symbiotic relationship.
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Introduction
Food industry cluster is composed with plenty of units, which lies in a specific geographical scope and in a particular way to rally around close neighboring communities, including government agencies, intermediary organizations, and research institutions, small and medium-sized enterprises producing food and related products and other social economic groups. In the industrial cluster, the enterprises can share the professional infrastructure, labor market and service. Relations among these units are complicated, such as complementary, cooperation, and even competing. For the important of food safety, Chinese government pays much attention to food industry development. “The 13th Five-Year Plan” of food industry and “No.1 File of 2017” clearly proposed to accelerate food industry cluster, to promote the food industry to be intensive, large-scale, so as to form a rational layout, resource conservation, modern food industry cluster. The government encourages food enterprises to strengthen cooperation and actively extend to the upstream and downstream, from the establishment of raw materials from the production of all aspects to the end of the whole industry chain. Promote the effective convergence of all aspects, to speedup the integration between the industrial chain integration, to achieve complementary advantages, information sharing, and coordinating development.
Under the guidance of government policy, most local government in China actively promotes the demonstration of food industry cluster or food park construction. And many large-scale, high levels modern food Industry Parks have been founded, such as Shandong Laiyang Food Industry Park, Chongqing Qijiang Food Industry Park, Chuzhou Green Food Industry Park and so on. At the same time, some districts are greed during food industry cluster construction, and there are some errors in their investment philosophy, leading to too much homogeneous enterprises within the cluster, and serious product homogeneity. And the lack of organic links and symbiotic relationship among enterprises within a food park, leading to depletion of resources and industrial environment deterioration, causing niche overlap and vicious competition and other issues. In particular, with the development of modern livestock production technology, animal husbandry, slaughtering, processing and logistics and other aspects is gradual getting intensive, large-scale. The fecal discharge and environmental pollution problems are becoming more and more serious, which has become a serious challenge to build a new socialist countryside and realize the coordinated development of economy and environment. In some districts, the food industry cluster has emerged the phenomena of lack of competition and excessive competition coexist, which caused the industrial cluster competitive power and innovation power is seriously inadequate, cooperation mechanism greatly reduced. Therefore, in the food industry cluster development and upgrading process, too much competition occurs in horizontal enterprises, and lack of cooperation among vertical enterprises. In the process of industrial operation, the regionalism, incompleteness and imbalance of the competition among enterprises and the inequality of the subject status are the key problems in the development of food industry cluster.
Food industry cluster is a life-like organic whole, it has the life characteristics from emerge, development, maturity, and even to recession or other evolution. And all these behaviors are not only impacted or constrained by the environment, but also have some feedback on the environment. So the food industry cluster has obvious Ecological characteristics. Our research is to regard the food industry cluster as a natural biological community, by using niche theory, we will analyze the niche of each unit, so as to make every enterprise in the cluster can find its own position, and all enterprises within a food park can form a “food industry ecological community”. We will take the food industry park lifecycle as research object, and carryout study from its original status of less competition to the intermediate status of excessive competition and to the final status of coexistence. We will integrate niche theory to build industrial clusters collaborative evolution and sustainable development model.
Conclusion
In the research assume that the food industry cluster is a crisscross network structure, enterprises in the cluster are homogeneous, heterogeneous or complementary, reflects the relations of competition, cooperation and symbiosis among enterprises in the cluster.
Due to the particularity requirements for food safety, its operation from environment, raw material, collaboration, inspection or quarantine institutions to any participant are extremely strict, this requires enterprises, farmers, and specialized agencies set up sound relations. Our research regard the food industry cluster as a natural biological community, and to make every enterprise in the cluster find its own position, and form a “ecological community”. The research aim is to build collaborative evolution and sustainable development model for food industry cluster, from the perspective of ecology. Through the analysis of the above can be found, in animal husbandry food industry cluster, homogeneous enterprises located in the state of niche overlap, there will be a shift to the fierce competition in the spiral phase, also be a result of natural selection. In addition, with the development of the competition, the cluster tends to be balanced. In the process of equilibrium, the inhibition of competition between homogeneous enterprises is greater than that of heterogeneous enterprises, i.e. the general trend of "homogeneous competition and heterogeneous cooperation".
When the equilibrium state comes, the cluster is in a state of saturation. The demise of old businesses will be replaced by new ones. The ecological niche difference between enterprises is also played down. Each enterprise is the equivalent individual in the cluster. The speed and quantity of the enterprise will not change again. That'swhat we call equilibrium -- symbiosis.
Symbiosis is a special situation in a cooperative relationship and a closer relationship than cooperation. It can be simply understood as co-existence. That is to say, the symbiotic enterprise is an intimate long-term strategic cooperative partnership, which is dependent on each other and is interdependent, and the ecological niche overlap is low. The low overlap of enterprise niche will avoid the confrontation between enterprises in the cluster because they produce the same products and compete for the same market and source. Ecological niche resource complementary or ecological niche separation can promote the relationship between enterprises to seek their respective development resources. At the same time, the daily operation of the communist party will reduce the transaction cost of enterprises and improve the efficiency of production and operation. For a business, it'sgood to have a symbiotic relationship, and it'snot good. Once a party has a major problem such as financial or even bankruptcy, the other party is bound to get involved. As businesses become more dependent on each other, once the symbiotic object goes bankrupt, the business can be severely damaged or even bankrupt. Although the competition itself has led to cooperation, it is not what we want to see whether it is excessive competition or lack of competition. What people want is a balanced development in the cluster, when the market itself does not have a role to play, with the help of government intervention. So the other main purpose of this study is to provide a manageable, maneuverable policy recommendation series to the government level. Subsequent research will be based on the theoretical framework of this paper, and the empirical research will be carried out in detail in various animal husbandry food industry clusters, such as fresh meat, frozen meat, eggs and milk.