=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1498/HAICTA_2015_paper59
|storemode=property
|title=The Corporate Social Responsibility in the Greek Agri-food Sector
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1498/HAICTA_2015_paper59.pdf
|volume=Vol-1498
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/haicta/LiapakisCS15
}}
==The Corporate Social Responsibility in the Greek Agri-food Sector==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1498/HAICTA_2015_paper59.pdf
The Corporate Social Responsibility in the Greek Agri-
food Sector
Anastasios Liapakis1, Constantina Costopoulou2, Alexander Sideridis3
1
Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, Agricultural University of
Athens, Greece, e-mail: liapakisanastasios@aua.gr
2
Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, Agricultural University of
Athens, Greece, e-mail: tina@aua.gr
3
Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, Agricultural University of
Athens, Greece, e-mail: as@aua.gr
Abstract. The Corporate Social Responsibility has become an essential factor
involved in the process of customers choosing products or services. It focuses
on the common place notion of “think global, act local”. While Corporate
Social Responsibility research has been conducted in many industries, the food
sector has been largely ignored. Especially, the agri-food sector has a strong
impact on the economy, the environment and the society and in the past it has
been plagued by many scandals of environmental degradation. In this context,
the purpose of this paper is to analyze the largest fifty six Greek food
companies in dairy and meat industries about their Corporate Social
Responsibilities. The analysis provides an overview of the current status of the
Corporate Social Responsibility practices of the leading companies in the
aforementioned industries as well as insights in future trends in this unfolding
national financial-debt crisis.
Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility, Food industry, Diary industry,
Meat industry
1 Introduction
Researchers and academics perceive Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as a
company’s involvement in activities with social applications. The notion of CSR has
evolved over the last six decades going through multiple conceptualizations.
Numerous researchers have contributed to the development and definition of the
concept of CSR and each decade brought with it new definitions and improvements
to this notion. Nowadays, more and more academics and researchers consider that the
study of CSR is an urgent need. But what is CSR and how many companies use this
strategy?
There is no a common definition of CSR in literature. This is due to the
multidimensionality of the CSR concept depending on the regional-cultural, socio-
cultural or sectoral characteristics of each country (Skouloudis et al., 2014). Broadly
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defined CSR is a group of actions developed by some companies in order to cope
with core problems of society and environment in general. Kilkenny et al. (1999)
state that CSR, is “a company's commitment to the well-being of its workers and
their families, as well as to the community and environment in which it operates, and
the actions that follow from that commitment”. According to ISO 26000 (ISO, 2010)
CSR is defined as: “the responsibility of an organization for the impacts of its
decisions and activities on society and the environment, through transparent and
ethical behavior that contributes to sustainable development, including health and
welfare of society, takes into account the expectations of stakeholders, is in
compliance with applicable law and consistent with international norms of behavior
and is integrated throughout and practiced in an organization’s relationships.”
If a company would like to be corporate responsible should be corporate financial
responsible, corporate social responsible and corporate environmental responsible.
This means that, CSR incorporates the economic, social and environmental strands of
sustainable development and provides a holistic approach for companies to
understand the issues in sustainable development.
The purpose of this paper is to examine the CSR practices adopted in the Greek
agri-food industry, especially in dairy and meat industries. In this context, a sample
of the fifty six largest companies operating in Greece has been used. The website of
each company related to CSR has been investigated. The structure of the paper is as
follows: Section 2 discusses the involvement of consumers to CSR. Section 3 gives a
brief overview of CSR in Greece. Section 4 presents the analysis results of CSR in
the Greek agri-food sector, especially in dairy and meat industries. The analysis is
referred to the evaluation of companies’ websites according to a number of criteria
such as the adoption of social, environmental and/or cultural practices. It has taken
place from February till April 2015. In the final section, some conclusions are given.
2 The Involvement of Consumers to CSR
After the 1990s, several researchers have started investigating the effects of CSR
on consumers and found that consumers expect a high degree of corporate
responsibility (Mohr et al., 2001). Several studies showed that CSR has a positive
effect on consumers’ attitudes and purchase intention and that negative CSR
degrades consumer outcomes (Brown and Dacin, 1997; Mohr and Webb 2005;
Murray and Vogel, 1997; Barrett, 1996). In addition, different researchers have
investigated the effects of CSR on willingness to pay and found that consumers
accepted higher price levels for products from ethical companies (Auger et al., 2003).
In Greece, consumers are willing to pay more for a product which adopts a CSR
campaign especially in social domain (Liapakis, 2013).
During the last decade, new results further clarified the factors that affect
consumers’ responses in a CSR setting. Webb and Mohr (1998) looked at the effects
of CRM on consumer attitudes and attributions and generated a classification based
on their responses. Mohr et al. (2001) extended their previous study using a generic
CSR case and classified consumers based on their purchase intention. A different
study showed that in a CSR context, consumers make self and other-driven
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attribution, a view which has been further developed by subsequent researchers. One
of the landmark studies was carried out by Ellen et al. (2006). The main thesis of
their work was that consumers’ attributions are key psychological mechanisms that
influence consumers’ reactions in a CSR context.
The most important properties of a CSR strategy are the CSR timing, the CSR
investment, and the CSR information source. The CSR timing property, explains
companies choice to deploy CSR initiatives either voluntarily (proactively) or as a
response to some negative event (reactively) (Ricks, 2005). The CSR investment is
defined as the amount of financial resources and time which used in a CSR
campaign.
3 CSR in Greece
In Greece, CSR is considered to be in its infancy. The difficult period which faces
Greece, due to the economic crisis, makes companies face major problems such as
unemployment, poverty, immigration etc. A lot of companies try to adopt CSR
campaigns in order to achieve their goals as social entities but several barriers like,
the bureaucracy, the lack of financial and tax motives make it difficult for them to
emerge fastest.
Nevertheless a number of leading Greek firms try to pioneer despite the barriers
faced. A promising example is the Hellenic Network for CSR. The Hellenic Network
for CSR is a non-profit organization having as members 138 companies and 7
business associations. It is run by a seven member Board. Main objectives of the
Network are to promote the CSR concept and principles and disseminate them to the
Greek business society and to society as a whole with the overall objective being a
balance between profitability and sustainable development (www.csrhellas.gr).
In Greece, the number of companies operating is about 800,000. As we can see in
Table 1, only 810 out of 800,000 companies (0.1%) use CSR. Out of these 810
companies, only 28 are issuing CSR reports and the frequent method of this reporting
is the self annual reports. The core CSR activities of these companies are in
telecommunications, in food industry, in logistics and in the sailing businesses
(Liapakis, 2013& Liapakis, 2015).
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Table 1. The CSR data in Greece.
Parameters Numbers
Number of
companies which use 810
CSR in Greece
Number of
organizations issuing 28
CSR reports
Number of
Up to 800,000
companies in Greece
Frequent method
Self annual reports 25/28
of CSR reporting
Furthermore, Skouloudis et al. (2014) state that Greek companies tend to pay more
attention on non-financial aspects of business operation emphasizing in the adoption
of environment management systems, waste management practices and employee
training and health measures along with possession responsibility procedures.
4 CSR in the Greek Agri-Food Industry
While a lot has been written and researched about sustainability in food
production and processing, very few papers investigate CSR activities in the food
sector. This sector is especially prone to problems in sustainability given its high
impact and dependence on natural, human and physical resources (Genier, et. al,
2009). The sustainability challenges faced by the food sector are numerous, including
environmental sustainability (usage of natural resources, animal welfare, etc.), social
sustainability (labor and work conditions, food safety, etc.), and economic
sustainability (energy usage, waste management, etc.). All food products carry
credence and experience attributes and forging a reputation of good citizenship will
most likely improve consumers’ reactions to brands. These products will be assumed
to have high added-value product and process attributes (McWilliams and Siegel,
2001, Siegel and Vitaliano, 2006).
In the following, table 2 presents data about three main financial indicators of the
200 biggest companies in Greek food industry, namely (i) sales, (ii) Earnings Before
Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization (EBITDA), and (iii) gross profit.
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Table 2. Financial indicators of the 200 biggest companies in food industry in Greece.
2012 2013
Indicators
(Thousand €) (Thousand €)
Sales 43.910 43.044
EBITDA 2.883 2.110
Gross Profit -1.104 -1.430
In order to understand the application of CSR in the Greek dairy and meat
industries, a sample of the fifty six largest companies operating in Greece, based on
their annual sales of 2013 as published in their balance sheets, has been studied. The
sample includes large companies since are much more activated in CSR actions than
the small and medium enterprises in Greece (Skouloudis et al., 2014). The examined
companies and particularly, the name of each company and its appropriate URL
related to CSR practices can be retrieved from the following URL:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/5bzaubmupoi123d/AADOQcu30jOCqBw5QXh1AEEc
a?dl=0. Table 3 presents the data of the three aforementioned financial indicators of
these companies.
Table 3. Financial indicators for the biggest companies in meet and diary industry in Greece.
Meat Industry Dairy Industry
Indicators 2012 2013 2012 2013
(Thousand €) (Thousand €) (Thousand €) (Thousand €)
Sales 43.910 43.044 63.417 56.905
EBITDA 2.883 2.110 3.072 2.824
Gross Profit -1.045 -1.430 -2.516 -2.053
We can see that in both industries, sales have decreased significantly. But what
happened in the CSR strategies in these companies? Which are the major
applications?
In the following tables, data about the Greek dairy industry and meat industry are
presented. Twenty seven leading companies in the dairy industry and twenty nine
companies in the meat industry have been examined. The results are presented in
Table 4 and Table 5 for the dairy industry and the meat industry, respectively. Table
4 illustrates that, only sixteen out of twenty seven of the biggest companies in dairy
industry adopted a CSR campaign (59%). The domains of these CSR campaigns are
in social, environment and culture activities. However, the main applications focus
on social activities. Twelve out of sixteen companies (75%) adopted social
504
campaigns when environmental campaigns adopted only eight to sixteen (50%),
cultural campaigns only two to sixteen (13%) and only 25% of companies adopt
multiple domains campaigns.
Table 4. The CSR data in the Greek diary industry.
Parameters Data
Number of examined companies 27
Number of companies which adopt CSR 16
campaigns
The percentage of companies which 59%
adopt CSR campaigns
Main applications of CSR campaigns Social, Environment, Culture
Number of companies which adopt 12/16
social campaigns
Number of companies which adopt 08/16
environmental campaigns
Number of companies which adopt 02/16
cultural campaigns
Number of companies which adopt 04/16
multiple campaigns
505
From 29 leading companies in the meat industry 14 of them have adopted CSR
campaigns (48%) as shown in Table 5. The fields of the main applications of these
CSR campaigns are in social, environment and culture activities. Although, the Food
and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reported in 2006 that
agriculture and food processing, in general, pollute the environment in significant
ways (reduction of biodiversity, water usage and contamination, greenhouse gases
emission, etc.), the main application are in social activities. Eleven out of twenty nine
companies adopted social campaigns when environmental campaigns adopted only
eight. Τwelve out of fourteen companies have adopted social campaigns (86%); eight
companies of them have adopted environmental campaigns (57%) and only three
companies of them have adopted cultural campaigns (21%). 50% of the meat
industry companies which use CSR campaigns have adopted multiple domains
campaigns.
Table 5. The CSR data in the Greek meat industry.
Parameters Data
Number of examined companies 29
Number of companies which adopt CSR 14
campaigns
The percentage of companies which 48%
adopt CSR campaigns
Main applications of CSR campaigns Social, Environment, Culture
Number of companies which adopt 12/14
social campaigns
Number of companies which adopt 08/14
environmental campaigns
Number of companies which adopt 03/14
cultural campaigns
Number of companies which adopt 07/14
multiple campaigns
506
5 Conclusions
Nowadays, there is an increasing number of companies around the world that are
involved in CSR activities. In this light, this paper provides a better understanding of
the current status of the CSR activities adopted by the leading companies in the
Greek agri-food sector. The study is focused on the dairy and meat industries because
of CSR’s high dependence on natural and human resources. It is based on the
evaluation of the website of each company related to CSR practices.
The analysis’ results show that firstly, a significant percentage of companies try to
help the society in spite of the barriers of the profound debt crisis. Secondly, the
Greek agri-food companies have started to pay attention in CSR strategies. Third,
CSR in the dairy industry is more dynamic than in the meat industry since sixteen
companies out of twenty seven in dairy industry has adopted a CSR campaign (59%)
whereas fourteen companies out of twenty nine (48%) in meat industry has adopted a
CSR campaign. Also, the majority of the companies have adopted social campaigns
in both industries, followed by environmental and cultural campaigns.
As far as limitations of this study are concerned, the small sample size of the
examined companies as well as the focus of the study only on CSR quantitative (and
not qualitative) characteristics reflect only indicative findings.
Future work will focus on the willingness of online consumers to pay more for
agri-food products provided by Greek online companies that are committed to
positive social and environmental impact.
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