1978
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Gérard Dorel, « La laitue aux États-Unis. Complémentarité des espaces productifs et stratégie des firmes de l'agri-business », Annales de géographie (documents), ID : 10.3406/geo.1978.17830
Lettuce in the United States. Lettuce is the perfect example of the spatial and capitalist process of integration of a particular produce. There, the control of productive space is not automatically based on land concentration but on the techno-commercial control of productive areas for complementary seasonal production. The center of this integration process is the Salinas Valley which not only produces one out of four salads consumed by the United States but controls nearly half of the commercial process. The agents of this near monopoly are the producers-shippers from the valley who have set up, in the last twenty or thirty years, an agricultural and commercial network all over the Southwest of the United States. Their success has attracted the giants of agricultural business and the most important one, Inter Harvest-United Fruit Company. The latter which broke into the market in 1968-1969 has become the most important seller of the most profitable produce in American agriculture.