As consumers’ demand for organic products and especially organic food grows,
organic certification for tropical fruit is increasingly promoted in many developing
countries. Certified organic pineapple exports only started taking off after 2005
and are rapidly increasing. The organic and conventional fresh pineapple value
chains are dominated by certification standards and large multinational
companies respectively. The two markets, however, still differ greatly in size. We
analyze if this influences the price structure in these markets. Specifically, the
paper attempts to single out the existence and direction of causality between the
conventional and organic pineapple price using the European pineapple market
as an example. We study spatial price transmission, i.e. the difference in prices
between the markets for organic and conventional pineapple. The results indicate
the dependence of organic market price movements on conventional ones. On
the contrary, the conventional market is not affected by this niche market.