  International trade can be a profitable business for agri-food communities.
However, access to international markets can be costly and thus unattainable
for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). This problem is exacerbated
under trade policies which require minimum quantity commitments (MQCs) on
export volumes, e.g., licensing tariff rate quota (TRQ) mechanisms.
  We show how cooperative exporting among agri-food SMEs can tackle the
barriers posed by the MQCs, and give market access to a broader range of SMEs.
We formulate a class of cooperative games associated with these situations and
find a gain-sharing mechanism that result in allocations in their corresponding
cores. Thus, grand coalitions of cooperative exporting SMEs can form in stable
manners.
  This allocation rule shares the export surplus only among the "essential" SME
exporters, that is, the players who are sufficiently cost efficient. Thus, less
cost efficient "complimentary" SMEs whose capacities are needed to maintain
MQCs receive no benefit from collaborative exporting and their participation
have to be altruistic. We propose two modifications to our original allocation
rule to share a portion of export surplus among the complementary SMEs through
taxing the essential SMEs: the first through egalitarian, and the second
through revenue-based rates. We compare the performance of these allocations
with the numerical examples and discuss their practical implications.
