Abstract
The worldwide importance of crop production is undisputed due to its function for basic nutrition of billions of people. Yet, the emergence of global forces implies severe consequences for the organization of crop value chains. These forces particularly include processes of liberalization and deregulation, the dominance of large retail groups as well as ever-changing consumer demands, leading to continuous reconfigurations of crop value chains. Based on a literature review, this paper aims at thematically ‘organizing’ and differentiating the key findings of relevant empirical studies on global crop value chains, with a particular focus on South-North relations. Thereby, current shifts and challenges are identified and analysed with special attention paid to spatio-relational dimensions. The spatial perspective is important since crop value chains both shape and are shaped by specific geographical settings which is, among others, considered in the growing literature on food geographies. Overall, we could extract three strands of literature on global crop value chains: the integration of smallholders; the role of food standards; and the effect of ‘hidden’ dynamics. These issues especially reveal the interdependencies between the Global South and the Global North as a crucial feature of contemporary crop production and distribution systems. These are A further outcome of the literature analysis is the derivation of suggestions regarding future research and areas of needed progress.
Highlights
The growing integration of worldwide agrifood markets has resulted in the emergence of new or revised configurations of food value chains, often linking large buyers from the Global North1 with small primary producers from the Global South2
When analysing crop value chains, many authors are concerned with aspects of poverty alleviation, smallholder production and food safety as the three most investigated issues derived from our literature sample
The following considerations aim to reveal a range of shifts and challenges that may affect the configuration of global crop value chains and their inherent spatialities
Summary
The growing integration of worldwide agrifood markets has resulted in the emergence of new or revised configurations of food value chains, often linking large buyers from the Global North with small primary producers from the Global South. The growing integration of worldwide agrifood markets has resulted in the emergence of new or revised configurations of food value chains, often linking large buyers from the Global North with small primary producers from the Global South2 This situation is especially true for the production and distribution of crop plants , as described by several authors (e.g., Gijsbers 2009; Humphrey 2006a; Jaenicke and Virchow 2013; Ruel et al 2014). It is important to note that these types of actors follow each other in a linear manner but are mutually linked through material and immaterial flows of commodities, capital, labour, information, knowledge and power
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