Global Salmon Networks: Unpacking Ecological Contradictions at the Production Stage

Abstract

Firms’ strategies for turning nature into commodities are heavily oriented toward reducing the ecological indeterminacy of the production process by controlling its biophysical properties to ensure that nature commodification leads to a profitable business. However, research on global production networks (GPNs) has not focused on firms’ strategies in controlling the impacts of biophysical properties on the production network’s organization. This article aims to fill this gap by reviewing the literature on GPN and resource geographies on nature’s transformation into commodities to show how, in resource-based industries, ecological contradictions establish the territorial embeddedness and value dynamics of the production network. This article empirically examines the production of Atlantic salmon in Chile and how firms’ strategies for handling the ecological contradictions after an economic crisis (infectious salmon anemia virus crisis) changed the spatial production network’s organization and constrained the value-creation process. The results of this work aid in the understanding of firms’ strategies at the production stage as drivers of the continuities and changes in production networks. Finally, the connection between value dynamics and ecological contradictions opens a set of challenges to this research agenda.