How Chinese demand for fresh fruit and vegetables is creating new landscapes of rural development and vulnerability in Southeast Asia: Insights from the Myanmar melon frontier

Abstract

Mainland Southeast Asia has become an increasingly important source for Chinese imports of fresh fruit. But how have these activities contributed to patterns of regional development in sites of production? This paper uses insights from China-centric melon production in Myanmar to generate new insights into this question. We argue that the expansion of this trade has created a structural form of strategic coupling in which benefits have flowed to a relatively small number of participants. Whereas these outcomes have some similarities to fresh fruit and vegetable export chains elsewhere in the world, what makes this case special is their creation through a form of value chain governance quite unlike the retailer-led arrangements typically associated with export fresh fruit and vegetable production. In the Myanmar-China melons trade, brokers, not retailers, exercise lead firm functions. These arrangements have generated distinctive and highly uneven distributions of risk and reward that have inhibited value chain upgrading and created substantial environmental despoliation. The vulnerabilities associated with these processes were brought into sharp relief with the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, which led to local farmers bearing huge costs and debts when the border trade was abruptly curtailed.