Commodity Chain Analysis Research Articles

Fresh Vegetable Supply System at the Da-zhong-si Wholesale Market in Beijing : In the Context of Commodity Chain Analysis

Fresh Vegetable Supply System at the Da-zhong-si Wholesale Market in Beijing : In the Context of Commodity Chain Analysis

Global Commodity Chains and the Production of Surplus-value on a Global Scale: Bringing Back the New International Division of Labour Theory

This paper offers a critique of mainstream and critical versions of Global Commodity Chain analysis of post-1960s global-economy transformations claiming that they suffer from different types of methodological nationalism. After arguing that the key to overcome their intrinsic problems is to be found in the critical revision of Fröbel et al.'s New International Division of Labour theory, the paper advances a novel account of the structural dynamics of the stratified capitalist world-system developed by Iñigo Carrera (1998). Finally, the paper substantiates its main claims with an analysis of the long-term development of the global semiconductors industry.

Mapping Value in a ‘Green’ Commodity Frontier: Revisiting Commodity Chain Analysis

ABSTRACTAnalysis of commodity chains has provided important insights on how power, resource and market access mediate the distribution of benefits and risks. Given this analytical potential, Commodity Chain Analysis (CCA) is now being applied to the study of biofuels and carbon markets to gain systematic insight into the circumstances, relationships and transformations involved in their production and exchange. By building on and adapting this approach to three distinct case studies (biofuels in Madagascar and forest carbon in Cambodia and Laos), this article contributes new insights on the emergence of value within market environmentalism. The analysis highlights methodological challenges in applying CCA to commodified forms of nature, and the significance of knowledge and value negotiations. All three cases illustrate that it remains highly uncertain whether or not market exchange can ultimately be realized. As in the case of traditional commodities, pre‐existing conditions of power and access shape modes of production and network configuration. Parallel and intersecting commodity networks (e.g. for land and timber) also require us to think beyond the traditional single‐commodity focus. Thus, the authors call for an expanded analytical focus in applying CCA to non‐material ‘green’ commodities which places greater emphasis on value negotiations and connections within new ‘commodity frontiers’.

Informality in Automobile Value Chains in India

India's automobile sector has emerged as an important growth engine of the Indian economy. The Northern automobile cluster in Haryana is not only the center of the automobile sector, but also a center of industrial unrest. This article questions informality in India's automobile sector through the application of commodity chain analysis to explain why India's automobile sector is beset by informality, low wages, and insecure working conditions. The article illustrates how leading firms in India's automobile industry, with the connivance of the Indian state, exploit the automobile commodity chain to marginalize both subordinate firms and the contract and casual workers who now make up the majority of the industry's workforce. The very structure of India's automobile industry locks many workers and firms into insecure work, where productivity gains are eaten up by leading firms, further reducing the margins of lower level suppliers and the wages of workers. While the automobile sector, and the demand for vehicles in India is growing, the wages and conditions of the workers in the sector are not improving. This qualitative study of Haryana's automobile sector attempts to explain why this is the case. The article concludes that India's industrial relations regime has long ceased to reflect the actual balance of power between labor and capital, institutionalizing noncompliance with the labor law and providing the basis for the industry's informalization.

Commodity chains, creative destruction and global inequality: a class analysis

The majority of global commodity chain analysis is concerned with producer firm upgrading, because it is held to engender local-level development. This represents a myopic comprehension of the interaction of firms under capitalism. This article argues, in contrast, that lead firm chain governance and supplier firm upgrading attempts constitute strategies and practices that reproduce global poverty and inequality. Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction represents a starting point in undertaking this endeavour. However, his formulation of capitalist competition ignores class and global economic relations. A Marxian conception of creative destruction, in contrast, rests upon an understanding of globally constituted class relations, which provides a novel perspective in comprehending and investigating processes that re-produce global poverty and inequality. The article substantiates these claims by examining cases of buyer-driven global commodity chains, and lead firm strategies of increasing labour exploitation throughout these chains.

Editor’s Introduction: Commodity Chains in and of the World System

see text.

Bringing Commodity Chain Analysis Back to Its World-Systems Roots: Rediscovering Women’s Work and Households

Globally between 1980 and 2000, women's economic activity rate expanded, narrowing the gender gap in labor force participation. Thus, females now account for one-third or more of the "officially-counted" personnel of export industries (UNICEF 2007), and export agriculture is now feminized (Deere 2005). Today women account for one-third of the manufacturing labor force in developing countries, and females hold more than one-half of the industrial jobs in Asia (Barrientos, Kabeer and Hossain 2004). In much of the global South, females account for a majority of the waged labor force in export agriculture, and they are more heavily concentrated than men in service jobs that provision the supply chains of global production. As a reflection of fewer opportunities for males, women are now less likely to withdraw from the labor force during their childbearing years. In addition, females account for a majority of the income earners in the informal sectors of a majority of global South countries, generate a significant proportion of global commodities through subcontracted work they complete in their households, and provide most of the unpaid family labor needed to support household-based farms and businesses that are dominated by males (United Nations 2003).

Workers, State and Development in Brazil. Powers of Labour, Chains of Value, by BenSelwyn. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. Pp. xvi+208. £65 (hb). ISBN: 9780719085314

__Abstract__ This book is written in the best of political economy tradition. Selwyn places class and labour at the centre of his analysis of Brazil’s agrarian change and capitalist development. The text starts with an impressive, enlightening and critical discussion of global commodity chain analysis within mainly Marxist and world systems theories of capitalist development. The author engages with a large number of authors such as Banaji, Bernstein, Brenner, Byres, Gereffi, Kaplinsky, Silver, E.P. Thompson, Wallerstein,Wood, E.O.Wright and, interestingly, Schumpeter. In a most original way, he weaves these different contributions into a theoretical framework appropriate for his research on the struggles of rural labour and how they shape processes of capitalist development. Selwyn’s aim is to write labour history from the bottom up within the context of globalization.

Rethinking governance and value in commodity chains through global recycling networks

The dominant political‐economic approaches to global trade flows known as global value chains and global production networks offer powerful insights into the coordination and location of globally stretched supply chains, in particular from global South to North. By way of both conceptual and empirical challenge, this paper highlights flows of end‐of‐life goods from the global North towards the global South. This involves the disassembly and destruction of goods to recover secondary resources for further rounds of commodity production. Global recycling networks take things of rubbish value (often spent or end‐of‐life goods) and turn them back into resources in other places and production networks. They operate not through adding value, but by connecting different regimes of value. The paper does not set out a new conceptual framework, but asks what challenges the rekindling of value in used goods creates for global commodity chain analysis and what insights those approaches bring to looking at waste flows. The examples of used clothing and end‐of‐life merchant ships are mobilised to illustrate the dynamics of global recycling networks and to challenge prevailing commodity chain approaches in three key areas – supply logics and crosscutting networks, value and materiality, and inter‐firm governance. We argue that resource recovery engenders highly complex and brokered forms of governance that relate to practices of valuing heterogeneous materials and that contrast markedly with the modes of coordination dominated by big capital typical of global production networks for consumer goods.

Food Regimes Revisited: A New Zealand Perspective

‘Food Regimes’ was coined by Friedmann and McMichael in 1989 and provided a organising framework for a considerable amount of Australian and New Zealand research during a period of economic restructuring and ‘deregulation’. Subsequently Food regimes were overtaken by other perspectives in New Zealand and elsewhere including an interest in commodity productions chains, regulation, postproductivist landscapes, and post structural political economy. More recently McMichael has reintroduced Food Regimes to his analysis. The paper will compare and contrast McMichael’s earlier and more recent engagements with Food Regimes. The export meat, the dairy, and pip fruit industries of Zealand it will be used to illustrate points about the timing, boundaries and margins as well as the transformation of Food Regimes. Finally the paper will attempt to connect the more recent focus on commodity chain analysis and post productivist landscapes with McMichael’s renewed interest in food Regimes.

Women and men as conservers, users and managers of agrobiodiversity: A feminist social–ecological approach

This feminist socio-ecological heuristic studies agrobiodiversity management, conservation and utilisation by men and women. Four approaches are characterised for an analysis of institutions, local knowledge, household economics and commodity chains. They are in turn linked to unveil their potential contributions towards a better understanding women's handling of, interests in and dependence on agrobiodiversity. The conceptualisation of a feminist framework aims at better informed research into the relationships between women, men and plants and is illustrated by examples from South Asia. Insights derived from a feminist socio-ecological perspective on agricultural biodiversity serve to generate gender-relevant policy recommendations towards establishing sustainable farming systems.

Global Commodity Chains & World Income Inequalities: The Missing Link of Inequality and the “Upgrading” Paradox

This article links key findings from two major research literatures within contemporary development and globalization studies: global commodity/value chains, and world income inequalities. Forging this missing link exposes what I call the “upgrading paradox” within commodity and value chain analysis. The paradox hinges on the disconnect between the global commodity/value chain literature’s focus on the potential for firms and nations to “upgrade” their position within chains and the roots of the global commodity chain construct in world-systems analysis, a theoretical framework that rejects the potential for widespread and generalizable developmental progress. Findings from the world income inequalities literature do indeed confirm the paradoxical nature of the upgrading discourse, so I conclude by discussing two potential paths for a “post-paradox” commodity chain analysis.

Beyond firm-centrism: re-integrating labour and capitalism into global commodity chain analysis

Since the mid-1990s, global commodity chain (GCC) analysis has contributed much to our understanding of processes of globalization and development. It has however, broadly failed to integrate class relations generally and labour in particular into its approach. This article suggests that we can understand this failure by revisiting and critically interrogating GCC's intellectual foundations—in World Systems Theory and Schumpeterian conceptions of capitalist innovation. It also argues that if carefully reformed, these foundations can provide a useful framework from which to conduct research into processes of contemporary development. A central argument of this paper is that evolving capital–labour relations co-determine processes of capitalist expansion and development, and that a commitment to understanding and investigating these relations should be placed more firmly at the centre of GCC analysis.

‘Everywhere in chains’: Work, commodity chain analysis, and the subversion of accountability

‘Chain’ literatures analyse the production and exchange linkages that bind nodes of production into a linear sequence. These chains typically extend beyond the remit of any one jurisdiction, firm, or civil-societal institution. Conventional treatments of accountability are informative, but rarely have chains in mind The concept of an accountability chain addresses these gaps. A central consideration in governance and accountability along a chain is the necessary bias in communications introduced by the very media that make accountability relations possible. This article addresses some basic strategic considerations that arise when accountability relations are viewed this way. It also addresses accountability itself and its worrisome degree of ‘modesty’ When the activities that are supposed to be monitored occur too much beyond the direct observation or control of the monitors.

Illegal Logging in Vietnam: Lam Tac (Forest Hijackers) in Practice and Talk

This article examines the political economy of illegal logging through a case study from Vietnam. The study examines the extraction and trade of a particular timber species through commodity-chain analysis and looks at national-level debates about illegal logging, corruption, and the state. Its findings suggest that central government concerns over authority and public discussions about corruption informed the criminalization of much logging. Criminalization provided the grounds for powerful wholesalers, brokers, and government officials to engage in the timber business and control the timber trade. The logging operations, in turn, fed back into the concerns of the central government and public. The article concludes that these interactions between local political economy and national politics may be a more general dynamic of illegal logging. A singular focus on law enforcement may serve neither local livelihoods nor forest protection in areas with smallholder extraction.

Review and Positions: Global Production Networks and Labour

Commodity chains that are global in extent have increasingly come to be seen as the defining element of the contemporary globalized world economy. Since the 1990s a body of theory — evolving from global commodity chain analysis to global value chain analysis to global production network analysis — has focused upon understanding how such commodity chains function. However, despite providing many important insights, these bodies of literature have generally suffered from a major deficiency in that they have failed to consider labour as an active agent capable of shaping such chains' structure and geographical organization. Here, then, we present a case for locating more centrally labour, in production network analysis.

The Place of Disarticulations: Global Commodity Production in La Laguna, Mexico

Studies of the shifting social organization and geography of global garment production have been critical to the development of the commodity chains framework as an important field of study for scholars of political economy in various disciplines. Our paper intervenes in this literature by proposing what we call a ‘disarticulations’ perspective, an approach attentive to historical and spatial processes of accumulation, disinvestment and dispossession that produce the uneven geographies generative of transnational production networks. We make the case for disarticulations as an approach to commodity chains via a case study of a region in north-central Mexico called La Laguna—a celebrated center of export dynamism in the 1990s, following the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and of rapid decline in the 2000s. Rather than offer a conventional commodity chain analysis of the boom to bust cycle in La Laguna, which would look to the dynamics of the contemporary apparel chain to explain the causes and consequences of La Laguna's NAFTA-era trajectory, we instead follow La Laguna's ‘travels’ through the cotton, textile, and garment industries over 150 years. We show how the recent NAFTA-era boom was premised on this layered history of engagements with the cotton–textile–apparel commodity chain. The disarticulations approach to commodity chains that we develop here foregrounds the processes of dispossession, accumulation and disinvestment through which not only commodity chains, but the uneven geographies that are their conditions of possibility, are reproduced.

Becoming coca: A materiality approach to a commodity chain analysis of hoja de coca in Colombia

Coca is a controversial plant, existing on the boundary between legality and illegality. This study aims at providing an analytical technique for discussing the problematic of coca in Colombia. Using new theoretical propositions in human geography, a more-than-human approach is adopted to encounter coca holistically. The results are a narrative account of coca's social life as experienced by the researcher following its network of non-cocaine derivatives. An analytical section invokes the Foucauldian dispositif to the drug trade and utilizes concepts of informed materials and technological zones to describe coca outside a political economy discourse. The research finds that coca's dynamic materiality complicates it as a commodity and that these conventional approaches do not fully encapsulate this complexity. By grappling with the messiness of coca's materiality, this paper reveals the multiplicity and interplay of coca's definitions, which lie at the heart of many conflicts.

Subverting Regulatory Protection of ‘Natural Commodities’: The Prunus Africana in Madagascar

ABSTRACTThis article explores the contradictions that have emerged along the commodity chain of the endangered medicinal tree Prunus africana in Madagascar. The study provides a unique opportunity to build on theories of access, highlighting in particular the themes of social relations, culture and power in mediating access to natural resources and benefits that derive from commercialization. Commodity chain analysis is employed to illustrate that property rights, based solely on formal rights, legal claims or customary rights to ‘natural commodities’ are insufficient to measure who is able to gain and maintain access to the species. The results show that power, regulation and exclusion have a much greater impact on who is able to tap into the benefits of P. africana commercialization. This article illustrates how extraction firms in Madagascar have over the years finessed their way, through ‘green conditionalities’ or conservation concessions, into continued extraction of P. africana — all in the face of widespread regulation.

Time to Pay the Piper

Ariel Salleh, ed., Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology (New York: Pluto Press, 2009), 324 pages, $34.00, paperback.In 2001, Wilma Dunaway wrote that the "tentacles of the world-system are entwined around the bodies of women." Yet her literary analysis revealed a profound silence about the role of women in reproductive labor, subsistence households, and commodity chain analysis. Dunaway characterized this omission as, "the greatest intellectual and political blunder" in her field.…Nearly ten years later, Ariel Salleh has answered this unspoken call with the resounding voices of seventeen feminist scholars who address transdisciplinary issues of global political ecology.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.