Global commodity chain approach and geography

Abstract

Today, we consume many commodities without knowing much about where or how they were produced, or how the seller obtained them. Against this background, the author reviewed approaches of global commodity chains (GCC) from a geographical perspective. The concept of a commodity chain was first introduced by Wallerstein in his Modern World-System Theory in 1974. The concept was applied by Gereffi, an American sociologist, to analyze the economy under a state of globalization in the 1990s. Gereffi focused mainly on three aspects of commodity chains: (1) governance, (2) geography, and (3) consumption. Governance was considered the most important and its styles such as buyer-driven or producer/supplier-driven have been comprehensively studied. Geographical aspects have been widely studied in the manufacturing industry but little studied in the agricultural industry. Consumption aspects, a growing new area of recent interest, considered commodity fetishism or ethical commodity chains. That approach was criticized as being an over-simplification of the production sector. Lack of cultural aspects and micro-scale analyses were also pointed out, which lead to GCC being developed more comprehensively. For example, the concepts of commodity circuit, commodity network, and value chain approach were introduced during this last decade. In addition, recent new trends in food studies were also important issues, and food systems, filière, food regime, and food network became keywords. Alongside these theoretical discussions, many case studies have also been reported. Regarding the agri-food sector, while much research was done on exports from Africa to Europe and from South America to North America, little was done on Asian chains or chains involving exports to Japan. As for African exports, horticultural products were the main items, but fruits, forest products, cotton, coffee and other various commodities were also items of focus. Especially coffee was considered as the main item of fair trade. Along with fair trade, ethical trade was one of the topics in commodity chain approaches. In relation to geography, Leslie, Reimer, and Hughes were pioneers. Especially, the book Geographies of Commodity Chains could be said to be a cornerstone. Many of its articles concern commodity fetishism or ethical commodity chains, also introduced because of criticisms of the commodity chain approach of the 1990s. Hughes and Guthman have considered ethical trade and organic agriculture. While they did not promote fair trade or ethical trade and organic farming, they took a critical stance towards them from the viewpoint of commodity fetishism, for example. In fact they argued that consumer trends or preferences for fair or ethical commodities and for organic or eco-friendly commodities could be one of the processes of commodity fetishism, and they considered who could profit most through this process. Actually it would be retailers or distributors, would it not? How did already small and poor farmers improve their difficult conditions through the movement of fair, ethical and organic chains? The movement resulted only in increased profits for retailers. Hughes and Guthman tried to reveal the hidden meaning of these movements in recent discussions about GCC.