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This article analyses undocumented migrant labour organising in a complicated context and site, the Vermont dairy industry, in relation to Tanya Basok's concept of "counter‐hegemonic human rights". Taking migrant rights organisation Migrant Justice in Burlington, Vermont as a case study, this work examines migrant labour organising that calls upon notions of human rights for economic migrants in the USA. Migrant Justice works through commodity chain labour organising that transcends the scale of the state, calls on moral geographies of consumption and production, and autonomously redistributes not just capital, but power, from the corporation down to workers. An analysis of literature on migrant human rights in relation to labour organising will lead us to problematise mainstream human rights discourse, explore alternative conceptions of rights, and understand the liberatory components of the "counter‐hegemonic" employment of human rights by subversive actors, which may truly hold the potentials that mainstream human rights discourse claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractIncreasingly, women are the producers of many agricultural commodities around the world and feminist scholars astutely argue that women subsidize global agricultural production because the exchange value attributed to their products in commodity chains does not fairly compensate them. Although this is the case with women’s smallholder coffee in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, in this paper we seek to move beyond an analysis of value and exploitation based on the commodity (in this case, coffee) to explore more fully women’s production practices. Drawing on debates over the question of value production in socionatures, we suggest that as women cultivate coffee, they also create socionatural spaces in which they produce and valorise a host of things and relations. Literature on diverse economies, Latin American theorizations of lo común (the common), and feminist political ecology help us examine how women also generate a multiplicity of values that exceeds their fraught relationship with global commodity chains. This perspective enables us to expand the way we understand women producers, seeing them simultaneously as subjects exploited by value extraction through the commodity chain to political actors engaging with other forms of valuing and promoting life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the political motivations and economic actions of China's global agribusiness project in the Brazilian soybean commodity chain. To verify these facts, we use literature review and qualitative data analysis through a long-term description of the political and economic actions of the Chinese agents. Additionally, we connect Chinese investments on the Brazilian soybean commodity chain as a practical representation of these actions. In sum, the article highlighted that long-term structures influence current actions in China and is being strengthened by the active participation of Chinese firms in commodity chains, such as Brazilian soybean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The few percent of soil organic carbon (SOC) among mineral components form the interface of climate, plant growth, soil biological processes, physical transport infrastructure, and chemical transformations. We explore maps, models, myths, motivation, means of implementation, and modalities for transformation. Theories of place relate geographic variation in SOC to climate, soil types, land cover, and profile depth. Process-level theories of biophysical change and socioeconomic theories of induced change explain SOC transitions that follow from land use change when a declining curve is bent and recovery toward SOC saturation starts. While the desirability of recovering from SOC deficits has been mainstreamed into climate policy, the effectiveness of proposed measures taken remains contested. Process-level requirements for transitions at plot and landscape scales remain uncertain. Expectations of policy-induced SOC transitions have to align with national cross-sectoral C accounting and be managed realistically with land users (farmers) and commodity supply chains (private sector, consumers). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 2000s, many private companies, public-private coalitions, and governments have committed to remove deforestation from commodity supply chains. Despite these zero-deforestation commitments (ZDCs), high rates of deforestation persist and may even be increasing. On the upside, a few region- and commodity-specific ZDCs have contributed to reductions by up to hundreds of thousands of hectares of deforestation, with mixed evidence on associated leakage. ZDCs have also spurred progress in monitoring, traceability, and awareness of deforestation. On the downside, as currently implemented, supply chain initiatives only cover a small share of tropical deforestation. Government- and company-led ZDCs are just two components of broader policy mixes aimed at reducing deforestation. To be more impactful, ZDCs needs to cover entire biomes, supply bases of companies, and export and domestic markets, with special attention not to exclude marginal producers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article pays attention to the gendered resource struggles and changing division of labor of the feminized shea fruit in Burkina Faso. The aim of this qualitative study is to explore how the increased demand for shea has affected gendered natural resource access and divisions of labor in the local. Shea, often described as 'women's gold', is one of few natural resources which women control harvest, processing and earnings. The increased demand for shea on the global market has therefore been presented as a benefactor for women's economic empowerment in Burkina Faso. Yet, studies have pointed to that women seem to be sidelined in the shea commodity chain. This study explores how gendered natural resource struggles are formed in the local shea commodity chain by departing from three principles of gender analysis, access and control, labor division and subjectivities. The data was collected through ethnographic fieldwork in the two rural villages of Boessen and Tonogo in Burkina Faso. The analysis sheds light on the particularities in how men's shea practices form masculinities and rearrange gendered labor norms. The study moreover shows how contestations of male involvement is done by targeting manhood and labor norm perceptions. Male involvement both re-produces hegemonic masculinities where male shea control delimits women's income possibilities. Whilst it also shapes alternative masculinities which embraces cooperation and joint decision making within households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between power, governance and value creation/capture is a central concern in global value chain (GVC) research. In the context of calls to develop a more expansive view of power in GVCs, we argue for retaining a focus on bargaining power, but shifting the conceptualization of bargaining power from the dyad to the network. We advance two arguments. First, we elaborate an exchange theoretic model in which skew of value capture is a function of the degree of power asymmetry inherent in the ratio of buyers to suppliers. Second, we explain how this model can be expanded to consider the role of external factors, such as the institutional and normative contexts in which exchange occurs. Rather than see these factors as contending forms of power, we treat them as forces that can affect value skew by either attenuating the bargaining power of lead firms or by moderating the distributional effects of power asymmetries between exchange partners. We conclude that an exchange theoretic approach to bargaining power in GVCs provides a parsimonious framework for explaining how inter‐firm governance shapes the distribution of value capture in global production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of literature acknowledges that the Gulf Cooperation Council's demand for food is met through a set of commodity chains that span the regional and global economy. But the development of national corporate food security strategies premised on the consolidation of logistical networks and food commodity chains has not been sufficiently explored. This paper is concerned with the United Arab Emirates' footprint on the regional and international food regime, and the state's production as a regional hub for agri-food trade. We trace the ways the UAE's corporate food security strategy utilises the private sector, agribusiness and logistics firms, alongside military power, to achieve so-called food security. We bring the literature on food regimes and logistics space into dialogue to explore the UAE's food security policy as a strategy to consolidate power over agro-commodity production and distribution networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Great attention has been paid to the bilateral economic relations between India, Vietnam, and South Korea; however, only scant research has focused on the prospects of triangular economic cooperation among the three countries. Given the advantage and demand for the cooperation of each party, there is significant potential for trilateral economic cooperation among South Korea, Vietnam, and India. In this paper, we discover the prospects for their triangular economic cooperation in three aspects. First, this study examines the potential for cooperation in production networks and supply chains between the three countries in the context of reconfiguring the global value chains (GVCs), with a focus on the leading role of South Korean multinational enterprises (MNEs). Second, the study explores trilateral cooperation in the digital economy and connectivity, focusing on how South Korea and India can collaborate on investment projects in Vietnam. Third, this study discusses the rationale and possibility of forming a regional trade agreement (RTA) between the three countries. South Korea, Vietnam, and India have extant bilateral trade agreements between two of the three countries; however, there is no regional integration among the three countries discussed in specific. Considering the bilateral relations and domestic and external factors, the paper reckons that an RTA for starters between the three countries would be mutually beneficial to each of the corresponding economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If we traveled back in time to the first half of the eighteenth century, we might notice that the cargo aboard an East Indiaman was rather diversified. But of these different products from different countries, a sizable number of them were manufactured in and originated from China. Why was China, alone among many other countries, able to secure its place as a world factory at the time? In this paper, I will suggest that we could not possibly understand how tea and porcelain became synonyms for China without tracing their histories back to the early modern world. We would not be able to deepen our understanding of Anglo-Chinese relations without taking into consideration the flow and circulations of goods between the two powers. My purpose here, therefore, is to outline these very connections throughout the early modern era, roughly from the late seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, based on the fascinating studies conducted by pioneering historians in the field over the past few decades. If we follow the life histories of some of the Chinese commodities, can we determine the ways in which those imported items interacted with the European market in general and the British in particular? Other than treating these commodities as marketable goods, are there any other intellectual perspectives available to help us better comprehend their associations with the early modern world? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the transformations experienced by the commercial coffee circuit within the period 1851 - 1895, when we observed the beginning of its international standardization. The analysis seeks to understand the conjuncture of continuous increase in coffee prices from two different scenarios: accelerated growth of demand combined with irregular growth of its supply. For this we used data which allowed us to map out the movement of this commodity on a global scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This co-authored article offers reflections on the pedagogical potential of focusing on commodity chains as an approach to teaching culture. By way of example, it foregrounds gold, drawing on the two authors' experiences teaching material related to this valuable mineral in very distinct fields: European art history (in courses on the ancient and medieval eras) and Latin American literature and culture (in courses about the Amazon taught in Spanish and Portuguese). The authors also discuss their collaborative work in creating an Open Educational Resources (OER) module on gold, and the possibility of a co-taught course. Gold is a particularly interesting commodity given the many myths that surround it, its history as a form of currency and standard of value, and the aesthetic qualities attributed to it. More generally, however, focusing on specific commodities from the point of extraction to their use in an array of products encourages students to think about the materiality of culture and its implication in an array of political, economic, and ethical issues. It also offers a way of charting connections and differences across long arcs of time, across geographical space and cultural differences, and across different academic disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an introduction to Redesigning Modernities I, the first of two special issues that grew out of the Redesigning Modernities project led by Penn State's School of Global Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. The article explains the aims of the larger project, which seeks to encourage complementary and collaborative research agendas among faculty and graduate students, develop new curriculum and innovative course designs, and generate materials for inclusion in the university's Open Educational Resources (OER) archive. This introduction also situates the first workshop, held in summer 2020, in the context of the pandemic's early days as a way of explaining the recurring threads that connect the contributions to this issue: infrastructures, ecologies, and emancipatory openings. Finally, it presents the lineup of pieces in this issue: a dossier on Ecologies, Foodways, and Commodity Chains composed of four short pieces; an interview with the Brazilian graphic novelist Marcelo D'Salete along with a prefatory text drawing connections between his Angola Janga (2017) and the U.S. writer Gayl Jones's Palmares (2020); and four full-length articles on diverse media (short videos/vlogs, a series of experimental novels, the ideas of a feminist philosopher and performer, and a cult classic film). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neomercantilism is commonly portrayed as a central mechanism of China's global agribusiness engagement. It implies reordering the international food regime by moving away from financial and trade liberalization and securing stable import supplies and price controls under state support. However, this article raises an alternative interpretation through an empirical‐rich investigation of the prominence of the state‐owned China Oil and Foodstuffs Corporation (COFCO) in the soybean commodity chain. The article draws upon analyses of the Chinese state and international food regime to demonstrate that recent changes in state‐capital relations during the Xi Jinping administration propelled forms of capital accumulation based on financial speculation and shareholder values. I conclude that state‐driven internationalization has placed Chinese agribusiness in an advantageous position within global finance rather than challenging it through agrarian neomercantilist strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cashmere provides an ideal material for examining how humans co‐opt tangible and intangible qualities into their ascription of value. The fiber's relative worth lies at the intersection of its tangible qualities (e.g., softness, lightness, strength) and intangible qualities (e.g., rarity, history, authenticity, sustainability). Mediating the relationship between those qualities are actors with very different stakes: the families of Mongolian herders who comb goats together each spring, the brokers and buyers who weigh it and feel it to adjudicate it for fashion houses, and the advertisers and marketers who decide what is desirable in global markets of end consumers. This article examines three nodes in the production and circulation of Mongolian cashmere to show how different forms of value—economic, social, linguistic, moral—accrue to material goods and travel, or not, from one context to another. I focus on interactions as moments of qualic evaluation. Here embodied, tactile experiences of qualia—which might seem to be immune to perceptual difference and "outside culture"—in fact differ. The example shows how valuation in a transnational commodity chain depends on both exploiting semiotic gaps in the chain and nonetheless meeting a threshold of commensurability, neither of which is divorceable from physicality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Residing in Brussels from 1755, Friedrich Romberg, a native of Hemer near Iserlohn in Westphalia and a friend of Emperor Joseph II, may be an exceptional figure in the line of German slave traders with his intensive involvement in the French colonial empire of the 1770s/80s. However, he can also be seen as an emblematic exponent of a profitable niche in the overall panorama of the Atlantic slave trade—namely, the connection of the German and even Italian textile industries with the Caribbean plantation economies. By examining the trading circuits within Romberg's freight forwarding company and his textile trade and production, we can extend and praxeologically nuance the concept of the central European "slavery hinterland." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Mapuche movement is among the most important social movements in post-dictatorship Chile. Since the 1990s, the Mapuche struggle has increasingly turned into a violent conflict over land usage and environmental degradation. By referring to theories of global capitalism and political ecology, we show how forestry extractivism has shaped the Mapuche struggle. Based on extensive fieldwork in the region of La Araucanía, we analyze how different forms of inequalities including social marginalization, cultural repression, and ecological inequalities have led to discontent. In reaction to this multi-dimensional discontent, the Mapuche have developed indigenous forms of 'collective bargaining by riot' by attacking the local extractivist network. We identify the transnational forestry industry as a major driver of conflict and discuss the limits of Chile's extractivist model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary global spice trade is a multi-million dollar industry that frequently relies on Global North consumers' romantic visions of spices and their cultivators in the Global South. From fieldwork with ethnic minority farmers in upland northern Vietnam growing star anise, Cinnamomum cassia (often marketed as cinnamon), and black cardamom, and from a content analysis of digital marketing websites, it becomes clear that astute practices of commodification and de-commodification are invoked at different nodes along these spice global commodity chains. In this paper we investigate the strategies deployed by Vietnamese state officials, Vietnam-based exporting companies, and overseas importing and retail companies to promote and market these three spices. We find major disjunctures between the "geographical indications" approach advanced by the Vietnamese state to link products to particular places and peoples, and the "placeless" strategies mobilized by private Vietnamese and Chinese exporters. Global North importers further complicate the story, often attempting to de-commodify or de-fetishize the spices on digital-marketing platforms. By focusing on the final nodes along these commodity chains – yet to be studied or critiqued – our findings raise important questions regarding the implications of such divergent marketing strategies for farmers at the initial nodes of these spice chains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is concerned with the contemporary relevance of caste to agrarian capitalism and the relations of dependency and allegiance it fosters in a village of Andhra Pradesh. It deploys the method of village study to examine the two‐way interaction between agrarian class and caste relations and the emerging rural‐based informal nonfarm economy. It elaborates the continuation of relations of debt, dependency, and political allegiance fostered by landlordism despite significant diversification to nonfarm by landlords and labour and identifies the crucial role of land inequality and the working of ritual hierarchy in locking Dalit caste in land‐based relations of dependency. The paper highlights the importance of expanding the definition of landlordism as the use of social power for accumulation by embedding it in the motives and values generated by the Hindu social order. While the new wave of literature focuses attention on global capital and commodity chains to understand differentiation of rural population and ruralities, the paper emphasizes the persistent significance of landholding provincial capital in shaping class/caste relations and rural politics and argues for a course correction in thinking about the processes of globalization and new forms of labour control and stresses the continuing significance of the agrarian question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of global supply chains, the workplace is a site of realization of global–local interrelations and materialization of class, gender and race exploitation. This paper explores these relations in the Mozambican cashew‐processing factory, the workplace at the bottom of the cashew global supply chain. The aim is to extend the literature on labor and global production networks by addressing the underexplored dimension of the everyday practices of work organization and by centering the interdependence of economic and socio‐cultural relations. Taking a feminist social reproduction perspective and drawing on insights from Quijano's coloniality of labor, the article conceptualizes the workplace at the bottom of global supply chains as a site of reproduction of colonial relations. The workplace is both internally fragmented and embedded within the structures of the local and global economy. Through the internal fragmentation, multiple forms of oppression and exploitation are reproduced. Through the external links with the structures of the local and global economy, the complexity of working lives as well as the colonial relations between employers and workers become visible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Despite the evidence that cold chain management practices affect the potency and effectiveness of both vaccines and non-vaccine commodities, most of the researches in Uganda focus on vaccines. This study assessed the cold chain management practices of non-vaccine cold chain commodities in public health facilities of the Rwenzori Region, Uganda. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted in a random sample of 69 level III and IV health facilities. The respondents were store managers at health facilities. Data on stock and storage management practices and level of knowledge on cold chain management were assessed. Data were collected and entered into Microsoft excel 2017, cleaned, and later exported into IBM SPSS version 26 for analysis. The management practices were graded as poor (< 50% score), fair (50–75% score), or good (> 75% score). Results: Results from the 69 facilities indicated that the stock management practices were graded as fair for lesser than half of the facilities 28 (40.6%). Few facilities were correctly filling stock cards 20 (29%) and conducting physical inventories 19 (27.5%). The refrigerator storage management practices were fair for nearly half of the facilities 32 (46.4%). Among the facilities that had a refrigerator 53 (76.8%), 39 (70.9%) utilized it for storing both vaccines and non-vaccine commodities. The cold chain management practices at service delivery points were fair for 32 (46.4%) health centers. A larger proportion of the participants 69 (65%) had knowledge of cold chain storage. Most of the participants 47 (67.8%) were knowledgeable about the heat sensitivity of the cold chain commodities, however, almost half (48.1%) of them lacked knowledge on refrigerator use. Conclusion: The management practices for non-vaccine cold chain commodities in health centers were fair. More than a third of the facility store managers lacked knowledge on cold chain management practices for non-vaccine commodities. There is a need to strengthen the capacity of the facilities' store managers and provide equipment specific for non-vaccine cold chain commodities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The research addresses the implementation of the circular economy in the sustainable supply chain, made possible through commodities in the sustainable context. The article seeks higher levels of sustainability, given the strong mobilization of society for products with better environmental performance. Method: Although many studies address the concepts separately, few studies advance in the integrated view of the functioning of the supply chain of circular products. The systematic literature review sought to relate the integration of the concepts by identifying key aspects of stakeholders, processes and tools, which can be synchronized to assist organizations in implementing the circular environment in supply chain operations and generate sustainability gains. Results: The evolution of the supply chain as a result of producers' competition needs, aiming at market improvements and cost reduction, the value generation along the chain is very focused on delivering specificity to the customer. Therefore, the supply chain is sustainable because it needs to perform well in traditional financial measures, including that when it comes to sustainability in the supply chain this can be formed by three dimensions: social, environmental and economic. Conclusion: The work opens the way for future research and practical applications, considering the need for systemic operation of technologies that promote joint action and cooperation environment between organizations, which favor sustainability gains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current literature on family businesses and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) offers some disintegrated insights in view of managing supply chains, particularly the supplier selection agenda. The presence of distinct characteristics inherent to both enterprises calls for a new line of inquiry regarding supplier selection for family SMEs. This work advances the literature by (1) identifying a set of supplier selection attributes best encapsulating the interests of family SMEs, and (2) evaluating these attributes to guide relevant decision-making. With a case study in the food industry and previous lists of supplier selection attributes, ten attributes were considered relevant to family SMEs. Applying the hybrid entropy-MARCOS method yields the priority attributes in decreasing order: on-time delivery, total service quality, product quality, productivity, attitude, response to customer requests, problem-solving capacity, payment terms, price, and flexibility. An analysis with other comparable methods suggests high consistency of these findings. Theoretical insights were discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women play an important role in small-scale fisheries around the world. Their work along the entire fish value chain contributes to the productivity of the sector and enhances household income. But this work remains unrecognized and undervalued, and women continue to be excluded from decision-making in fisheries management and policy development. This study aims to construct a theoretical framework for analyzing how women's fish processing and trade activities create value and enhance competitive advantage along the fish value chain. It asks how the value of fish is generated by women's labor in processing and trade and how we might construct a theory of value that better accounts women's contributions to fish economies. The framework combines the Resource-Knowledge-Based-View, which considers situated knowledge as a source for capability creation, and Feminist Commodity Chain Analysis, which describes and assesses how the activities performed by women create value within and across value chain nodes. Applying this framework to three fish economies in Mexico and India, findings emphasize that a) valuable assets emerge from women's work in small-scale fisheries; and b) to make gender visible, it is necessary to identify how and where value and profit are created by women in each node of the fish value chain. Recognizing the value of women's work is a key element to empower them and to make visible an invisible workforce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the country's policy support and the rapid development of Internet technology, the domestic consumption level has been escalating and the consumption structure has changed. The traditional retail industry cannot integrate all the relevant data due to data security and privacy protection concerns so that it is unable to adjust sales strategies in an accurate and timely manner. New retail has sounded the clarion call for the retail revolution. The supply chain demand forecasting is an important problem for the supply chain management. In this research, we propose a new retail supply chain commodity demand forecasting framework based on vertical federal learning, which solves the problems of data security and privacy faced by new retail theoretically and empirically. In experiments, we use datasets from different platforms (such as social platforms, e-commerce platforms, and retailers) in the same region for federated learning. The experiment results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior to its release, the film Suffragette (2015) generated significant media commentary when its marketing campaign emblazoned a controversial historical quotation on promotional t-shirts. The 1913 Emmeline Pankhurst quotation generated a variety of negative emotional responses across digital, print, and social media because it compared women's disenfranchisement to slavery. This article builds on recent historical analyses of national and transnational women's movements that are informed by the history of emotions. It considers the operation of discourses of slavery within the history, memory, and popular culture of the transatlantic women's suffrage movement. Using Jemima Repo's concept of feminist commodity activism to situate the t-shirts, this article examines the anger and frustration that dominated media commentary about the Suffragette marketing campaign across the United States, Britain, Australia, and Canada. Both the filmmakers and intersectional feminist activists embraced historical evidence—from primary and secondary sources—to mobilise different narratives about the Women's Social and Political Union. Yet many journalists and commentators envisioned the film's construction of historical memory as insufficiently attuned to racism within the history of feminism, and thus as a failure of intersectional feminism. Suffragette reveals significant anxieties about how the women's suffrage movement should be remembered in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report reviews recent literature that provides a new understanding of the material formation of urban space in the context of carbon/post-carbon urbanism. First, it discusses the concept of extractivist urbanization, which links the excavation of terrestrial materials to a wider agenda of data mining. Second, it considers the relationship of cities to material flows, including debates around how ports and corridors might relate to the urbanization of both 'circular' and waste intensive commodity chains and consumption spaces. Third, it traces the relationship between climate change, the redesign of cities and the topographic profile of the Anthropocenic city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study proffers the need to strengthen supply chain resilience toward the minimization of disruptions. We investigate the financial performance of agricultural commodities' supply chain amid external uncertainty shocks in both time and frequency dimensions. The wavelet techniques are employed for the analysis. Specifically, both the Windowed Scalogram Difference (WSD) and Wavelet Multiple techniques are utilized. First, the study finds from the WSD that disruption which we proxy with global economic policy uncertainty (GEPU) hurts all the agricultural commodities in the medium and long terms. For instance, we find high comovements between agricultural raw material (ARM) and GEPU. This is similar to the comovements between rice and GEPU. Additionally, high potential comovements between 2005 and 2016 in the medium and long term for fertilizer, maize, and possibly wheat with the GEPU are found. Generally, there seem to be fewer comovements between soybeans and the GEPU which is indicative of a resistance to shocks. Second, we find from the Wavelet Multiple approaches that most of the agricultural commodities are highly integrated, except rice. Findings from the study imply minimization of diversification, hedge, or safe haven benefits with regard to market conditions among the commodities. The findings have important inferences for policymakers, supply chain actors of agricultural commodities, and investors to extensively examine the heterogeneous and adaptive dynamics of the commodity markets. We advocate that supply chains of agricultural commodities must be borne with dynamic capacities to manage vulnerabilities in an uncertain environment, necessitating resilience capabilities to thrive in the long run. Also, investors should hedge against the portfolio risk present in these agricultural commodities. This study is the first to provide insights into the supply chain of agricultural commodities from a financial perspective through time and/or frequency analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why has the COVID-19 pandemic manifested itself differently in different parts of the capitalist world-economy? The analysis here examines the way in which the system of "imperial value," as articulated by Samir Amin and others, has governed the relations of individual nation states to the onset of SARS-CoV-2. The result is enormous disparities between the Global North and the Global South, as well as between countries that are relatively more capitalist and those that are relatively more socialist, along the socioeconomic spectrum. The impact of COVID-19 is thus mediated by a country's position within the global value chain dominated by monopolistic multinational corporations. In this way, the structure of the contemporary world system has only served to worsen the global effects of the pandemic, in line with the general character of today's catastrophe capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the forest to the fork: A conceptual framework of the wild meat supply-demand system to guide interventions in tackling unsustainable trafficking and consumption in the Congo Basin The conservation sector has been aware of the decline of wildlife in Central African forests for decades and its alarming unsustainable scale as urban populations grow (Ingram et al., 2021; Wilkie et al., 2016). While the framework was originally developed with large urban centres in mind, WCS has adapted it beyond large urban centres to also address dynamics in rural protein-poor towns on the wild meat value chain to provide legal, sustainable options to consumers and engage wild meat value chain actors in other businesses. [Extracted from the article]

This article investigates the role of industrial policy in promoting upgrading in commodity sectors by examining the case of the petroleum, rubber, and palm oil industries in Malaysia. By doing so, it aims to contribute to an emerging scholarship that bridges the developmental state and the global value chains literature. Several findings emerge from this study. First, linkages do not unfold through market forces alone. Commodity value addition processes can be hindered by a range of barriers, including power dynamics alongside global commodity chains. The existence of high barriers for linkage development in developing nations justifies the need of state interventions. Second, successful government interventions for commodity value addition in Malaysia have gone far beyond fixing market failures and a 'facilitative' role of the state. Instead, the productive capabilities necessary for value addition were accumulated through coherent industrial policies and the strategic orientation of rents towards achieving productivity gains and learning. Third, political considerations, such the base of the ruling coalition, the regime type (marked by both executive dominance and political competition), and the influence of the regional intellectual climate, are essential to understanding both the policy will and ability to pursue a developmental approach towards commodity value addition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on fieldwork with riverine householders in the Amazonian municipality of Abaetetuba, this article recounts an ongoing struggle against the construction of a fluvial grain terminal by Cargill, the global grain‐trading giant. Over the past two decades, grain‐trading firms have engaged in a publicly subsidized bidding war to expand export infrastructure in the Amazon, harnessing the world's largest river system to flush agricultural commodities on the global market. The so‐called Northern Arc consists of a regional network of private grain terminals, ports, roads, and railways connecting disparate places within a broader landscape of value. This article overlays ethnography with historical analysis to examine the confrontation between a regional project of commodity chain integration and a set of valuations derived from the long‐standing role of commodity exchange in the Amazon. I suggest that the Northern Arc articulates with the sociological legacy of the aviamento: a system of debt‐peonage that structured the circulation of commodities in the basin during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By connecting local understandings of power, circulation, and authority to a new structural position within the global food system, the Northern Arc has galvanized old antagonisms and reflects the history of social conflict along the Amazon estuary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bolivia is a centre for drug production and trafficking and yet it experiences far less drug‐related violence than other countries in Latin America that form part of cocaine's commodity chain. Drawing upon more than three years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2005 and 2019, this article presents evidence from the Chapare, a coca‐growing and drug processing region in central Bolivia, to consider why this is the case. Building from the literature on embedded economies and the subsistence ethic of peasant communities, the article demonstrates that the drug trade is part of a local moral order that prioritizes kinship, reciprocal relations and community well‐being, facilitated by the cultural significance of the coca leaf. This has served to limit possibilities for the violence that is often associated with drug production and trafficking. In addition, coca grower agricultural unions act as a parallel form of governance, providing a framework for the peaceful resolution of disputes and working actively to exclude the state and criminal actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the price transmission within the milk commodity chain in the Czech Republic. The aim of the paper is to assess the price transmission within the commodity vertical of the semi-skimmed long-life cow's milk (1.5% fat) as a product with low added value, and of butter as a higher added value product. The dataset consists of monthly prices on the sub-markets of the analysed commodity chain with the period of January 2002 to August 2020 that were retrieved from the Czech Statistical Office and the Ministry of Agriculture of the Czech Republic. Methodologically, the analysis is based on the elasticity of price transmission (EPT) coefficients used in both supply and demand direction, on the correlation of price differences, and on the evaluation of the time-lag changes in output prices in case of changes in input prices. The results show imperfections in the transmission of price changes between individual levels of the commodity chain. Time delays of price transmission are not obvious in the case of these commodities due to the perishability of these products. Finally, several suggestions for further research are given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The effects of key parameters on system performance are investigated. • The optimal recooling capacity ratio is fitted by the neural network approach. • Lower limit of heat source temperature in the proposed layout is reduced by 4 °C. • 28.5% of compressor work in subcooling subcycle for the proposed layout is saved. • The payback period of proposed system is 10.1 years. Stimulated by the fast development of cold chain commodity market and a large amount of demand in cold storages, the application of CO 2 refrigeration system is to enhance remarkably. Owing to the low critical temperature of CO 2 , the dedicated subcooling technology is widely-used in the CO 2 transcritical refrigeration cycle to increase the system performance. In this regard, reducing the compressor power of subcooling subcycle and extending the working range of heat source temperature is highly important for the mechanical subcooling technology and absorption one, respectively. Motivated by such purpose, the CO 2 transcritical cycle with dedicated subcooling and cascade recooling is presented and the thorough investigation is performed thermodynamically. The proposed system is compared with layouts with dedicated mechanical subcooling and dedicated absorption one at first. Subsequently, the effect of recooling capacity ratio, the critical parameter for the system performance, is analyzed in-depth. Finally, the optimum recooling capacity ratio for different conditions is fitted by the neural network approach. Compared to layouts with dedicated mechanical subcooling and dedicated absorption one, the secondary compressor work goes down by 28.5% and the lower limit of heat source temperature is extended by 4 °C, respectively in the proposed system. The paper is favorable for the development and performance improvement of CO 2 transcritical refrigeration systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a bibliographical essay about the Hispanic mercury trade from the 16th to 18th centuries that proposes a model of the quicksilver trade built around the Commodity Chains Methodology. The topic has been divided into four sections: origins, production, trade, and consumption. This allows for systematizing and synthesizing the historiographical knowledge of the subject. It emphasizes the transcontinental scope of this Commodity chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines African peasant tobacco production in Southern Rhodesia from 1900 to 1980, from the cusp of colonialism to its end. It analyses shifting state policy towards African tobacco producers, the concomitant impact on peasant economies, accumulation patterns and the rural physical landscape and peasant responses. It focuses on the changing agricultural commodity value chains, cash crop asymmetries, and global market forces to explain colonial responses to peasant production and peasant agency. We argue that the symbolic value of each agricultural commodity, in entrenching the hierarchy of power relations and the institutionalisation of white control, mediated colonial responses to peasant production and concomitantly 'peasant agency'. We use this case study to highlight the structural constraints on 'agency' and to explore how cash crop asymmetries helped structure agrarian encounters and power relations in colonial Africa. The paper uses archival sources from the National Archives of Zimbabwe, newspapers, and journals from the Tobacco Research Board (TRB). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the 1590s to 1650s, the Spanish Crown tried different approaches to control the Florida ambergris trade. They were unable, however, to prevent various Florida governors, other local officials, and other peoples from Florida, Cuba, and beyond from profiting by an illicit trade in this maritime commodity. The Crown first tried establishing procedures and punishments, including requiring ships to stop and get a license from the Florida governor or face a fine. With the trade in ambergris continuing unabated, the Crown then tried ameliorating the penalty and offering financial reward to the governor and informants for information on the illicit trade. With these enticements not working, the Crown returned to the earlier higher punishments, but again to no avail. The central role of the governors in controlling the ambergris trade meant that despite repeated attention to the trade by the Crown, they were not able to gain regular payment of the quinto real, i.e., the royal fifth. The Florida ambergris trade thus revealed a combination of partially concealed pilfering by local officials and the limits of the Crown's reach in the North American borderlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Criticism is mounting that market-led and state-led initiatives for environmental impact disclosure are too limited in scope and that they rest on too strong assumptions about the quality and impartiality of monitoring and enforcement, with resulting insufficient effect on environmental sustainability. It has been proposed that citizen monitoring may contribute to counteract this void. However, to our knowledge, policy analysis in general and economics in particular has not paid much attention to this role of citizen monitoring. This paper aims to bridge that gap from an economics lens, by exploring the dynamics of disclosing local environmental impact and the potential role of citizen monitoring in environmental policy. To this end, the paper addresses monopolistic versus pluralistic environmental disclosure, letting citizen monitoring represent the latter. The study uses the mining industry as an illustrative case, because of that sector's particular transparency challenges in international value chains, typically with strong negative local environmental impact. It is shown how pluralistic information provision such as citizen monitoring can contribute to incentivizing more reliable information provision, especially in countries with weak state institutions, which is particularly important in the case of high-risk environmental impact. The findings should be of use for shaping environmental policy, providing valuable insights for both policymakers and scholars. • Contrasting monopolistic information provision with citizen monitoring. • Applying a media market model to environmental disclosure. • Examining citizen monitoring as a complementary approach: a case study of the mining industry. • The critical role of citizen monitoring in environments with high-risk pollution and weak state institutions. • Extracting insights for improved environmental disclosure in commodity chains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amazon seems to be creating a new hybrid model of capitalism combining some elements of classical Fordist vertical integration, or even the over hundred-year-old “Taylorism” of scientific management, with 21st century elements of labor “flexibility” and reliance on gig labor and subcontracting. This hybrid model offers opportunities for organized labor to gain a foothold within some of Amazon’s vertically integrated nodes as the firm lengthens its corporate commodity chain to grow increasingly close to consumers. Building on earlier work on opportunities for, and constraints on, labor in a variety of global commodity chains, our empirical cases examine how Amazon’s corporate strategies may open opportunities for labor in three illustrative cases ensconced in fulfillment centers—the Fordist vertical integration side of the model—in the Inland Empire and Otay Mesa (both in southern California) and Northern Kentucky. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Integrating laboratory service network and it's consumable commodities supply chain. • Managing multiple disruptions in healthcare service network design. • Considering a real-world case study with reliable data. Health service networks play a key role in ensuring the health of society. Disruptive and operational risks are constantly affecting the goals of healthcare supply chain and service networks. Therefore, adopting a suitable approach to deal with risks is critical in the mentioned networks. This study proposes a mathematical model for designing an integrated resilient medical laboratory service network and the supply chain of laboratory consumables under multiple facility disruptions to minimize the total network design costs. A robust possibilistic optimization approach is employed to deal with the uncertainty of input parameters. Then, a case study is presented to extract the results and evaluate the proposed model. Regarding the results, the integration of the laboratory service network and laboratory consumables supply chain significantly reduces costs and improves the service process in the long run. Also, adopting more efficient resiliency strategies will increase the cost savings of the entire network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Avocados have become a global commodity, and environmental and socioeconomic impacts in the regions where avocados are grown have increased in tandem with production. In this article, we synthesize the current state of knowledge about the impacts of avocado production in Michoacán, México, the global center of avocado production. Environmental impacts on biodiversity, soil, and hydrological systems stem from deforestation and forest fragmentation that result from avocado expansion. The avocado industry has brought some economic benefits, namely increased employment and reductions in poverty and out-migration, but inequity in the region limits the positive socioeconomic impacts. We draw comparisons to other commodity studies and propose that lessons learned from such research could be utilized to make the avocado supply chain more sustainable. Ultimately, steps could be taken at all levels of the commodity chain to improve sustainability, including improved farming practices, policies protecting smallholders and local capital, and increased consumer awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 Pandemic led to a strong increase in demand for medical products. At the same time, supply problems in international supply chains kicked in due to health policy interventions (e.g., lockdowns) and economic policy measures (e.g., export controls). Combined, both resulted in temporary shortages and triggered a controversial discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of globalised production structures, which led to strong dependencies on a few, primarily Asian, locations and producers. Against this background and based on case studies for Austria, the article deals with the question which factors determine the robustness of global commodity chains for respirators, protective gloves and respiratory equipment and which national and European policies could be suitable for increasing resilience in the supply of medical products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores mine waste that originates from resource extraction by specifically focusing on waste rock, tailings, dust and material culture from the resource extraction industry. By drawing on examples from fieldwork, archives, local media commentary and limited interviews from two iron-mining regions in Arctic Norway and sub-Arctic Canada, this paper follows mine waste as it routinely transgresses attempts to be managed. Mine waste spills out of its prescribed sinks, it oscillates between being considered waste to heritage to potentially valuable commodity, and it blurs the boundaries between spaces dedicated for mining and for non-mining. In following these trends, the paper calls for attentiveness to the ambiguous materiality of mine waste and how heterogeneity and excess circumscribe attempts at easy characterisation and management of the ubiquitous wastes that come to dominate mining regions. As such, archaeological approaches to studying mine waste can illustrate how mine waste becomes the default, lived-with condition of life in regions dominated by ongoing mining operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the price transmission within the milk commodity chain in the Czech Republic. The aim of the paper is to assess the price transmission within the commodity vertical of the semi-skimmed long-life cow's milk (1.5% fat) as a product with low added value, and of butter as a higher added value product. The dataset consists of monthly prices on the sub-markets of the analysed commodity chain with the period of January 2002 to August 2020 that were retrieved from the Czech Statistical Office and the Ministry of Agriculture of the Czech Republic. Methodologically, the analysis is based on the elasticity of price transmission (EPT) coefficients used in both supply and demand direction, on the correlation of price differences, and on the evaluation of the time-lag changes in output prices in case of changes in input prices. The results show imperfections in the transmission of price changes between individual levels of the commodity chain. Time delays of price transmission are not obvious in the case of these commodities due to the perishability of these products. Finally, several suggestions for further research are given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aflatoxins in crops pose a risk to food safety and have been detected in samples of Haitian peanuts. Using an interdisciplinary commodity chain approach, this paper examines the factors that increase the likelihood of aflatoxin contamination in the country's peanut supply. The results indicate that contamination risk is influenced by political, organizational, institutional, socio-economic, technological, and environmental constraints. A systemic analysis was performed to examine how such factors affect the quality of peanuts as they pass through the commodity chain. The results of our study offer broad insights into the challenges of preventing aflatoxins and protecting food safety in Haiti. Las aflatoxinas en los cultivos representan un riesgo para la seguridad alimentaria y se han detectado en muestras de maní haitiano. Utilizando un enfoque interdisciplinario de cadena de productos básicos, este documento examina los factores que aumentan la probabilidad de contaminación por aflatoxinas en el suministro de maní del país. Los resultados indican que el riesgo de contaminación está influenciado por restricciones políticas, organizacionales, institucionales, socioeconómicas, tecnológicas y ambientales. Se realizó un análisis sistémico para examinar cómo dichos factores afectan la calidad del maní a medida que pasan por la cadena productiva. Los resultados de nuestro estudio ofrecen amplias perspectivas sobre los desafíos de prevenir las aflatoxinas y proteger la seguridad alimentaria en Haití. Les aflatoxines représentent un danger pour la sécurité alimentaire et leur présence a été signalée dans des échantillons d'arachide en Haïti. Cet article utilise l'approche interdisciplinaire de l'analyse des filières pour examiner les différents facteurs qui participent à l'altération de la qualité des produits du producteur au consommateur final. Les résultats mettent en évidence des contraintes politiques, organisationnelles, institutionnelles, socioéconomiques, technologiques et environnementales. Un schéma systémique montre les liens entre ces facteurs et la manière dont ils contribuent à affecter la qualité des produits dans la filière arachide. Cette étude ouvre ainsi sur une meilleure compréhension des défis relatifs à la prévention des aflatoxines et la préservation de l'innocuité alimentaire en Haïti. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last two decades, social scientists across disciplines have been researching how value is extracted and governed in the reproductive bioeconomy, which broadly refers to the various ways reproductive tissues, bodies, services, customers, workers, and data are inserted into capitalist modes of accumulation. While many of these studies are empirically grounded in single country–based analyses, this paper proposes an integrative political economy framework, structured around the concept of "global fertility chains." The latter articulates the reproductive bioeconomy as a nexus of intraconnected practices, operations, and transactions between enterprises, states, and households across the globe, through which reproductive services and commodities are produced, distributed, and consumed. Employing a diffractive reading of the literature on commodity chains and care chains, this unified approach scrutinizes the coproduction of value, biology, and technoscience and their governance mechanisms in the accumulation of capital by taking into account (1) the unevenly developed geographies of global fertility chains, (2) their reliance on women's waged and unwaged reproductive labor, and (3) the networked role of multiple actors at multiple scales without losing sight of the (4) constitutive role of (supra)national states in creating demand, organizing supply, and accommodating the distribution of surplus value. We empirically ground this integrative political economy approach of the reproductive bioeconomy through collaborative, multisited fieldwork on transnational reproduction networks in Israel/Palestine, Romania, Georgia, and Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]