Identifying economic and financial drivers of industrial livestock production - the case of the global chicken industry

This report articulates the asymmetries of power and policies that give rise to corporate concentration in livestock industries, in particular poultry.Another aim of this report is to provide an analytical framework on how to research economic and global finance drivers of corporate expansion and concentration of industrialized livestock production systems in low- and middle-income countries. It explains how to map the economic organization of livestock industries from the local to global level. For example: What are the spheres of influence? How is market power concentrated in corporations? What are the firm ownership structures? What are the investment portfolios of public development banks?The framework is followed by an analysis of the economic organization of the global poultry genetics industry. Lastly, the report presents a case of how global finance and corporate consolidation is linked to the Indian poultry industry, examining how corporate concentration and public policies have shaped the Indian poultry industry into vertically integrated broiler production systems.This report helps front-line persons and policy-makers understand the pathways and power-sharing practices between international and domestic private and public capital that support industrial livestock production systems and their negative externalities. It provides evidence that they can use to identify and address power imbalance in a financialized livestock industry, characterized by spheres of influences and political clientelism between IFIs, LMICs governments, multinational firms and domestic agribusinesses.

Dried up Bt cotton narratives:climate, debt and distressed livelihoods in semi-arid smallholder India

This paper interrogates technological fix narratives on the genetically modified crop Bt cotton in India that claim to address poverty under climate change. Furthermore, I focus on the political economy of input markets as the mechanism for technology adoption and theoretically maximizing profitability for farmers. I compare these narratives to empirical reality by drawing on 94 interviews and 151 household surveys conducted in the south Indian state of Telangana, the second biggest Bt cotton producing state in India. I show how Bt cotton has been propagated as a technological climate fix crop through its technical traits of thriving in higher temperatures and adapting to particular pests in rainfed conditions relative to non-GM cotton varieties. Yet, I show how Bt cotton increases economic risks for farmers due to higher input costs, which are financed by debt relations with market intermediaries. These debt relations, which I term ‘indebtedness treadmills’, are intrinsically linked to droughts and rainfall climatic variability in Telangana, owing to the increasingly unreliable agroecological rainfed and semi-arid Bt cotton growing conditions. The paper therefore highlights unintended consequences of technological fix climate narratives that arise from siloing technologies from their contextual conditions of adoption to the detriment of real-world outcomes.</p

COVID-19 and the case for global development

COVID-19 accentuates the case for a global, rather than an international, development paradigm. The novel disease is a prime example of a development challenge for all countries, through the failure of public health as a global public good. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the falsity of any assumption that the global North has all the expertise and solutions to tackle global challenges, and has further highlighted the need for multi-directional learning and transformation in all countries towards a more sustainable and equitable world. We illustrate our argument for a global development paradigm by examining the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic across four themes or \u27vignettes\u27: global value chains, digitalisation, debt, and climate change. We conclude that development studies must adapt to a very different context from when the field emerged in the mid-20th century

COVID-19 and the case for global development

COVID-19 accentuates the case for a global, rather than an international, development paradigm. The novel disease is a prime example of a development challenge for all countries, through the failure of public health as a global public good. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the falsity of any assumption that the global North has all the expertise and solutions to tackle global challenges, and has further highlighted the need for multi-directional learning and transformation in all countries towards a more sustainable and equitable world. We illustrate our argument for a global development paradigm by examining the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic across four themes or 'vignettes': global value chains, digitalisation, debt, and climate change. We conclude that development studies must adapt to a very different context from when the field emerged in the mid-20th century