Analyzing Global Commodity Chains and Social Reproduction

World-systems analysts argue that households take on a structural role within the capitalist system to mediate pressures exerted by the state and economic actors. Underpinning this view is the supply of low-paid and waged labor by household members in the process of social reproduction and the role of households as sites of commodity consumption. Here, I argue that the analytical choice to use the features of low-waged households renders a partial analysis of their structural location within a multi-sited capitalist system. While acknowledging that households across the Global Commodity Chain (GCC) are neither spatially segregated (i.e., global North, global South) nor solely spaces of production or consumption, I suggest that households differ in their structural location within a multi-sited capitalist system, subject to their incidence on the instantiation of hierarchical capitalist relations. First, “core” households differ from their peripheral counterparts via their reliance on financial assetization and capital accumulation in the core for (intergenerational) social reproduction. Second, in the process of social reproduction, core household excess commodity consumption generates metabolic differentials that fuel hierarchical relations of production and place core households in a more central location within a multi-sited capitalist system compared to peripheral ones. Third, the analysis of hierarchical capitalist relations and GCCs focuses on capital accumulation and the extraction of (women’s) household unpaid labor in the periphery. I argue that to more fully capture the extraction of unpaid labor across the GCC, household fluidity and heterogeneity and associated variation in intra-household divisions of labor must be analytically considered

Un/associated: accounting for gender difference and farmer heterogeneity among Peruvian Sierra potato small farmers

Recognizing the challenges faced by small farmers, international institutions have encouraged national governments to foster the collective organization of small farmers and farmer membership through policy interventions that target rural populations, and more specifically ‘women’ and ‘marginalized farmers’. Yet, access to membership continues to elude the most disadvantaged small farmers. Based on Peru's 2012 National Agricultural Census, we conduct a comparative analysis of small Peruvian potato farmers to identify the social markers that influence membership status. We conduct cross-group (women versus men) and intra-group (among women and among men) comparisons to tease out gender difference and farmer heterogeneity and the social markers that account for exclusion. We suggest that considering women and marginalized farmers as homogeneous and residual populations obscures the social markers that differentiate small farmers homogenizing women as a group and rendering some men and masculine gendered practices analytically invisible. This study contributes to the literature on gender and the collective organization of farmers by highlighting gender difference and farmer heterogeneity and points to gender-based inequality as well as other forms of inequality that influence the membership status. Our analysis shows that men comprise a larger proportion of potato farmers, yet the membership status of women and men is nearly equal and that associated women farmers hold the highest percentage of land titles while unassociated men hold the lowest. We also find a large number of districts without the presence of associated women potato farmers indicating the existence of gender-based spatial inequality. Our analysis of household composition points to the feminization of women farmer households due to the absence of male partners and a large presence of elderly women in comparison to men farmer households. Unlike for men, the presence of a partner and/or elderly household members has no effect on women's membership status. Similarly, the presence of girls (and not boys) under six years of age has a negative effect only for women's membership. We also find that for women, it is more important to have higher levels of education than men to participate in farmer organizations. Our intra-group comparisons indicate unassociated and associated women are differentiated based on a combination of social markers including education, economic and domestic partnership, language and land ownership. Overall, our analysis shows that while gender-based inequality persists, there are other cross-cutting markers of social differentiation among women and men that influence farmer membership status

Assessing Growers\u27 Challenges and Needs to Improve Wine Grape Production in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania wine grape growers were surveyed to obtain information on factors affecting varietal selection, challenges to production, and their perceptions of canopy management practices. Our survey revealed that participants perceived site as a key factor in varietal selection decisions and winter injury as the greatest challenge for their economic sustainability. Other issues limiting production and profitability were disease control, frost injury, and labor cost and availability. Participants recognized the importance of canopy management practices for reaching optimum wine quality but had concerns over the shortage and cost of labor to implement them. Mechanization of canopy management likely would increase adoption

The gendered production-consumption relation: accounting for employment and socioeconomic hierarchies in the Colombian cut flower global commodity chain

Scholarly analyses of the transnationalisation of economic activity have placed women workers as active agents in the production of agro-export commodities for world markets. Less explored, however, are the roles that women and men play according to specific employment and socioeconomic hierarchies in the production, circulation and consumption of export commodities, and their influence on regime transformation. Building on the literatures on Global Commodity Chains (GCCs) and hegemonic masculinities, I examine the production-consumption relation of export-oriented cut flowers; I suggest that a gender analysis that accounts for the roles that women and men play in the production, circulation and consumption of this export commodity elucidates the ways in which the gendered production-consumption relation is constituted; and how it is used to reproduce as well as contest the norms and practices associated with neoliberal agriculture, or what is termed the third corporate food regime. As transnational capital seeks to expand into new and emerging markets, understanding the gendered production-consumption relation associated with particular commodities is of utmost importance for creating advocacy campaigns that resonate with citizen-consumers across the world. This article draws on field research, and on critical interpretations of secondary data

Rival commodity chains: agency and regulation in the US and colombian cut flower agro-industries

Export-oriented development strategies and trade regimes encourage the incorporation of developing country exports into northern markets, often bringing them into competition with domestic suppliers. While studies of transnational commodity flows focus on the organization and coordination of economic activities over geographic space, little research has been done on their competitive relations. In this article, I focus on the political economy of disputes over market access by linking trade regimes to the economic and political activities of actors in the rival Colombian and US cut flower commodity chains. I argue that the regulation of the Colombian and US cut flower commodity chains is a process marked by institutional mediation and political and economic contestation. In shaping their economic spaces, a combination of shifting discourses, litigation, and political lobbying in sites of power are used by economic actors to meet their interests. The examination of rivalry over market access shows variation in the configuration of economic activity in the US cut flower market over time while drawing attention to the dynamic interaction among economic actors, institutions, and markets

Transforming global commodity chains: actor strategies, regulation, and competitive relations in the Dutch cut flower sector

Buyer-driven and producer-driven commodity chain governance typologies are helpful in characterizing the relationships between buyers and suppliers engaged in transnational economic activity. However, what is missing in Global Commodity Chain (GCC) and Global Value Chain (GVC) analyses is an explanation of how governance structures change over time. In this paper I suggest that the production system associated with particular commodities is not the only factor shaping commodity chain governance. Rather, I argue that actors’ strategies, regulation, and historical trajectories also influence and, in certain conjunctures, transform chain governance. Since regulations and actor strategies in competitive environments change over time, it follows that chain governance is dynamic. Drawing from the case of the Dutch cut flower agro-industry, the world’s leading supplier of cut flowers, I build on the GCC, GVC and Global Production Network (GPN) literatures to illustrate how actor strategies, regulation and the historical trajectory of the Dutch cut flower GCC shape and change chain governance. What the Dutch cut flower case illustrates is how grower strategies and government policy facilitated the formation of grower cooperatives, and transformed the power relations between growers and buyers in a shift from a buyer to a producer-driven chain