Global Commodities

11 Key excerpts on "Global Commodities"

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  Handbook of Material Culture

  • Chris Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Kuechler, Mike Rowlands, Patricia Spyer, Chris Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Kuechler, Mike Rowlands, Patricia Spyer(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  18 TRACKING GLOBALIZATION Commodities and Value in Motion Robert J. Foster The rhetoric of economic globalization invokes the movement of goods, money, information – usually rapid, sometimes promiscuous, always expanding. Images of hyper-mobility abound, for example, across the ‘landscapes of capital’ depicted in corporate television advertising since the 1990s (Goldman et al. n.d.; see also Kaplan 1995). Likewise, academic literature on the cultural dimensions of globalization, typi-fied by Appadurai’s influential 1990 essay, deploys the liquid trope of ‘flows’ – non-isomorphic movements of images, people, and ideas that describe shifting configurations or ‘scapes’: mediascapes, ethnoscapes, ideoscapes, and so forth. While questions have rightly been raised about the intensity, extent, and velocity of these movements, what concerns me here is how the current fascination with border-crossing mobility has prompted investigations into the social and geographical lives of particular com-modities (Jackson 1999). This detective work is not restricted to specialists. Consider, for example, the spate of popular books devoted to tracking through historical time and geo-graphical space such commodities as cod and salt (Kurlansky 1997, 2002), potatoes and dia-monds (Zuckerman 1998; Hart 2002), coal and tobacco (Freese 2003; Gately 2001). (For global flows in the art market see Myers in the previ-ous chapter.) It is as if renewed interest in the sociospatial life of stuff – in following tangible, ordinary things such as glass, paper, and beans (Cohen 1997) – has emerged as a thera-peutic defense against the alienating specters of globalization. Inside the academy, it is undeniable that ‘the commodity is back’ (Bridge and Smith 2003: 257). Commodities from bluefin tuna (Bestor 2001) to maize husks (Long and Villareal 2000) have provided material vehicles for narrating economic change, political power, and cul-tural identity.

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  Global Commodity Governance

  State Responses to Sustainable Forest and Fisheries Certification

  • F. Gale, Marcus Haward(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  1 1 Commodity Governance in a Globalising World Commodities play a vital role in world trade. Every day, huge quantities of oil, iron, gold, silver, tin, copper, coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar, rice, wheat, corn, fish, cotton, wool and timber and other products are transported around the world. The trade in commodities links a vast number of produc- ers and consumers together via lengthy and complicated chains. Whether engaged in extraction, transportation, refining, transformation, packaging, wholesaling, retailing or marketing, or credit or consumption, we are all enmeshed in these trade arrangements and share responsibility for their consequences. Commodity production is now truly globalised. In the past 50 years, revolutions in transport and communications coupled with runaway glo- bal demand and the liberalisation of trade, investment and finance rela- tions have turbocharged the trade component of world economic output. Whereas total world economic output increased by three per cent between 1974 and 2007, the concomitant growth in world trade was five per cent (Cohn 2009, 167). Technological development has raised the capacity of merchant fleets and innovation, such as containerisation, has meant that ever-more goods are transported at ever-lower cost. Technological develop- ments have interacted with increased trade liberalisation via the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Despite widespread disappoint- ment at the US Senate’s refusal to ratify the 1948 Havana Charter which thwarted the establishment of a potentially powerful International Trade Organization, the GATT facilitated the pursuit of a remarkably successful post-war trade liberalisation agenda via successive ‘rounds’ of negotiations. GATT negotiations during the 1960s and 1970s resulted in significant, if not necessarily equitable, reductions in tariffs: for example, the Kennedy Round reduced the tariffs on industrial goods by an average of 35 per cent (Cohn 2009, 174).

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  Commodity Politics

  Contesting Responsibility in Cameroon

  • Adam Sneyd, Steffi Hamann, Charis Enns, Lauren Q. Sneyd(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • McGill-Queen's University Press

    (Publisher)

  Applying this approach to the topic at hand then, after the Second World War there was an attempt to build a consensus that the international commodity trade was primarily economic in nature. From this business-friendly viewpoint, politics, in the form of nationalizations or regulations, was typically portrayed as an intrusion into the economic sphere. Governments of the then so-called advanced industrialized states, and businesses with stakes in the production and movement of raw materials, reliably advanced this notion (Cox 1979). But much like many other apparent alignments of interest, that consensus was always more apparent than it was real. And it also depended on massive historical omissions. Looking at the production and movement of Global Commodities in historic perspective, politics and the exercise of power have in reality made incredible contributions to building and maintaining the global commodity trade. Slavery, for example, subsidized the growth of global trade in sugar and cotton for some time (Beckert 2014). Gunboat diplomacy was used to secure preferential imperial treaties and trade pacts (Chang 2009). Imperial powers also instigated wars, such as the Opium Wars, in part to correct their own balance of payments problems linked to the commodity trade. And direct and indirect colonization was used to impose commodity export specializations on many African places. Those impositions yielded asymmetrical trade relations that persist (Murphy 1984). The ongoing dependence of many of the

  UN -designated Least Developed Countries on the exports of basic extractive or agricultural commodities is indicative of these enduring political legacies ( UNCTAD 2017).

  From the early 1970s, many governments across the Global South stridently challenged the view that commodities should be considered solely economic goods. They sought to apply political pressure on commodity-importing countries in the Global North. Working individually and sometimes collectively, in many cases they aimed to set prices for a diverse range of export commodities at higher levels in order to generate increased foreign exchange earnings. Leaders across the Global South had been inspired by the notion advanced by Raúl Prebisch and Hans Singer that the persistence of commodity export models undercut the potential to transform their “peripheral” societies in relation to the “core” countries (Caldentey and Vernengo 2014; Margulis 2017). Other more critical scholars added fuel to the idea that the terms of the commodity trade were stacked against economic transformation in the 1970s. At that time, a politics of economic liberation shaped up most prominently in countries such as Chile and infused debates on trade and development at the United Nations General Assembly. Many policy and decision makers in the Global North characterized this movement as an effort to politicize the commodity trade. And while the inter-state, international movement ultimately foundered by the 1980s, the idea that there was such a thing as commodity politics continued to simmer in the background.

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  Latin American Economic Development

  • Javier A. Reyes, W. Charles Sawyer(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6 Latin America and primary commodities

  Introduction

  In the previous chapters, we touched on the importance of the production and export of commodities in Latin America. The first purpose of this chapter is to explain in more detail why commodities have been an important factor in the economic development of the region. Second, commodities are going to be an important part of the future of the region, so an understanding of this part of the economy is important for an overall understanding of the history of the region and its future. In some regards, commodities are just another product to be analyzed using the familiar tools of supply and demand. However, commodities have their own peculiarities. Supply and demand still works, just somewhat differently in commodities markets. Third, if commodities are a significant percentage of total exports and GDP, then changes in commodities markets can have ramifications for the entire economy. Since this is true for many of the economies of the region, we will introduce some of these issues.1 Further, countries have policy choices concerning economic development. For a country that possesses commodities, there may be noticeable differences in economic development policy. Finally, commodities potentially can distort the entire structure of an economy. This can happen even in a high-income country. For the middle-income countries of Latin America, commodities can be like dynamite: useful if handled with care but potentially dangerous. The brief history of commodities in Latin America in the next section begins to illustrate both the costs and the benefits of commodities for a country or region.

  Commodities in Latin America: a brief history

  We are poor, living in the midst of our riches. (Juan Miguel Castro)

  In previous chapters, we have touched on the importance of commodities in Latin American economic history. Commodities have not only been important in the past, they continue to be an important part of the economic landscape of the region. The purpose of this section is to briefly review this importance and finish with the current data on commodities in the region. To begin with, it is necessary to recognize two important characteristics of commodities. First, the production of commodities has a tendency to follow a boom-and-bust cycle. Commodity booms tend to have two sources. On the one hand, it is sometimes the case that a boom in a commodity follows its discovery and subsequent widespread use. Latin American examples of this would be coffee and tobacco. In another case, the boom may be caused by the discovery not of the product itself but of a new source of supply. Newly discovered supplies of gold and silver in Latin America would be examples. As we will see in the next section, these booms usually contain the seeds of their own destruction. If commodities are important in a country or a region, this can make either economic development or economic management in the shorter run more difficult. This has been a significant economic problem in the region from the beginning. A somewhat less problematic, but still important, problem with commodities is price volatility. Everyone is familiar with the gyrations in price in the world oil market over the past few decades. Oil is not a special case. In commodity markets, this price volatility is normal

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  Transatlantic Trade and Global Cultural Transfers Since 1492

  More than Commodities

  • Martina Kaller, Frank Jacob, Martina Kaller, Frank Jacob(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Nevertheless, as US historian Roy Bin Wong correctly remarks, “[t]he world of production before 1800 was overwhelmingly agrarian.” 10 It is consequently not surprising that the increasing interest in the Atlantic as a specific geographic and economic space of study stimulated the production of numerous commodity histories, something US scholar Bruce Robbins describes as “a suddenly ubiquitous genre of popular nonfiction.” 11 He also highlights that the “titles [of the named popular historical works] suggest that all these commodities, even the humblest, have the power to get continents discovered, dynasties toppled, [or even] mountains moved.” 12 While popular historical writings about the commodity trade and its impact on and within the Atlantic World have become commodities themselves, it cannot be omitted that commodities like sugar, tobacco, chocolate, etc., played an important role in shaping not only the Atlantic, but the whole world. 13 Works like Sidney W. Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985) 14 highlight the interconnectedness of the Atlantic World and show that the new habits of the Old World would tremendously impact on the socio-economic shaping of the New World, or, to follow the narrative of the named book, that the habit of the British working class of drinking sweetened tea would demand a steady slave trade between Africa and the Caribbean World. Regardless of their initial status as luxury goods, some of the commodities, e.g

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  Globalization; Today and Tomorrow

  • Gerard F Adams, Gerard Adams(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  PART III

  The critical questions

  Passage contains an image

  7

  GLOBALIZATION AND WORLD COMMODITY MARKETS

  A demand/resource availability paradox?

  “Our global economy is outgrowing the capacity of the earth to support it, moving our early 21st-century civilization ever closer to decline and possible collapse” (Brown, 2006, p. 6).

  In a global economy, resource constraints apply globally. While there is no consensus that, as Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, says above, “our global economy is outgrowing the capacity of the earth to support it”, in recent years pressures in primary commodity markets have become clearly apparent. In this chapter, we consider the implications of growing needs for primary commodities as growth and trade have extended to large developing economies. There is no doubt that commodity needs and resource limits have important impacts, as is apparent, for example, from the large fluctuations of commodity prices. But does it follow that we are “moving … ever closer to decline and possible collapse”?

  International markets for primary commodities have long been globalized. Markets for such commodities as petroleum, copper, wheat, coffee, and other primary products bring together demand with the available supply on a world scale to determine world market prices. International reference prices for primary commodities are usually established on an international market, frequently in US dollars or pounds sterling. Prices at various sources and at various destinations are likely to differ from the reference prices by transportation costs to a particular destination and by the effect of quality differences.

  World commodity prices show considerable movement with changes in demand, typically reflecting the world business cycle or the growth of demand in large consuming economies, and variations in supply owing to weather conditions, political disturbances, or labor disputes. There is frequently a substantial speculative component to price movement, though, for a few commodities, such as iron ore, prices are quoted by major producers on a contract basis so that the known prices do not show much short-term variation.

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  Mediterranean Labor Markets in the First Age of Globalization

  An Economic History of Real Wages and Market Integration

  • Paul Caruana Galizia(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Getting the timing of globalization right is important because our explanations for globalization rest on its context. Its timing also has implications for the explanations of other variables in which we might be interested. For example, if we accept the claim of some of the world historians that globalization started in 1492, “the Age of Discovery,” then what explains the timing—was it the random event of Columbus’s birth some years earlier? Further, if globalization started at this point, why were there large differences in the prices of same commodities everywhere?

  In the remainder of this chapter, I first set the global context for the rest of my study by reviewing the long-run commodity price evidence and the changes in trade and transport costs that affected it. I then look into labor markets and migration and what these variables tell us about the global economy. Zooming back into the Mediterranean, in the last two sections, I locate the region in the global economy and conclude with the questions raised by this discussion.

  Tracing Globalization through Commodity Markets

  What does the commodity price evidence tell us about globalization’s history? O’Rourke and Williamson have shown that there is little evidence of commodity market integration between Europe and Asia for the three centuries that followed 1492.14 For example, take the price gaps between Amsterdam and Southeast Asia for cloves, coffee, and black pepper from the 1590s onward—spices accounted for 68 percent of Dutch homeward cargoes in the mid-seventeenth century.15 While clove prices converged until the 1640s, the spread soared to a 350-year high in the 1660s, maintaining its high during the Dutch East India monopoly until the 1770s.16 The pepper price spread exhibited no trend between the 1620s and 1730s but soared to a 250-year high in the 1790s. While coffee prices converged between 1730 and 1780, they dispersed with the onset of the French wars. With the start of the eighteenth century, however, all commodities converged. By the 1820s, the clove spread was one-fourteenth of its 1730s level. The pepper price spread converged quickly between 1820 and 1880, when the data end. After the French wars, coffee prices converged rapidly so that, in 1850, the spread was one-sixth of its 1750 level. There is also no evidence of Anglo-Indian commodity market integration between the seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. From 1660 to 1710, there was no decline in the price markups—which include all trade costs and company monopoly profits—for the East India Company’s trade in pepper, tea, raw silk, coffee, and indigo.17 There was also no decline in markups on the Anglo-Indian cloth trade from 1664 to 1759.18

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  Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific 1987

  • United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific(Author)
  • 1987(Publication Date)
  • United Nations Publications

    (Publisher)

  Part Two INTERNATIONAL TRADE IN PRIMARY COMMODITIES I. GENERAL PERSPECTIVE ON ISSUES AND POLICIES A. THEME AND CONTENTS OF THE STUDY T rade in primary commodities has provided the Ufe blood to most economies of the Asian and Pacific region and has been their main link with the world economy. Although founded during a period of colonial domination of the region, such trade has proved most valuable in generating the external and domestic financial resources needed for development. During the past two decades, however, extremely im portant developments have taken place in the volume, value, structure and direction of such trade, raising serious questions about the role o f trade in primary commodities in the economic de-velopment of the developing coun-tries of the region. The fortunes of developing countries dependent on trade in primary commodities have fluc-tuated widely during this period, with sudden and short booms alternating with long periods of stagnation and decline. The per-ceptions about the long-term trends in terms o f trade between primary commodities and manufactured goods largely governed the debate on “inward- and outward-looking” development strategies in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1970s, the increasing concerns about the depletion of natural resources and the limits of growth in developed countries coincided with the quad-rupling of oil prices and suddenly engendered optimism among the producers of primary commodities. It lulled the disquiet and fears of developing countries about peren-nial dependency on primary com-modities and provided them a breathing space (of which they did not always fully avail them-selves) in which to diversify their economies. A confluence of events in the early 1980s brought the virtual collapse of the prices of a wide range of primary commodities, which has served to revert the attention to the problems of international trade in primary commodities.

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  Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism

  • Gary Gereffi, Miguel Korzeniewicz, Gary Gereffi, Miguel Korzeniewicz(Authors)
  • 1993(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  1 Introduction: Global Commodity Chains Gary Gereffi, Miguel Korzeniewicz, and Roberto P. Korzeniewicz Industrialization on a world scale has undergone significant shifts during the past two decades. The capacity to produce and export manufactured goods is being dispersed to an ever expanding network of peripheral and core nations alike. Economic globalization has been accompanied by flexible specialization, or the appearance of new, technologically dynamic forms of organization that usually are characterized by low equipment dedication, high product differentiation, and short production runs. In today's global factory, the production of a single commodity often spans many countries, with each nation performing tasks in which it has a cost advantage. The components of the Ford Escort, for example, are made and assembled in fifteen countries across three continents. Capitalism today thus entails the detailed disaggregation of stages of production and con- sumption across national boundaries, under the organizational structure of densely networked firms or enterprises (see Dicken, 1992; Porter, 1990; Reich, 1991). Crucial concepts in comparative sociology, such as national development and industrialization, are increasingly perceived as problematic in facilitating an understanding of these emerging patterns of social and economic organization. But how novel are these emerging phenomena and world-economic patterns? Do they indeed signal the emergence of a new international division of labor? In order to successfully address these questions, we must find a theoretical approach that is analytically sensitive to historical change in order to evaluate and distinguish cyclical patterns from new trends. This framework must capture both the spatial features of these transformations across the world-economy, and the relationships that link these processes together. To contribute to such a theory,

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  Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization

  • Ivonne del Valle, Anna More, Rachel Sarah O'Toole, Ivonne del Valle, Anna More, Rachel Sarah O'Toole(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Vanderbilt University Press

    (Publisher)

  two.oldstylethree.oldstyle uni25C6 c.sch.sca.scp.sct.sce.scr.sc o.scn.sce.sc Precious Metals in the Americas at the Beginning of the Global Economy Bernd Hausberger Dexter Zavalza Hough-Snee, translator Global History and Globalization At a moment when debates about globalization are omnipresent, we need a new way of looking at history. Although there are dozens of proposed definitions, globalization tends to be understood as the growing interconnection and inter-dependence of (almost) all aspects of human societies at the planetary level. one.oldstyle In any case, its phenomena overwhelm both the concerns and the frameworks established, above all, by national histories, hegemonic since the nineteenth century. One can attribute the rise of “transcultural” and “transnational” per-spectives, of “hybrid” histories and, last but not least, that of Global History to this situation. Following authors such as Patrick Manning or Jerry H. Bentley, I understand Global History as a historiographical current that studies the rela-tions and connections at different levels and on different scales in fields such as the history of ideas, the history of science, the history of religion, economic history, or demographic history, and that transcend the borders between conti-nents, countries, cultures, and civilizations. Globalization, in this sense, would be only one chapter of Global History, a chapter that starts when the aforemen-tioned connections achieve a magnitude that allows us to speak of an (at least two.oldstylefour.oldstyle b.sce.scr.scn.scd.sc h.sca.scu.scs.scb.sce.scr.scg.sce.scr.sc incipient) integration of the different parts of the earth, in an interdependent and “globalized” world. two.oldstyle But in what historical moment does this occur? There are authors that have placed the beginning of globalization at particular moments of the nineteenth or twentieth century.

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  The Future as Cultural Fact

  Essays on the Global Condition

  • Arjun Appadurai(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Verso

    (Publisher)

  13

  But in most modern analyses of economy (outside anthropology), the meaning of the term commodity has narrowed to reflect only one part of the heritage of Marx and the early political economists. That is, in most contemporary uses, commodities are special kinds of manufactured goods (or services) are associated only with capitalist modes of production and are thus to be found only where capitalism has penetrated. Thus, even in current debates about proto-industrialization,14 the issue is not whether commodities are associated with capitalism, but whether certain organizational and technical forms associated with capitalism are solely of European origin. Commodities are generally seen as typical material representations of the capitalist mode of production, even if they are classified as petty and their capitalist context as incipient.

  Yet it is clear that this is to draw on only one strand in Marx’s own understanding of the nature of the commodity. The treatment of the commodity in the first hundred or so pages of Capital is arguably one of the most difficult, contradictory, and ambiguous parts of Marx’s corpus. It begins with an extremely broad definition of commodity (“A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another”). It then moves dialectically through a series of more parsimonious definitions, which permit the gradual elaboration of the basic Marxian approach to use value and exchange value, the problem of equivalence, the circulation and exchange of products, and the significance of money. It is the elaboration of this understanding of the relationship between the commodity form and the money form that allows Marx to make his famous distinction between two forms of circulation of commodities (Commodities-Money-Commodities and Money-Commodities-Money), the latter representing the general formula for capital. In the course of this analytic movement, commodities become intricately tied to money

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