SESSION 6 | THE POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF “SUSTAINABLE” GLOBAL FOOD SUPPLY CHAINS: PROSPECTS AND LIMITS FOR TRANSFORMATIVE CHANGE
Session Organisers: Joss Lyons-White, Izabela Delabre, Rachael D. Garrett
Session Abstract
Private-sector policies to ensure global food supply chains are “sustainable” have proliferated since the 2000s. While much research has examined the effectiveness of these policies for reducing deforestation or poverty, comparatively little is known about their simultaneous conservation and livelihood outcomes (Garrett et al. 2021), and wider political effects. For example, policies focused on conservation can exclude “non-compliant” smallholder farmers from supply chains, exacerbating pre-existing vulnerabilities (Grabs et al. 2021). More broadly, sustainable supply chain policies represent a neoliberal discourse that privileges markets as the solution to social and environmental problems. Consequently, these policies may appear to serve the interests of conscientious consumers in the Global North, but they risk further consolidating power to multi-national companies (Archer 2021) while dissenting voices from communities in the Global South are marginalised (Delabre and Okereke 2019). Ultimately, it is questionable whether sustainable supply chain policies can achieve transformative change or simply entrench colonial extraction systems, perpetuating environmental degradation and injustice. Given the growing focus on sustainable supply chains by governments, businesses, and donors, there is a need to examine how, and under what conditions, sustainable supply chain policies can redress unequal power relations and the underlying causes of unsustainable practices. In this session, we will ask: what claims do companies make about supply chain policies? Who gets to determine what counts as knowledge, and where? How do these policies (re)shape relations between the Global North and South through supply chains? And under what conditions might they contribute to more sustainable, and just, globalised food production?
PRESENTATIONS
Session abstract:
Chocolate is enjoyed by millions of consumers in the Global North, but its key ingredient, cocoa, is associated with deforestation, poverty, and social harms in the Global South where it is produced. In West Africa, efforts to eliminate forest-related problems from cocoa supply chains have coalesced under the Cocoa and Forests Initiative (CFI), an agreement by the governments of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, and 35 companies, to conserve forests, support farmers’ livelihoods, and promote social inclusion. We investigated the prospects for CFI companies’ policies to transform the cocoa sector to a more sustainable and equitable model, by applying a political ecology lens in over 50 stakeholder interviews. Competitive cocoa sourcing and the sensitive politics of pre-competitive collaboration have generated a multitude of individual programmes with limited collective potential to secure transformative change. In addition, limited demand for sustainable cocoa has constrained funding for sustainability, despite large profits being enjoyed by cocoa and chocolate companies. Consequently, civil society organizations criticised the inequitable distribution of power and profits through the cocoa value chain. However, companies’ sustainability initiatives also contend with the politics of national resource governance. In Ghana, for example, the state controls cocoa prices, forest reserves, and even individual trees. In this context, the potential for supply chain policies to produce a more sustainable cocoa production model is further limited. Instead, we propose that a “managerial” approach has been adopted, whereby companies can substantiate claims about sustainability, but an extractive neo-colonial regime persists, entrenching inequity between the Global North and South.
Session abstract:
In response to exposés of rainforest destruction and land-grabbing for oil palm cultivation, as well as consumer boycotts of palm oil products and lobbying by NGOs, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) aims to address the impacts of unsustainable palm oil production on an international scale. Using a global political ecology lens, I examine how “global” environmental governance, through the RSPO sustainability standard, intersects with the “local” politics of its enactments at specific sites and ecologies. The study is informed by fieldwork undertaken in communities in Indonesia and Malaysia, as well as policy-level stakeholder interviews, participant observation, and document analysis. The study unearths significant inconsistencies in how the land and labour rights requirements prescribed by the RSPO standard are perceived and implemented. While the RSPO is designed to standardise practices, its implementation is embedded within highly diverse political and social contexts, in an industry that has subsumed social and ecological relations into capitalist regimes through the appropriation of land and labour as “cheap natures”. Simultaneously, the social relations and environmental conditions at local sites construct and affect global-level RSPO politics. The RSPO has strengthened the narrative for sustainability in the palm oil sector, and the scrutiny of its weaknesses has stimulated the development of new industry initiatives. However, the multiple political economic conditions that form the ‘palm oil industry complex’ limit the capacity of the RSPO as a form of resistance in the system.
Session abstract:
Despite a growth in global conservation and restoration commitments, tropical forests are disappearing faster than ever. The goal of this research is to advance our understanding of the conditions under which forest-focused supply chain policies (FSPs), a form of voluntary environmental governance, can lead to improved conservation and livelihoods in the tropics. I will present work examining how differences in supply chain structure and public governance context, including global, national, and local politics, influence the effectiveness and equity of supply chain policies focused on the 4 major forest-risk commodities: beef cattle, oil palm, soybeans, and cocoa. The research draws on replicated methods across Brazil, Indonesia, and West Africa to lend new insights into the contextual reasons why supply chain standards succeed or fail in their conservation goals. We find that company-led supply chain policies face numerous implementation paradoxes (i.e., persistent contradictions between interdependent goals). These paradoxes may arise from efforts to address contradictory demands by powerful civil society organizations in the Global North. Environmental effectiveness is often prioritized, but the exclusion of vulnerable actors is a common outcome. This tension can result in political backlash and support subversive narratives and behaviors by companies that source deforestation-risk products. There are no clear solutions to these problems from an individual supply chain standpoint. However, pre-competitive collaboration across companies and local governments through jurisdictional approaches to zero-deforestation and sustainable development policy could help reconcile tensions between global and local politics, and thus address many of the challenges uncovered by the research.
Session abstract:
Certification of sustainability standards is a main governance approach aimed at enhancing human well-being and conservation outcomes of agri-food value chains. While impacts of certification on well-being are positive for some farmers under certain conditions, they are insignificant or adverse for others. A whole range of barriers, such as uneven participation of producers in certified production or limited voice of producers in setting standards, may impede more positive impacts of certification on well-being. Alternative or complementary strategies may challenge these barriers. Inclusive business and solidarity economy strategies are gaining importance in this regard. However, since these strategies are studied in isolation, their precise similarities and differences, their interplay, relative efficacy and limitations remain elusive. Therefore, this contribution explores to what extent and how inclusive business and solidarity economy strategies may overcome governance and economic barriers that limit the well-being impacts of certification. We explore four purposively selected cases of inclusive business and solidarity economy strategies from the cacao value chains of Peru and Switzerland. Results show that value chain actors combine specific elements of the three strategies into complex portfolios of instruments, which reflect their value chain role and organizational missions. These instrument portfolios may address some of the persistent barriers of certification, including by transforming beneficial ownership in global supply chains; pricing mechanisms; and collective action in producer organizations. However, these instrument portfolios come with their own limitations. We conclude with reflections on elements of enabling political frameworks and the need to institutionalize justice in global supply chain policies.
Session abstract:
For most of its history, 5,000 years or so, palm oil was produced under very different conditions than today: harvested from wild and semi-wild oil palm groves, West African women made palm oil by hand. In the 19th century, it was these small-scale, rural producers who furnished industrialising Europe’s exploding demand for palm oil, before plantation production in Southeast Asia took off from the 1920s. Today, of course, global consumption of oil palm is on a completely different scale and could not be met by West African artisanal producers and semi-wild groves; plantations are needed. Nevertheless, is there anything we can learn from palm oil’s longer-term history that could make plantation production today more sustainable and just?