ABSTRACT
In recent years, economic geographers and others have emphasized the importance of the wider social relations and networks in which places and regions are entangled. Flows of different kinds of material – goods, services, money, information and people – are of particular importance here, creating a range of connections between places. With globalization, the volume and intensity of these connections has increased considerably, focusing attention on the interactions between
Chapter map The chapter begins by emphasizing how places are connected by flows of goods and services, among other things. We then go on to assess the global commodity chain (GCC) approach, highlighting the key distinction between buyer-driven and producer-driven chains. This is followed by a discussion of the global production
While we focused on flows on money in the last chapter, here we are concerned with flows of goods and services between places. The production and consumption of particular goods and services or commodities typically involves a complex chain of actors, spread across different countries and regions. These include producers such as farmers or labourers in plantations, mine or plantation owners, sub-contractors, transport operators, distributors, retailers and consumers. The global commodity chain approach aims to capture these relations (Box 1.5). The production and distribution of commodities reproduce patterns of uneven development between places with low-value activities, often confined to poorer regions in the global south, while highervalue ones are typically located in wealthier places in the global north, reflecting, to a considerable extent, the legacy of colonialism. The process of commodity fetishism means that consumers in the Global North are typically concerned with the price and appearance of the goods that they buy, obscuring the relations of production and distribution associated with these goods. This commodity fetishism is often reinforced by advertising. By contrast, recent research by economic geographers, sociologist and anthropologists has been concerned to overcome commodity fetishism by uncovering the complex geographies of commodity production and distribution, revealing webs of interdependencies that connect different places within the global economy. As the following quotation from David Harvey illustrates, even routine, everyday activities like having breakfast rely on complex sets of spatial relations:
Consider, for example, where my breakfast comes from. The coffee was from Costa Rica, the flour that made up the bread probably from Canada, the oranges in the marmalade came from Spain, those in the Orange juice came form Morocco and the sugar came from Barbados. Then I think of all the things that went into making the production of these things possible – the machinery that came from West Germany, the fertiliser from the United States, the oil from Saudi Arabia . . . it takes
very little investigation for the map of where my breakfast came from to become incredibly complicated. I also find that literally millions of people all over the world in all kinds of different places were involved just in the production of my breakfast. The odd thing is that I don’t have to know that in order to eat my breakfast. Nor do I have to know it when I go shopping in the supermarket. I just lay down the money and take whatever it will buy.
