ABSTRACT

The commodity chain concept has been applied to a wide range of food and nonfood products. Reflecting increasing consumer demands for high quality and year-round food, corporate retailers are sourcing products from different parts of the world (Barrett et al. 2004). The global commodity chain (GCC), which has its roots in world systems theory, has become a key theoretical device for explaining the production of food in ‘peripheral’ regions of the world economy for retail and consumption in the ‘core’ (Hughes and Riemer 2004; Jackson et al. 2006). This approach has been complemented and extended by the more explicitly political-economic ideas of the global value chain (GVC), with a focus on governance forms and the nature of relations between key actors in a global context (Bourlakis and Weightman 2004; Ponte and Gibbon 2005). However, both approaches tend to ‘emphasise large-scale food systems at the expense of the cultural richness of localities’ (Hughes and Reimer 2004, 2–3). As Murdoch (1997) suggests food chains or, as he prefers, food networks are always localised, working in real places and at specific times and can only be considered as globalised in terms of their physical extension across space.