Making the leap: commodity chains and the potential for global environmental histories of capitalism

This article is a brief response to Leonardo Marques’ essay “Commodity Chains and the Global Environmental History of the Colonial Americas.” It focuses on the practical and theoretical limitations of commodity-chain histories as away to address our political and environmental moment. It argues that commodity-chain histories must overcome the complexity of their subjects, and leap the theoretical gap between local and global scales without losing sight of nature. To do so, the article advocates for more work by environmental historians, and a focus on transformation rather than commodity flows.

Articulations of workplace precarity: Challenging the politics of segmentation in warehouse logistics

As critical nodes for global commodity flows, warehouses are an important example of segmented labour regimes which partition workers into groups with different conditions of security or its opposite, precarity. An emerging literature on warehouse work has tended to place segmentation in the context of managerial despotism based upon low wages, high labour turnover and job insecurity. However, the literature has, thus far, tended to pay comparatively less attention to workers’ collective resistance and its relationship to intra-labour divisions reproduced through segmentation. In refocusing attention to this problem, this article addresses the theoretical status of intra-labour groups, the nature of horizontal worker-to-worker relations, and their interaction with workers’ social identities and vertical capital–labour relations. It argues that the Gramscian concept of articulation provides the most promising frame for understanding these networked relations and for addressing how the politics of segmentation can be challenged by building common cause among divided workers.

Resource rivalry will rise between China and the West

Significance Chinese miners tend to invest around USD4bn overseas each year, which is comfortably less than 10% of the global total. They have focused on metals for which demand is rising fast and domestic supply is negligible. In some Western countries they now encounter political obstacles to investment. Impacts The Australia-China trade conflict is affecting commodity flows, except in iron ore, which represent 40% of Australia’s exports to China. The United States, Australia, Japan and India have agreed to develop production of rare earths to reduce dependence on China. The strengthening of the renmimbi will incrementally boost the buying power of Chinese mining firms in many developing states.

Visualizing Spatial Economic Supply Chains to Enhance Sustainability and Resilience

This article presents a spatial supply network model for estimating and visualizing spatial commodity flows that used data on firm location and employment, an input–output table of inter-industry transactions, and material balance-type equations. Building on earlier work, we proposed a general method for visualizing detailed supply chains across geographic space, applying the preferential attachment rule to gravity equations in the network context; we then provided illustrations for U.S. extractive, manufacturing, and service industries, also highlighting differences in rural–urban interdependencies across these sectors. The resulting visualizations may be helpful for better understanding supply chain geographies, as well as business interconnections and interdependencies, and to anticipate and potentially address vulnerabilities to different types of shocks.

INTERNAL REPORTING OF AGRICULTURAL HOLDINGS

The effective and well-coordinated work of agricultural holdings is to a large extent determined by the internal structure of the system, the clear interaction of its constituent structures. The effective development of holding structures is impossible without the organization of an effective accounting and analysis system, which has its own characteristics in agricultural holdings. The formation of an accounting and analysis system in holding structures requires a vertical orientation, which implies the existence of a parent organization that ensures the centralization of all information flows through the development of intercompany management reporting. An important process for managing an agricultural holding is the formation of a regulation for interaction among holding participants in it, where the inter-holding reporting system plays an important role, without which it is impossible to optimize all financial and commodity flows, organize operational monitoring of the financial and economic activities of the agricultural holding, and accordingly, make timely and correct decisions. It will be relevant to divide the system of intra-holding reporting into three main blocks (on finance, costs and key production indicators), in each of which the appropriate forms are identified and tested.