Report; A Metric of Global Maritime Supply Chain Disruptions https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099746107032431443/pdf/IDU19447dab513757140b1193cd19643f0ab7c10.pdf
In recent years, containerized trade, the backbone of global value chains, has experienced unprecedented disruptions. For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic created unforeseen consequences in a far-ranging array of sectors on a global scale, triggering an unprecedented supply chain crisis from late 2020 to mid-2022. Surging trade demand surpassed shipping capacity, itself affected by massive operational disruptions in key ports. In 2023, there were two events of global relevance. First, a severe drought affected the operation of the locks in the Panama Canal, resulting in a reduction in throughput and restricting the size of vessels able to transit the canal. Later in the year, militant groups carried out attacks in the Red Sea, forcing shipping lines to reroute ships servicing the Asia-Europe and Asia-US East Coast trade routes through the Cape of Good Hope.
FSC-certified forest management benefits large mammals compared to non-FSC https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07257-8
More than a quarter of the world’s tropical forests are exploited for timber1. Logging impacts biodiversity in these ecosystems, primarily through the creation of forest roads that facilitate hunting for wildlife over extensive areas. Forest management certification schemes such as the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) are expected to mitigate impacts on biodiversity, but so far very little is known about the effectiveness of FSC certification because of research design challenges, predominantly limited sample sizes. Here we provide this evidence by using 1.3?million camera-trap photos of 55 mammal species in 14 logging concessions in western equatorial Africa.
Article; The governance of global value chains https://rrojasdatabank.info/sturgeon2005.pdf
This article builds a theoretical framework to help explain governance pat- terns in global value chains. It draws on three streams of literature – trans- action costs economics, production networks, and technological capability and firm-level learning – to identify three variables that play a large role in determining how global value chains are governed and change. These are: (1) the complexity of transactions, (2) the ability to codify transactions, and (3) the capabilities in the supply-base. The theory generates five types of global value chain governance – hierarchy, captive, relational, modular, and market – which range from high to low levels of explicit coordination and power asymmetry. The article highlights the dynamic and overlapping nature of global value chain governance through four brief industry case studies: bicycles, apparel, horticulture and electronics.
Article; Entangled chains of global value and wealth https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09692290.2023.2220268?src=recsys
n recent decades multinational enterprises have developed ways to reorganize production and trade through Global Value Chains (GVCs), and to manage assets and liabilities through Global Wealth Chains (GWCs). This co-evolution has permitted the hyper-extraction of labor and natural resources through financial and legal technologies, entangling value creation and wealth accumulation. While scholars have separately acknowledged the role that GVCs and GWCs play in generating distributional outcomes, entanglements of production, trade, finance, and law are now so extensive that we need a sharper analytical lens to understand their interrelations. In pursuit of such a lens, we propose a research agenda focused on chain entanglements. We argue that GVCs and GWCs are not governed by firms as separate or even sequenced processes, but rather that value creation and wealth accumulation strategies are imbricated in ways that merit careful study. We develop a framework for analyzing entangled chains based on two dimensions: 1) the relative importance of intangible versus tangible assets; and 2) the orientation of firm strategy towards value creation or wealth accumulation activities.
Article: Global Value Mapping https://www.globalvaluechains.org/wp-content/uploads/Frederick-GVC_Mapping.pdf
Global value chain (GVC) research has evolved from a theoretical framework to become an applied research approach over the last 20 years. As described in detail in other chapters of the Handbook and elsewhere, the GVC framework was developed based on case studies and qualitative firm-based research. As GVC analysis has increasingly gained the atten- tion of policymakers, there has become a need to link theoretical concepts to a definable research approach. This shift from theory to application has also led to the use of more standardized data sources to enable comparability and repeatability over time. Applied research implies that actionable recommendations can be made based on the outcomes of using the framework. The objective is no longer just to explain how and why certain countries participate in an industry, but also to determine how successful a country has been in the industry and to provide recommendations on how this can be sustained or increased into the future. In today’s data-driven world, to be useful for policymakers and government agencies, these comparisons and recommendations need to have at least esti- mated quantifiable metrics on key topics such as increases in exports, output, employment, wages or skill levels. This requires the use of industry-specific national and firm-level data.
Paper; Monitoring Global Supply Chains https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/11591700/short%252ctoffel%252chugill_monitoring-global-supply-chains.pdf
Firms seeking to avoid reputational spillovers that can arise from dangerous, illegal, and unethical behavior at supply chain factories are increasingly relying on private social auditors to provide strategic information about suppliers’ conduct. But little is known about what influences auditors’ ability to identify and report problems. Our analysis of nearly 17,000 supplier audits reveals that auditors report fewer violations when individual auditors have audited the factory before, when audit teams are less experienced or less trained, when audit teams are all-male, and when audits are paid for by the audited supplier. This first comprehensive and systematic analysis of supply chain monitoring identifies previously overlooked transaction costs and suggests strategies to develop governance structures to mitigate reputational risks by reducing information asymmetries in supply chains.
Paper; The Red Sea link. Geo-economic projections https://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/72105/QM-03-21-328-EN-N.pdf
The Red Sea region is becoming increasingly important in global geopolitics. Given its importance for global trade and security, growing geo-economic projections, military rivalries and the risk of confrontation between key regional players and international actors are growing and could have far-reaching and disruptive repercussions. This paper explores the critical economic and security issues that link littoral, regional and international powers to the Red Sea region. It shows how efforts by countries in the broader Gulf region and external powers to extend their influence to the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa can produce a potential new conflict zone. It concludes by offering some reflections on how to promote regional security and economic development in the region, with a view to minimising the risk of conflict and increasing opportunities for cooperation
The latest firm-level network data reveal that global value chains have lengthened, although without the accompanying network densification that might indicate that supplier relationships are diversifying.
Lengthening of supply chains is especially significant for supplier-customer linkages from China to the United States, where firms from other jurisdictions, notably in Asia, have interposed themselves in the supply chain.
Nevertheless, these recent developments have not so far reversed the long-running trend toward greater regional integration of trade in recent decades, especially in Asia.
PDF: Towards more accurate and policy relevant footprint analyses http://resources.trase.earth/documents/Godar%20et%20al.%20(2015)%20Ecological%20Economics.pdf
The consumption of internationally traded goods causes multiple socio-environmental impacts. Current methods linking production impacts to final consumption typically trace the origin of products back to the country level, lacking fine-scale spatial resolution. This hampers accurate calculation of trade and consumption footprints, masking and distorting the causal links between consumers' choices and their environmental impacts, especially in countries with large spatial variability in socio-environmental conditions and production impacts. Here we present the SEI-PCS model (Spatially Explicit Information on Production to Consumption Systems), which allows for fine-scale sub-national assessments of the origin of, and socio-environmental impacts embedded in, traded commodities. The method connects detailed production data at sub-national scales (e.g., municipalities or provinces), information on domestic flows of goods and in international trade. The model permits the downscaling of country-to-country trade analyses based on either physical allocation from bilateral trade matrices or MRIO models. The importance of producing more spatially-explicit trade analyses is illustrated by identifying the municipalities of Brazil from which different countries source the Brazilian soy they consume. Applications for improving consumption accounting and policy assessment are discussed, including quantification of externalities of consumption, consumer labeling, trade leakages, sustainable resource supply and traceability
Countries, companies and individual consumers are increasingly aware that their consumption could be linked, via supply chains, to environmental and social sustainability impacts in distant parts of the world. However, most of the footprinting methods available prior to 2015 critically lacked detail – of the connections between consumption and production, and of how particular commodity flows were linked to sustainability issues in specific production sites. Instead, they estimated footprints at country level, based on assumptions and macroeconomic figures.
This limited their value for policymaking, attributing responsibility and taking preventive action, given the often localized nature of issues like deforestation, as well as the heterogeneity of landscapes and vulnerability that can exist, particularly in large countries like Brazil. br> SEI-PCS (for Spatially Explicit Information on Production to Consumption Systems) is a modeling approach developed at SEI.1 SEI-PCS allows for fine-scale subnational assessments of the origin of traded commodities and the socio-environmental impacts embedded in them, such as carbon emissions, local pollution or biodiversity loss. It recreates supply chains and attributes sustainability impacts to commodity flows and actors, using a combination of detailed production data at subnational scales, information on domestic trade flows, customs data and international trade flows between countries.
Mining is of major economic, environmental and societal consequence, yet knowledge and understanding of its global footprint is still limited. Here, we produce a global mining land use dataset via remote sensing analysis of high-resolution, publicly available satellite imagery. The dataset comprises 74,548 polygons, covering ~66,000?km2 of features like waste rock dumps, pits, water ponds, tailings dams, heap leach pads and processing/milling infrastructure.
This paper calls for integrating price-setting power and related uneven exposure to price risks into the analysis of governance in global value chains (GVCs) as it adds to other power dimensions in producing unequal distributional outcomes. This is shown for the cocoa GVC, in which—unlike in today’s mostly liberalised market structures—the world’s top cocoa-producing countries, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, pursue price stabilisation measures. These measures address intra-seasonal producer price volatility, and recent collaboration has achieved a living-income differential on top of export prices, but such measures do not shield export and producer prices from inter-seasonal variations in world prices determined on commodity derivatives markets. Based on interviews with actors along the cocoa GVC, we argue that this is related to the price-setting power of ‘grinder-traders’ and the key role of financial hedging and trading on commodity derivatives markets in their business strategies.
The area used for mineral extraction is a key indicator for understanding and mitigating the environmental impacts caused by the extractive sector. To date, worldwide data products on mineral extraction do not report the area used by mining activities. In this paper, we contribute to filling this gap by presenting a new data set of mining extents derived by visual interpretation of satellite images. We delineated mining areas within a 10?km buffer from the approximate geographical coordinates of more than six thousand active mining sites across the globe. The result is a global-scale data set consisting of 21,060 polygons that add up to 57,277?km2. The polygons cover all mining above-ground features that could be identified from the satellite images, including open cuts, tailings dams, waste rock dumps, water ponds, and processing infrastructure.
The platform will deliver the following capabilities:
- Simplified supply chain and data pipelines - Self-service analysis, which enables planners to make faster and better decisions - Improved data quality by eliminating the reconciliation of data across systems - Real-time analytics that identify, diagnose, and respond to issues
We plan to continue to add more advanced predictive analytics to enhance our “sense-and-respond” supply chain.
Paper, Revealing and concealing power in the sustainable tea
supply chain
https://research-api.cbs.dk/ws/files/69553351/matthew_archer_et_al_its_up_to_the_market_to_decide_publishersversion.pdf
In 2007, Unilever, the world’s largest tea company, announced plans to source its entire tea supply sustainably, beginning with the certification of its tea producers in East Africa to Rainforest Alliance standards. As a major buyer of Kenyan tea, Unilever’s decision pushed tea producers across Kenya to subscribe to Rainforest Alliance’s sustainable agriculture standard in order to maintain access to the global tea market; according to a 2018 report, over 85% of Kenya’s tea producers were Rainforest Alliance certified. Drawing on ethnographic material among supply chain actors across different sites along the sustainable tea value chain (from those designing and disseminating standards to tea traders to smallholder tea farmers), this article examines how these actors frequently attributed the power to determine the outcomes of certification to a faceless ‘market’. Deferring to ‘the market’, we observe, served primarily to mask theoutsized power of lead firms (in particular Unilever) to determine conditions of tea production and trade. At the same time, ‘the market’ was also in some cases qualified by our interlocutors, allowing them implicitly (and at times explicitly) to reveal power and give it a face.
Paper, Sustainable Tea at Unilever (2012) https://blogs.ubc.ca/courseblogsis_ubc_ba_504_001_2014w1-2_45258-sis_ubc_ba_504_001_2014w1-2_45258/files/2015/08/Sustainable-Tea-at-Unilever.pdf
In 2010, Unilever announced its commitment to a new “Sustainable Living Plan,” a document that set wide-ranging, companywide goals for improving the health and well-being of consumers, reducing environmental impact, and, perhaps most ambitiously, sourcing 100% of agricultural raw materials sustainably by 2020. Such a goal implied a massive transformation of a supply chain that sourced close to 8 million tons of commodities across 50 different crops. Unilever CEO Paul Polman believed that the company’s ambitious goals could drive savings, product innovation, and differentiation across the company’s portfolio of products.
The 11 sins of seafood: Assessing a decade of food fraud reports in the global supply chain https://ift.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1541-4337.12998
Due to complex, valuable, and often extremely opaque supply chains, seafood is a commodity that has experienced a high prevalence of food fraud throughout the entirety of its logistics network. Fraud detection and prevention require an in-depth understanding of food supply chains and their vulnerabilities and risks so that food business operators, regulators, and other stakeholders can implement practical countermeasures. An analysis of historical criminality within a sector, product, or country is an important component and has not yet been conducted for the seafood sector. This study examines reported seafood fraud incidents from the European Union's Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed, Decernis's Food Fraud Database, HorizonScan, and LexisNexis databases between January 01, 2010 and December 31, 2020.
History of Food Traceability https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325247189_History_of_food_traceability
In the past the food industry has had its fair share of scandals, accidents, and incidents. It must be pointed out that reported food scares were not always associated with microorganisms; many of them were connected to new technology, environmental pollution or changes in co-product management. For example the food colorant (tartrazine and amaranth) incident reported in mid-1980 in UK; mercury poisoning in oranges reported in 1979; mercury poisoning in fish reported in 1970; radioactivity in lamb reported in 1986; glass, pin and caustic soda found in baby food product reported in UK in 1989 which resulted in the recall of 100 million jars off the shelves and repackaging of another 60 million. These incidents are very much in the memories of the general public.
Traceability as an integral part of supply chain logistics management: an analytical review https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.06358
Purpose: Supply chain has become very complex today. There are multiple stakeholders at various points. All these stakeholders need to collaborate with each other in multiple directions for its effective and efficient management. The manufacturers need proper information and data about the product location, its processing history, raw materials, etc at each point so as to control the production process. Companies need to develop global and effective strategies to sustain in the competitive market. Logistics helps companies to implement the effectiveness across the business supply chain from source to destination to achieve their strategic goals. Traceability has become one of the integrated parts of the supply chain logistics management that track and trace the product's information in upstream and downstream at each point. All the stakeholders in the supply chain have different objectives to implement the traceability solution that depends on their role (e.g. manufacturers, distributers or wholesalers have their own role). The information generated and needed from all these actors are also different and are to be shared among all to run the supply chain smoothly. But the stakeholders don't want to share all the information with other stake holders which is a major challenge to be addressed in current traceability solutions. The purpose of this research is to conduct thorough study of the literatures available on the traceability solutions, finding the gaps and recommending our views to enhance the collaborations among the stakeholders in every point of the business supply