Shrooms of Hope: Can Matsutake save Global Commodity Chain Research . . . and ‘our’ Dear World?
OUMA Stefan, 2017
Name of publisher/editor
Dialogues in Human Geography 8
Geographic area
Global
Summary & key words
We live in a world overflowing with commodities and our lust for ever more may, or will, sooner or later drive ‘our’ dear planet to the wall. Global commodity chains (a.k.a. ‘global value chains’) play a central role in this, as they coordinate the transformation of nature and labour around the globe, linking wealth creation and consumerism somewhere with resource-making, exploitation and ruination elsewhere. If commodities are the blood cells of global capitalism, then commodity chains are its veins. It is hard to imagine something good – like hope – out of such destructive chains.
While many still find something (for instance, academics and policymakers who want to integrate certain places into ‘global value chains’ because it can lead to ‘upgrading’) and consumers, producers and workers are sometimes happy that they can improve their lives by either consuming or making/ selling more goods, there is no doubt that the ecological predicament that characterizes the Anthropocene is tightly linked to the workings of global commodity chains. There is not much work that addresses this issue since global commodity chain research has largely forgotten about how value is made from ‘nature’.
This book offers much to fill this gap. While it is not a global commodity chain book per se, and actually does provide quite a number of entry points to engage with the predicaments of the Anthropocene, it nevertheless contains some important insights that help develop new perspectives on global capitalism and its complex social and ecological entanglements.