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In the Shadowlands of Supply Chains

Driving through northwest Victoria in late summer, you will encounter endless horizons of thick green and white plastic sheeting rolled out across rows of vines, protecting first-class table grapes from the remote but consequential possibility of hail. Expensive and unwieldly, not to mention environmentally unfriendly, this prophylactic securitization of grapes is viewed by (large) farmers as an increasingly necessary protection against the risk of damaged crops and resultant drops in their price. Across this landscape, there are many such techniques to guard against risks. These risks extend beyond those communicated with growing urgency by climate scientists. They are mediated and created by markets and their broader political economies.

There are many recent incidents across this landscape of farmers ploughing fully ripened crops and the related financial investment back into the earth. In one case, 40 acres of celery was sacrificed, as no pickers were available to harvest the crop at a fee that would make the process profitable. In another, a plantation of watermelons met the same fate when the large supermarket to whom the farmer was contracted suddenly dropped its purchasing price by 50 per cent in response to an unseasonably cool summer—consumer interest in the fruit had plummeted, yet there was no change in the shelf price. In another case, crops of oranges had been downgraded, diverted to juice as a result of skin discolouration caused by wind rubbing fruit against fruit. According to Australia’s National Crop Loss Register, 85,000 agricultural businesses reported significant crop losses within a few months of COVID-19 arriving. Millions of dollars’ worth of crops were left rotting in the fields (Liveris, 2020), rendering worthless and invisible the huge amounts of water, fertilizer, and pesticides invested in them and the large environmental costs imposed in their name.

In the wheat-belt area, pesticides are an especially key input in most cropping systems, particularly given the turn to water-saving but synthetic chemical-reliant “no-till” cropping systems. The main active chemical is glyphosate. Despite being the focus of various lawsuits about its deadly health and ecological impacts, glyphosate remains a basic ingredient of pesticide mixes, with two-thirds produced en masse in specialized industrial manufacturing zones in China, like many of the chemicals that Australian industries are reliant on (Productivity Commission, 2021). Chinese glyphosate factory production was disrupted by COVID-19’s effects on the upstream production of raw materials (e.g. glycine), labour shortages and transport blockages, right when Australian farmers’ desire for it escalated as favourable post-drought rainfall fuelled their optimism about the next season. Desperate searches to source it led to many farmers paying sky-high prices (McNaughton, 2020). Invisible to most of us, this disruption of crop inputs was one stark reminder of the many long, hidden, just-in-time supply chains that Australian agriculture is reliant on and vulnerable to. Seemingly a “black swan” event, the pandemic has made visible threatening possibilities previously unimagined.

At least, that is how it appeared. While the pandemic has indeed awoken urban public awareness of supply chain disruption, for farmers and others in Australian agriculture the assumption that supply chains flow smoothly and securely has never held. For those supplying Australia’s highly concentrated and export-oriented agricultural markets, supply chains are as much a fickle master as they are a benevolent servant. The small vignettes rehearsed above might be interpreted as disruptions, but we offer them as indications of the kinds of rupture that are endemic to the Australian agricultural system—the small sacrifices required on a daily basis in Australian farming to ensure the pre-eminence of global supply chains. In this chapter, we approach supply chains as complex conjunctions of practice, values and effects that their underpinning modernist imaginary of “seamless circulation” precludes from view.

Scaling

Central to the sociological significance of global supply chains is their ambitious reach and scale (Tsing, 2012a). As Anna Tsing argues, scalability is “the ability to expand—and expand, and expand—without rethinking basic elements”. Like a house of mirrors, scalability “allows us to see only uniform blocks, ready for further expansion” (Tsing, 2012b). But behind its endless refractions, scalability is characterized by sharp differentiations and divisions, “a triumph of precision design” (Tsing, 2012b, p. 143). Only very carefully selected parts of the world are allowed into the enclosed chains of connectivity that whisk their offerings through blanked landscapes, towns and seas to the next special destination, leaving the unchosen to only watch the constant stream of B-double trucks, planes and ships. Scalability is a triumph precisely because it differentiates itself from the myriad singular, non-scalable biological, cultural and social forms that otherwise make up the diversity of the world (Tsing, 2012a).

How scalability is done and how supply chains are constructed across borders is itself diverse, with fine-grained qualitative distinctions characterizing the choices and transactions made. Deeply cultured relations differently organize reciprocal exchanges, trade routes and circuits of goods. For example, British supply chains of green beans privilege homogeneity in beans, whereas French ones privilege regional distinctiveness in beans (Freidberg, 2004). Whether British or French, the national identity of such chains refers to their consumer and corporate base, not their spatial extent. Each supply chain retraces colonial passages and reinforces the magnetic pull of resources and capital to the Global North. As Tsing observes, far from being new or modern, the ideal of scalability originates in the sixteenth-century plantation and the racialized forms of dispossession and labour exploitation upon which it turned (and continues to turn): slavery (Tsing, 2012a). Colonization was a process of establishing, securing and scaling supply chains. These chains are thus an artefact and a vehicle of colonial capitalism, remaining today, beneath their shiny digital signs, what Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd (2011) might describe as the transit of empire.

As much as colonizing spaces, supply chains have colonized minds. Today the ideal of linking into international markets remains a common marker of success in modern business. Here, the appeal of finely threaded supply chains snaking horizontally across the world merges in the mind with the ideal of jumping scales from local to national to global, even to universal. How to take innovation “to scale” is a profitable new area of expertise. Farmers are targeted as not just potential adopters of the vision but potential consumers of the myriad tools and technologies that promise to help them scale their own businesses, from the precision agricultural machinery that allows them to carve paddocks into laser-graded units, to the smart farming sensors that monitor soil moisture from outer space, to the phone apps that report real-time movements in commodity prices and shipping containers, to the banking credit that can fund it all, for a fee. Governments are also targeted, in recognition that scaling out across the farming population requires “scaling up” the right settings into policies, structures and decision making, cultivating a regulatory environment and innovation system conducive (only) to the right types of suppliers and buyers.

Differentiating

Scaling is not only about homogenization. To create the gradients along which capital and goods flow, heterogeneity is essential. Supply chains, then, are not just about connection; they are about “difference-in-connection” (Tsing, 2016). They generate “global integration, on the one hand”, and “diverse niches, on the other” (Tsing, 2009). Crucially, such diversity is not celebrated for its own sake; it is ranked and used to fuel competition. The products, suppliers and areas ushered into global supply chains are not selected by their absolute characteristics but by their relative ones—they are the ones that are favoured at that particular moment in time. Although other places, products and people are simply blanked out in depictions of supply chains stretched purposively across the globe, they lurk in background calculations of possible future options, a reminder to the linked-in few to keep performing. If one is unable to deliver products on time and to a set standard, it places one’s future as well as one’s immediate income at risk because it marks one as unreliable. If a buyer has to go elsewhere for a product, even for a short-term disruption, there is no guarantee they will return.

Reflecting the nation’s colonial roots, Australia has long taken pride in exporting goods to overseas consumers, as if others’ acceptance of our material offerings signals a far deeper belonging than just inclusion in a supply chain. Underpinning such a preoccupation are abstract modernist notions of global prestige and international competition. For countries such as Australia (or, as Ilppo Soininvaara discusses, Finland) that are somewhat unsure of their global standing, such an imaginary drives a fierce ranking of subnational regions, determining which parts of the nation are considered the “key national spaces … where global competitiveness is performed” (Soininvaara, 2021, pp. 10, 11). The resultant spatial hierarchies reflect and attract the paths of global supply chains. They also reflect urban-centrism, which remains the telos of virtually all such chains. In contrast, rural regions are frequently cast as “troublesome spaces”, with few managing to secure global recognition or the attention of international investors or suppliers (Soininvaara, 2021). Rural areas’ failure to secure reliable labour perpetuates the image of them as undisciplined and unappealing, both to workers and to those who might enter contractual agreements with businesses in the area. Supply chains, Tsing reminds us, are about discipline—of suppliers, workers, logistics and natures. Those who resist or fail to perform risk being quickly replaced. For Australia—that want-to-be island of the Global North within the deep Global South, a nation whose productive capacity has been underpinned by “capital in-flows” from distant shores for over 200 years (Black et al., 2017)—the fear of “capital flight” and the abandonment it represents are visceral.

Revaluing

Increasingly, the value afforded a commodity, business, property or region depends less on its productive capacity or physical merits (even its relative ones) and more on the mysterious whims of the financial world. The magical touch of finance has spread across the globe like a contagion, drawing and continually redrawing global supply chains as powerfully as any etched colonial trade route. Referred to by some as a second wave of colonization, this financial capitalism has financialized myriad aspects of agriculture. By financialization, we mean here the strategy of “profiting without producing” (Lapavitsas, 2013) by exploiting interest rates in loaning and reloaning “fictitious capital”: “money that is thrown into circulation as capital without any material basis in commodities or productive activity” (Harvey, 2006, p. 95). Agricultural products are now not only commoditized (i.e. reduced to their market exchange value and sold as one commodity among others—turning food into widgets, as one of our interviewees put it); they have also been colonized by parasitical financial products such as “wheat futures” that put the commodities “in play” in the global economy and in doing so tie their exchange value to innumerable and untraceable financial transactions around the world, twisting and contorting the relationship between their price and the on-ground contexts that produced them. In this way, agricultural production and supply chains have been distorted to supply profit, not food.

Inputs right along agri-food supply chains have been financialized (Clapp, 2014), including water and water infrastructure. For example, whether and how London’s water infrastructure provides “for actual needs”—that is, provides potable water to residents—has become less relevant to the company in charge (Thames Water) and its myriad owners (first, Australia’s Macquarie Bank, now various sovereign wealth and pension funds in Canada and elsewhere) than whether its future revenue flows can be bundled up as “securities” and sold to other financial actors (Loftus et al., 2019). In this way, the “illiquid assets” of water infrastructure have been turned into “liquid forms” in a financial sense (Pryke & Allen, 2019, p. 2), embedding water infrastructure into a “supply chain” that has little to do with supplying water and everything to do with supplying financial returns.

In the 2008 Global Financial Crisis when the whole overheated web of promises, wishes and transactions came crashing down, the “solid” character of farmland gained appeal as an apparently safe haven for flighty capital (Ouma, 2020, p. 67). Through ongoing “moral struggles” about its inherent values (Ouma, 2020, p. 66), farmland has been turned into a new asset class and bestowed with “legitimate financial worth”. In the process, rural and remote areas have been cast once again as a new frontier and a target for investment and speculation. Some of the swelling cohorts of new agri-investors target the distant high-risk environment of the Global South, where farmland can be made fresh out of forest or wasteland. Others prefer the slightly slower profits but greater security of more established contexts such as Australia (Sippel, 2018). To help things along, the Australian government (2021) aggressively markets Australian farmland to investors (e.g. see the new Why Australia: Benchmark Report 2021 by Austrade). Partly as a result, over the last decade, Australian farmland value has become “red hot” among international investors (Tracey, 2020).

Foreign investment is spreading into conventional family farming districts and through the supply chain to processors, packers, distributors. It is also flowing through the financial supply chain to insurance companies, who offer to offset the risk at every turn, all the while becoming large holders and managers of farmland themselves. All farmland investors are seeking scale, consolidating farm properties into larger and larger parcels. In doing so, the aggregate value of the parcels begins to approximate the smallest financial units that investment firms are accustomed to dealing with (Fairbairn, 2020), the farm operations become more scalable, and the farms begin to attract government-subsidized infrastructure.

Whether foreign or Australian owned, much agricultural production today occurs in distinctively corporatized arrangements, whereby owners outsource the production to managers, who in turn tend to outsource most of the practical work to others. This commodification of labour means that those involved are often relatively disconnected from the land, upon which they work but do not live; they are employed to make market-driven decisions, and they work to maximize profits. It is part of a deliberate strategy of achieving consistency across corporate holdings, uncontaminated by local environments, communities and their predilections. As Anna Tsing notes, such self-containment is core to scalability—to being able to “expand without changing”, moving “from small to large without redoing the design”, thanks to avoiding relationships and their threatening transformative potential (Tsing, 2012b, p. 145).

Infrastructure is another tool of standardization and expansion, allowing supply chains to circulate through farms more swiftly and purposively. On-farm infrastructure also serves another purpose, allowing capital to circulate and accumulate in farms more swiftly. Reflecting the hegemonic real estate mantra about capital flowing to the “highest and best use” (Fairbairn, 2020), farmland increases in value as it is “improved”—for example, made more productive and standardized through the addition of new digital agriculture technologies or cavernous sheds. Irrespective of whether such improvements pay off in more profitable production, the financial value of “capitalized” land tends to appreciate, providing investors with their returns on investment and adding to agriculture’s appeal as a new asset class. High land values tend to have a “neighbourhood effect”, adding value to a general region or even nation. They also attract more middle players, keen to facilitate the supply of land into the market, for a fee.

All of this interest and interference in agriculture from non-agricultural players adds enormous uncertainty to farmers’ decision-making. No longer can prices be anticipated using common-sense logics; more factors than are calculable are involved. In paying attention to what farmers do and what they say, we glimpse diverse approaches, some of which feel akin to walking a tightrope. Some of those who stay in the game do so by “running to stand still”, securing a position that might be characterized as just beyond hanging on. They are aware that they do their work on constantly shifting ground. It is what anthropologist Henrik Vigh (2009) describes as “motion squared”, whereby everything is in a state of motion and volatility, with farmers sharply aware of the constantly intensifying pressures on their margins and the risk of obsolescence.

Others are keenly aware of farmers’ uncertainty and pressures. Numerous consultants and digital “decision support tools” offer to help farmers through the maze, while many investment companies offer to relieve farmers of stress by buying them out and reinstating them as a farm manager. But many Australian farmers are determined to remain owners themselves. The country’s record land prices reflect not just foreign investors seeking properties to purchase but Australian farmers taking more risk to buy more land. As a rural banker noted recently, many are suffering from FOMO: “People are realising that they’ve just got to act now, because that parcel of land may not be available for a substantial period of time” (Jasper, 2021). Crucially, increasing farmland value underpins the equity calculations that banks use to offer farmers more credit to purchase more land. It is a cyclical financial equation that has driven Australia’s total farm debt to record highs ($86.9 billion) in the last financial year (Australian Government, 2020), effectively handing ownership of more farmland to banks.

Meanwhile, those without land are increasingly unable to break into farming. The size of farm that is considered viable has increased with the purportedly universal law of scalability, and so too has the cost of farmland per hectare. The result is that the “supply” of farmers may be running out, as those without millions in equity are unable to get established, while those within the sector continue to leave (Jasper, 2021), along with their families, community ties, rural services and place-based knowledge.

All of this is invisible at the industry or market level on which policy is focused. Because many Australian farmers produce common products that serve as the raw materials for others’ supply chains, their farms are considered broadly commensurable with any other. As such, any disruptions to their contribution, including their entire exit from the sector, barely register, at least if the overall rate of productivity growth continues to climb, as it tends to do if the land is absorbed into larger operations. Relatedly, the Productivity Commission does not rank agriculture as an essential industry. Not only are exported products rarely discussed in anything but coarse economic summations, such as the “record $50.1 billion of Australian agriculture produced in 2019–2020” (Rural Bank, 2020), but also they are part of a supply chain that we now know the federal government does not consider to be critical because the products do not directly serve Australian consumers (Productivity Commission, 2021). For the many highly geared family farms straining to enter privileged global circulations, the upshot is that while they are trumpeted as a national success story—Australian farmers are the best in the world! (Hayman & Rickards, 2013)—in other ways, they are relegated to a mere footnote in the ongoing colonization of the planet by supply chain capitalism.

Rupturing

North of Victoria’s wheat belt, not far from the expanses of plastic-wrapped grapevines, the landscape is increasingly dominated by almond plantations. Many of them are owned by Hancock Natural Resource Group, owned in turn by Canada’s largest insurer, Manulife Investment Management Company, which invests retirement funds for various groups of North American workers (Fairbairn, 2020). Almonds are an increasingly popular crop, especially given demand for lower-carbon milk alternatives, which is proving to be a serious disruption for the dairy industry (Clay et al., 2020). Yet the life cycle analysis (LCA) calculations that rank almond milk as generating lower carbon across its global supply chain relative to equivalent units of dairy milk not only exclude the complexities that make such calculations dubious (Freidberg, 2013) but also overlook most non-carbon considerations. The health, social and ecological disbenefits of thirsty almond plantations upon local ecosystems and communities are severe and highly visible to those who now live in their midst. Such problems are not the fault of almond trees per se but the profit motive they are being put towards. Growing almond trees takes more water even than growing cotton (Davies, 2019), but it makes a certain short-term sense when the market price is so high.

Smaller-scale farmers express awe, anger and despair in relation to investor-operated large almond plantations. One tells eerie stories of the mysterious deaths of countless native birds (“pests”), especially corellas, and the sudden death of a large grove of decades-old eucalypts, allegedly for simply housing the offending birds. The elderly farmer who shares these stories took up long-distance running a long time ago to deal with the day-to-day stress of farming. Running generated the energy required to solve problems. But, he observes, “you need to run 100 kilometres to deal with such horror”.

Prosperity and precarity coexist in supply chains, which “make and use difference and ruination—both in human communities and in the natural world” (Tsing, 2016). The almond “boom” in northern Victoria is not likely to last long. Climate change is accelerating, and as a result, rainfall in northern Victoria is becoming less abundant and less reliable (Victorian Government, 2019). Elaborate water infrastructures are being installed to try to squeeze some savings out of the existing system, reducing the amount that is “wasted” by seeping into the environment. “Rolling out” such irrigation modernization is a massive task and requires farmers to get on board. As such, it is disruptive. But disruption by modernization is deeply normalized and invisibilized.

The late French social theorist Bernard Stiegler compels us to approach disruption as nothing short of an epoch-breaking, unprecedented global force. Automated and reticulated society—society in the time of global supply chains—is a “global cause of colossal social disintegration” (Stiegler, 2019, p. 6). Disruption from this perspective is not a condition of technological glitches or failures in a system but a system itself. It destroys local culture, and disintegrates and exploits psychosocial energies, as well as equipment, infrastructure and heritage. Disruption, Stiegler argues, renders human will obsolete—it always arrives too late. It destroys affective relations and the processes of intergenerational transmission and translation whereby shared expectations of and orientations towards the future are generated (Stiegler, 2019, pp. 8–10). Such insights would resonate strongly with the growing number of Australian farmers without farms and rural families without neighbours or real communities. So too do they resonate in other places being reshaped by supply chain capitalism. Marc Edelman, for instance, describes the “hollowing out” of the rural United States as corporate-state abandonment has delivered “shredded social fabric”. Justified by neoliberal capital logic, social supports are being comprehensively withdrawn, leaving a devastating human toll.

But the view from the ground also tempers Stiegler’s critical insights—disruption is not so total nor so spectacular. As Tsing (2012a, p. 36) puts it, “grand schemes never fully colonise the territories upon which they are imposed”. In Australia, the colonization of rural landscapes and life by corporate power and its logics is incomplete, revealing the “unstable commitments” that characterize supply chains (Tsing, 2009). The colonization of rural landscapes and life by corporate power is layered upon older, ongoing processes of colonization and dispossession of First Nations people. Indeed, supply chain capitalism exploits pre-existing forms of dispossession, taking advantage of the destruction of spiritual connection to land and water that may otherwise have provided more widespread moral anchorage, guidance and resistance. Yet this is not the end of the story. One response to the developments sketched here is a strong yearning across Australian agricultural communities to learn from and help nurture Aboriginal cultural attitudes and practice. A growing coalition of activist farmers, environmentalists, First Nations people and concerned citizens is promoting a new kind of collective commitment, to urgently prioritize the fundamental health of the Country, water and people. Such alliances offer our best hope of imagining how we might hack and remodel supply chains, and in the process re-embed food production in the activities of feeding and nurturance, in communities and the Country.