Spatialising illicit commodity chains: Comparing coffee and cocaine

Abstract

Among geographers, recent focus on the illicit and illegal has tended to fall into two camps. Economic geographers focus on regimes of illicitness and corresponding production of specific forms of economic space; political ecologists and land change scholars, on the other hand, scrutinised how illicit commodity flows shape land and resource use, especially in the global South. This paper offers an initial integration of these two relatively separate subfields, specifically in terms of their complementary attention to uneven development. We use the concept of "global commodity chains" to explore the ways in which the regulation of agricultural commodities shapes how they are trafficked and embed in space, with particular attention to sites of international transshipment. When a commodity is illegal, spaces of transit take on significant analytical importance. As a heuristic, we present a comparative mapping of two agricultural commodity chains linking Colombia and the USA: coffee and cocaine. Their comparison highlights how "illicitness" fundamentally transforms cocaine's spatiality, requiring risk evasion that results in characteristically enlarged transit spaces and huge differentials between producer and consumer price. We show how rents circulate in those transit spaces, socially and ecologically embedding in diffuse, fluid networks with severe consequences for people and environments. We conclude with implications for work on illicit commodities and the collateral social and environmental harms they produce.

Value capture by companies of different ownership, tier, size, and distance to market: A cross‐sectoral analysis

“…This suggestion should not be considered contradictory with pleas for companies to be plugged into GVC/GPNs, but rather as its contextualisation according to the level of socioeconomic development of a given country or region. While the plug‐in strategy might be desirable in the case of developing countries (obviously also acknowledging the dark side of involvement in production networks, Coe & Hess, 2011; Dávila et al, 2021), in regard to middle‐income countries such as Czechia, a strategy to support companies outside production networks might prove more beneficial. More broadly, these results indicate the relevancy of cross‐sectoral studies performed in countries and regions at various levels of socioeconomic development.…”

Introduction: illicit flows, criminal markets and geopolitics

“…The circulation of illegal goods and services as well as the specifics of their international transshipment have been of major importance in research (Dávila et al 2021), on value generation along the respective supply chain concerning the social and ecological harm that is allocated at the different stages of production, transit and consumption . The heterogeneous character of supply chains, goods and services makes it quite difficult to get a clear picture of the logics, the structural factors and the operational modalities of different supply chains.…”

Criminal organizations exhibit hysteresis, resilience, and robustness by balancing security and efficiency

“…Like successful licit enterprises that cater to societal needs, criminal organizations function by fulfilling a specific demand [5]. Criminal organizations bring illegal products to market through international supply chains, such as cocaine, through a network of coca farmers, smugglers, runners, and dealers [6]. Running an illicit operation requires goal-orientated and management skills not uncommonly found in successful businesses [5,7].…”