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Commodity Traders in a Storm: Financialization, Corporate Power and Ecological Crisis

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Commodity Traders in a Storm: Financialization, Corporate Power and Ecological Crisis A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Baines, Joseph; Hager, Sandy Brian Article — Manuscript Version (Preprint) Commodity Traders in a Storm: Financialization, Corporate Power and Ecological Crisis Review of International Political Economy Provided in Cooperation with: The Bichler & Nitzan Archives Suggested Citation: Baines, Joseph; Hager, Sandy Brian (2021) : Commodity Traders in a Storm: Financialization, Corporate Power and Ecological Crisis, Review of International Political Economy, ISSN 1466-4526, Taylor & Francis, London, Iss. Latest Articles, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2021.1872039 , http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/672/ This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/229186 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ www.econstor.eu Commodity Traders in a Storm: Financialization, Corporate Power and Ecological Crisis Joseph Baines Department of European and International Studies, King’s College London, London, United Kingdom Sandy Brian Hager Department of International Politics, City, University of London, London, United Kingdom, ([email protected]) This is a pre-preprint of an article accepted for publication in Review of International Political Economy https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2021.1872039 Commodity Traders in a Storm: Financialization, Corporate Power and Ecological Crisis Commodity trading firms occupy a central position in global supply chains and their activities have been associated with financial instability, social upheaval and manifold forms of ecological devastation. This paper examines these companies in the context of debates regarding corporate financialization. We find that since the 2003-2011 commodity boom, trading firms have become less financialized in terms of the source of their profits as they have shifted away from financial activities. However, they have become more financialized in terms of the destination of profits, with dividend and share repurchase commitments reaching new heights after 2015. In view of this finding, we inquire into whether trading firms’ growing commitment to shareholder payouts will encourage them to continue to prioritize short-term returns, or whether instead these firms’ linkages to financial markets will lend clout to financial activists concerned by the long-term environmental and social consequences of their operations. Ultimately, we find several sources of commodity trader resilience which insulate them from shareholder resolutions and divestment campaigns aimed at curbing ecological destruction and human rights abuses in their supply chains. We accordingly suggest that pressures from activist investors must be complemented with more wide-ranging efforts to defend living systems across the planet. Keywords: commodity trading firms; ecological crisis; financialization; corporate power; shareholder value; financial activism 1. Introduction The titles of journalistic books on multinational corporations tend towards hyperbole. Such is the case with The Secret Club that Runs the World, American reporter Kate Kelly’s (2014) investigation into the world of commodity trading. In reality, the major commodity trading firms are not a secret club, but they are shadowy entities that shy away from the spotlight. They do not run the world, but they do occupy a central position within contemporary capitalism. 1 The poetic license of Kelly’s title should not detract from the key insight: the commodity traders are among the most important firms in the world, and yet most people have never heard of them. What are commodity trading firms? And why do they matter? At the most fundamental level, commodity trading firms are the main intermediaries within global commodity supply chains (Chalmin, 1987). Through their extensive transportation activities, they connect the producers and the users of raw materials across space. Through their storage facilities, they mediate the discontinuities of production and consumption across time. Through their processing capabilities, they transform raw materials into secondary products. And through their derivatives operations, they manage their exposure to the price fluctuations of the underlying commodities that they trade (Pirrong, 2014). In short, the commodity traders control the channels through which commodities pass from producers to manufacturers, and they operate at the interstices of physical and financial markets. A brief glance at market share data reveals the centrality of these multinational giants in the supply of essential raw materials. The four largest agricultural commodity traders – Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus – control between 75% and 90% of the international grain trade; just three commodity traders – Vitol, Glencore and Trafigura – handle equivalent to half of OPEC’s total oil output; and Glencore alone accounts for 55% of the global zinc market and 36% of the global copper market, while Wilmar accounts for 45% of the world trade in palm oil (Lawrence, 2011; Schneyer, 2011; Sheppard & Hume, 2017; Stringer, 2014). Over the past decade, the annual revenues of the major commodity trading firms have been comparable to, and in some instances even exceeded, those of the Wall Street banks as well as the major mining and oil companies (see Figure A1 in the Appendix). 2 Along with staggering financial clout, the commodity traders have also been mired in controversy. They have been accused of promoting deforestation and other forms of ecological damage (Amazon Watch, 2019; Amnesty International, 2016). There are concerns regarding their role in marketing commodities extracted or harvested through forced labour, including child labour (Braunschweig et al., 2019). They have been entangled in multiple corruption cases (Berne Declaration, 2012). And finally, there are ongoing concerns regarding their alleged manipulation of physical markets as well as the potentially destabilizing impacts of their speculative activities in derivatives markets (Oxfam, 2012a; The Economist, 2014). The fact that commodity traders are embroiled in scandal and controversy is nothing new (see Ammann, 2011; Morgan, 1979). But concerns regarding their operations have become more widespread against the backdrop of overarching dysfunctions in the global economy over the past five decades which have generated increasing inequality, greater financial instability, and accelerating ecological breakdown (Dobler & Kesselring, 2019; Elsby, 2020). A small but growing body of literature adopts the concept of financialization as a common theoretical point of departure to explore the business practices of the commodity trading firms (Clapp & Isakson, 2018; Isakson, 2014; Salerno, 2017). According to existing accounts, financialization has encouraged a short-term outlook among the commodity traders with the result that long-term social stability and ecological integrity, especially in the Global South, are heavily discounted in favour of generating immediate financial returns (McMichael, 2012). A key theme in this literature is that the concept of financialization helps to reveal how and why commodity trading firms have embraced short-term, risky behaviour that boosts their profits at the expense of workers, customers, and the communities in which they operate (Clapp & Helleiner, 2012a). Notwithstanding all the impressive insights of this body of research, there has not yet been a systematic mapping of financialization for all of the major commodity traders. Thus, the purpose of this article is to fill these gaps in our knowledge, offering the first 3 comprehensive account of the commodity trading firms in the context of debates regarding financialization and corporate involvement in social and ecological harms. In our analysis we explore the two main facets of corporate financialization emphasized in the literature: the financialization of accumulation and the rise of shareholder value norms (Van der Zwan, 2014). When taken as a whole, we find incongruence between the two facets of financialization as they apply to the commodity trading firms. In terms of the first facet of financialization (accumulation), the commodity traders have actually become less financialized since the end of the 2003-2011 commodity boom as they have shifted their focus away from ancillary financial activities towards their core processing and merchandising operations. But in terms
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