(vi) Sustainability in global commodity trade: successful responsible entrepreneurship or fallacious market capture? Dr Walter J.V. Vermeulen Associate Professor Sustainable Production & Consumption Faculty of Geosciences | Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development Utrecht University w.vermeulen@geo.uu.nl http://www.copernicus.uu.nl/esp International trade is usually considered a prime engine of growth and can contribute significantly to the reduction of poverty and hunger in developing countries, if it actually enables communities in disadvantaged regions to take part in this global economy. Products could be sold for better prices then given on local markets and the growing international demand can enable further job creation and improvement of living conditions (Bray, Saﾌ］chez & Murphy 2002, Browne et al. 2000). But such benefits are not evident. Established businesses may very well pick the fruits of growing international economic cooperation, enabling production at the lowest costs and ignoring social and environmental externalities. In many cases foreign investment contributes to the creation of new pollution heavens chains (Mani 1998; Eskeland 2003; Cole 2004; Bogmans 2010). In these cases the positive socioeconomic impacts remain limited, adding to the welfare of a small economic elite, but not contributing to the achievement of the UN Millennium Development Goals. Consumption of food and commodities in Europe and North America increasingly depends on international sourcing, with developing countries as suppliers. From the perspective of western companies investing in and/or sourcing from the developing world, participation in (inter)national markets is increasingly governed through vertically structured supply chains and horizontally organized clusters and networks (Lazzarini et al. 2001; Vermeulen and Seuring, 2009). Global markets therefore are increasingly conceptualized as a competitive arena of integrated companies and networks. Various strategies are applied by Western MNCs to control their international supply chains and to enable cost reductions (Gereffi and Korzeniewicz1994; Gereffi et al. 2005). The ability of end-producers and retailers to control their supply chain and simultaneously to meet costumer and societal needs, determines their competitive advantage. Simultaneously, however, civil society in western countries is increasingly pressing spearheaded firms to bring their corporate social responsibility into practice, especially in this international context. In response to this European and American producers and retailers are increasingly applying new forms of cooperation and selfregulation, either as firm-to-firm supply chain management or with the help of private standards (with third party auditing) to assure that their practices at the developing world side of their supply chain can be labelled as socially and ecologically responsible. These new forms of cooperation and self-regulation include both single firm supply chain management approaches, and joint product sector and cross sector approaches applying third party certification and auditing, as described in (Vermeulen 2010) under the heading of sustainable supply chain governance systems.
33