Extraction, Global Commodity Trade, and Urban Development in Zambia's Northwestern Province

In this Chapter (6), `Trading inequality’ follows copper on its journey from Solwezi to world markets and shows where profits flow. In this chapter, the interdependent relationship between Switzerland and Zambia is at its most obvious; the Swiss wealth is based on its articulation with Zambia’s extracted mode of production. Between their extraction and their use in global industrial production, commodities are financed, insured, moved, stored, cleaned, weighed, blended, bought, sold, certified, tracked – to mention just a few downstream activities. Service providers such as trading firms, transport and shipping companies, financial institutions, certification and software providers are as important agents of commodity extraction as mining companies, but these segments of global production networks figure less prominently in the literature. I show how Swiss companies active in these sectors have the capacity to order value chains to their benefit, controlling essential parts of copper’s global production network and generating a great amount of profit on the way. Getting access to such kind of information is notoriously difficult. In the chapter, I not only show how companies capture value but also show how they attempt to do the same with researchers.

For more on the book's goals, structure and argument, please read the Introduction.  Other chapters closely related to WISER's work include Copper's Promise and Power and Infrastructure.