Dr. Oliveira’s team awarded $1 million to study impact of COVID-19 on food supply chains

By mid-March, with much of the country shut down to stem the spread of COVID-19, Li Zhang and her collaborator, Gustavo Oliveira, were – like many around the world – witnessing the impact of pandemic panic buying and Coronavirus closures. Empty grocery store shelves where staples like flour, rice and bread were once stacked instead brandished signs limiting bulk purchases and notifying consumers when limited shipments would arrive. At the same time, Zhang, a visiting assistant professor of global and international studies at UCI and active WeChat user, started seeing a new form of commerce emerging on the online platform among her predominantly Chinese contacts across Orange and Los Angeles Counties.

“With all of the supply chain disruptions happening, restaurants closed or with reduced operations, and virtually no or very limited institutional clients, wholesalers began connecting with consumers to offload products, filling a need for both” says Zhang who teaches Global Food and the Environment and Global Pandemics courses at UCI.

It was a bit messy at the outset, she says, as buyers scrambled to either cost share or take delivery of products not intended for individual consumption (like the 50-pound bag of flour her household is still working its way through). But the result, says Oliveira, an assistant professor of global and international studies at UCI, has been a fascinating new network of exchange fueled by crisis-driven ingenuity.

li zhang“The buying and exchange habits that transpired at the outset of the pandemic are not unlike what you might see in times of other crises, like a hurricane, but what’s different here is the length of time the pandemic has required these systems to operate and the importance informal, less established networks have played,” says Oliveira. “We’re interested in how some of these new systems might be sustained, how old systems might be better adapted for resilience during future catastrophes, and what these changes mean for vulnerable communities involved in the processes.”

As scholars who study critical food, agricultural and environmental justice issues, Zhang and Oliveira shared their observations and interest in the new phenomenon with their research networks, and a team was quickly formed to dive into the ways the pandemic has disrupted and adapted regional food supply chains in the U.S. The collaborative effort – which includes economists, landscape architects, communication specialists, and other interdisciplinary social scientists and political ecologists at the University of Florida, University of Wisconsin Madison, University of Minnesota, and Kansas State University – was recently awarded a $1 million rapid response grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

gustavo oliveiraFor their part, Zhang and Oliveira received $92,057 to adapt surveys originally developed to study climate change-induced disruptions of agricultural production, and organize qualitative case studies and focus groups for food supply chain actors to share innovations. The project will reveal how traditional – as well as the emergence of alternative – networks that have enabled the food supply chain to survive and thrive amid the COVID-19 crisis. They plan to pay particular attention to issues of gender, race, social equity and resilience along the entire food supply chain – from farm workers to processing plants to distribution drivers and centers – so they may highlight the disproportionate weight vulnerable and marginalized communities carry within the network while experiencing crisis-driven hardship themselves. Their partnerships with the LA Food Policy Council and the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources will help get the survey directly into the right hands in California, says Oliveira, while similar community partnerships will help facilitate regional distribution across the nation.

“Given the risk of future pandemics and climate change-induced disruptions to local and even global food supply chains, our research will continue to generate crucial knowledge and practical engagements for many years to come,” says Oliveira.

Funding for this work began in September and runs through September 2022.

-Heather Ashbach, UCI Social Sciences
-pictured: Zhang, Oliveira.

Dr. Oliveira publishes a special issue of Globalizations: “Beyond land grabs”

Beyond land grabs: New insights on land struggles and global agrarian change

Dr. Oliveira’s article “Beyond land grabs: New insights on land struggles and global agrarian change” has just been published as the guest editor’s introduction to a special issue the journal Globalizations.

The article is co-authored with Ben McKay and Juan Liu, who also co-edited the special issue.

ABSTRACT: The conjunction of climate, food, and financial crises in the late 2000s triggered renewed interest in farmland and agribusiness investments around the world. This phenomenon became known as the ‘global land grab’ and sparked debates among social movements, NGOs, academics, government and international development agencies worldwide. In this introduction, we critically analyse the ‘state of the literature’ so far, and outline four areas that are moving the debate ‘beyond land grabs’. These include: (1) the role of contract farming and differentiation among farm workers in the consolidation of farmland; (2) the broader forms of dispossession and mechanisms of control and value grabbing beyond ‘classic’ land grabs for agricultural production; (3) discourses about, and responses to, Chinese agribusiness investments abroad; and (4) the relationship between financialization and land grabbing. Ultimately, we propose new directions to deepen and even transform the research agenda on land struggles and agroindustrial restructuring around the world.

KEYWORDS: Global land grab, contract farming, agricultural labour, control grabbing, dispossession, financialization

 

Globalizations seeks to publish the best work that contributes to constructing new meanings of globalization, brings fresh ideas to the concept, broadens its scope, and has an impact upon shaping the debates and practices of the future. The journal is dedicated to opening the widest possible space for discussion of alternatives to narrow understandings of global processes and conditions. The move from the singular to the plural is deliberate and implies scepticism of the idea that there can ever be a single theory or interpretation of globalization. Rather, the journal seeks to encourage the exploration and discussion of multiple interpretations and multiple processes that may constitute many possible globalizations, many possible alternatives.  The journal is open to all fields of knowledge, including the natural, environmental, medical and public health sciences, as well as the social sciences and the humanities.  Globalizations encourages multidisciplinary research and looks to publish contributions from all regions of the world. The articles and special issues focus on acute issues of the moment and on deep long-term structural shifts.

For the full-length article, see: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2020.1843842

Dr. Oliveira contributes to webinar on China’s Capitalism and the World

China’s Capitalism and the World

The past decades have witnessed a dramatic increase in the pace and scale of global capitalist expansion; the rapidity of consequent social transformations is in part due to China’s increasing participation in these processes. The Belt and Road Initiative and its associated infrastructure projects have received a huge amount of attention, but this webinar expands the focus to less understood and less often seen aspects of the reorganization of global capital. Based on extensive research and innovative approaches, the speakers will make visible the ways in which Chinese investment in South America, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa is reshaping local and global life, resource extraction, and relations of political domination and resistance.

Thur, Nov. 19, 5-6:30 EST

Organized by Critical China Scholars

Co-sponsors: GongchaoMade in China JournalThe Nation

Moderator: Eli Friedman, Cornell University

Panelists:

  • Patrick Bond, School of Government, University of the Western Cape
  • Juliet Lu, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Atkinson Center for Sustainability & Department of Global Development, Cornell University
  • Farai Maguwu, Executive Director, Centre for Natural Resource Governance, Harare, Zimbabwe
  • Omar Manky, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Universidad del Pacífico
  • Gustavo Oliveira, Global & International Studies, University of California, Irvine

Dr. Oliveira presents his research at the Catholic University of Chile

“The Tenuous Co-Production of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Brazil and Latin America”

Dr. Gustavo de L. T. Oliveira, Department of Global and International Studies, UC Irvine

Article co-authored with Margaret Myers, Inter-American Dialogue

Abstract: China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) evolved from promotion of Eurasian connectivity into a catchall for Chinese foreign policy and infrastructure investments worldwide. Although usually portrayed as a top-down geopolitical project of the Chinese central government, this article argues the BRI is actually shaped by converging and diverging interests of a wide variety of actors within and outside China. In order to conceptualize the relational, contingent, and unstable emergence of the BRI in Latin America, the article emphasizes the process of co-production as a theoretical framework. It first analyzes how the BRI incorporated Latin America through policy and discourse analysis, then examines the multi-scalar and multi-sited co-production of Chinese-funded port and railroad infrastructures through interviews and public documents in Brazil.

 

November 9, 2020 2pm (GMT-3 Santiago de Chile)

Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile)

School of History, Geography, and Political Sciences / Center for Asian Studies

The Pontifical Catholic University of Chile was ranked 1st university in Latin America in 2018, 2019 and 2020 according to the same QS ranking.

For more information, please contact Professor Pedro Iacobelli, Director of the Center for Asian Studies:
piacobel@uc.cl

https://estudiosasiaticos.uc.cl/

https://estudiosasiaticos.uc.cl/noticias/479-seminario-de-investigacion-the-tenuous-co-production-of-china-s-belt-and-road-initiative-in-brazil-and-latin-america

Dr. Oliveira published in the Journal of Contemporary China

The Tenuous Co-Production of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Brazil and Latin America

 

Dr. Oliveira’s article “The Tenuous Co-Production of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Brazil and Latin America“, co-authored with Margaret Myers, has just been published in the Journal of Contemporary China.

 

Abstract

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) evolved from promotion of Eurasian connectivity into a catchall for Chinese foreign policy and infrastructure investments worldwide. Although usually portrayed as a top-down geopolitical project of the Chinese central government, this article argues the BRI is actually shaped by converging and diverging interests of a wide variety of actors within and outside China. In order to conceptualize the relational, contingent, and unstable emergence of the BRI in Latin America, the article emphasizes the process of co-production as a theoretical framework. It first analyzes how the BRI incorporated Latin America through policy and discourse analysis, then examines the multi-scalar and multi-sited co-production of Chinese-funded port and railroad infrastructures through interviews and public documents in Brazil.

Keywords: China; Brazil; Latin America; Belt and Road Initiative; Co-production; Infrastructure; Ports; Railroads; International Relations

The Journal of Contemporary China was established in 1992. It has become one of the most prominent interdisciplinary journals of Chinese studies, and since 2011 it has featured in the top quartertile of journals in political science, international relations, geography, planning, and development. It is one of the preeminent forums for research and debate about China’s Belt and Road Initiative, having published over fifty articles on this topic in the past five years.

For the full length article, see: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10670564.2020.1827358

Dr. Oliveira publishes a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies

Authoritarianism, Populism, Nationalism and Resistance in the Agrarian South

Dr. Oliveira’s article “Authoritarianism, Populism, Nationalism and Resistance in the Agrarian South” has just been published as the guest editor’s introduction to a special issue the Canadian Journal of Development Studies.

The article is co-authored with Ben McKay and Juan Liu, who also co-edited the special issue.

ABSTRACT: This special section contributes to the vibrant debates concerning the “new political moment” underway with regards to “authoritarian populism” and nationalism in the agrarian South. With neoliberal globalisation in crisis, nationalist-populist and authoritarian movements are gaining ground, often transforming state and class configurations in ways that appease landed, agro-industrial and political elites, while simultaneously seeking to neutralise forms of resistance. Rather than starting from an ambiguous concept that submerges these class conflicts and contradictions, we argue that re-centering class struggles that frame the new political moment offers a more useful framework for understanding agrarian transformation in the contemporary period.

KEYWORDS: Authoritarianism, populism, nationalism, resistance, agrarian change

 

The Canadian Journal of Development Studies is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary, bilingual (English and French) forum for critical research and reflection on the complex problems of international development theory, policy and practice. Founded in 1980, the CJDS remains the only Canadian scholarly journal devoted exclusively to the study of international development. It is published quarterly by the Canadian Association for the Study of International Development.

For the full-length article, see: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02255189.2020.1814707 

Dr. Oliveira published in Applied Geography

Global-local interactions in agrochemical industry: Relating trade regulations in Brazil to environmental and spatial restructuring in China

Dr. Oliveira’s article “Global-local interactions in agrochemical industry: Relating trade regulations in Brazil to environmental and spatial restructuring in China“, co-authored with He Canfei and Ma Jiahui, has just been published in Applied Geography.

Abstract

China and Brazil are the world’s leading exporter and importer of agrochemicals respectively. We combine quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze global-local interactions in the spatial restructuring of China’s agrochemical industry in relation to a 2006 agrochemical import-acceleration policy in Brazil. We synthesize global political ecology and evolutionary economic geography (EEG) research on environmental regulations, technological upgrading, and the spatial transformations of China’s pollution-intensive industries, discussing arguments that the Pollution Haven Hypothesis (PHH) and Porter Hypothesis (PH) co-exist due to firm heterogeneity. While existing studies conceptualize heterogeneity in terms of firm size, regional hub (cluster) effect, and local government intervention, this study adds global-local interactions as dimension of firm heterogeneity – distinguishing firms with weak and strong international linkages. We show the import-acceleration policy in Brazil contributed to the de-concentration of agrochemical production towards western China (confirming the PHH). Yet increasingly strict environmental regulations in China curtailed de-concentration after 2010, when well-established firms and new entrants with strong international linkages consolidated exports to Brazil, while new firms with weaker international linkages exited this market (confirming the PH). This co-existence of PHH and PH due to firm-level heterogeneity of global-local interactions illustrates a theoretical synthesis we call an evolutionary political economic geography (EPEG).

Keywords: Evolutionary economic geography; Global political ecology; Global-local interactions; Pollution haven hypothesis; Porter hypothesis; Chemical industry

Applied Geography is a journal devoted to the publication of research which utilizes geographic approaches (human, physical, nature-society and GIScience) to resolve human problems that have a spatial dimension. These problems may be related to the assessment, management and allocation of the world’s physical and/or human resources. The underlying rationale of the journal is that only through a clear understanding of the relevant societal, physical, and coupled natural-humans systems can we resolve such problems. The journal was founded in 1980, and consistently ranks among the top journals of geography, planning, development studies, and environmental science.

For the full length article, see: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2020.102244

 

Dr. Oliveira publishes a special issue of Political Geography

China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Views from the Ground

Dr. Oliveira’s article “China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Views from the Ground” has just been published as the guest editor’s introduction to a special issue Political Geography.

The article is co-authored with Galen Murton, Alessandro Rippa, Tyler Harlan, and Yang Yang, who also co-edited the special issue.

 

ABSTRACT: The Chinese government promotes the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a global strategy for regional integration and infrastructure investment. With a projected US$1 trillion commitment from Chinese financial institutions, and at least 138 countries participating, the BRI is attracting intense debate. Yet most analysis to date focuses on broad drivers, risks, and opportunities, largely considered to be emanating from a coherent policy imposed by Beijing. In this special issue, we instead examine the BRI as a relational, contested process – a bundle of intertwined discourses, policies, and projects that sometimes align but are sometimes contradictory. We move beyond policy-level, macro-economic, and classic geopolitical analysis to study China’s global investments “from the ground”. Our case studies reveal the BRI to be dynamic and unstable, rhetorically appropriated for different purposes that sometimes but do not always coalesce as a coherent geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy. The papers in this special issue provide one of the first collections of deep empirical work on the BRI and a useful approach for grounding China’s role in globalization in the critical contexts of complex local realities.

KEYWORDS: China, Belt and Road Initiative, political geography, globalization, theory and methods, global ethnography.

 

Political Geography is the flagship journal of political geography and advances knowledge in all aspects of the geographical and spatial dimensions of politics and the political. It was established in 1982, consistently ranks among the most high impact and well regarded journals across the disciplines of geography, history, political science, sociology, and interdisciplinary social sciences.

For the full-length article, see: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102225

Dr. Oliveira presents his research at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)

Video of lecture at UFRRJ, July 31, 2020

Video of lecture at UFRRJ, July 31, 2020

Dr. Oliveira interviewed by the South China Morning Post

China urged to diversify soybean sources to curb reliance on US

Jun Mai, South China Morning Post, May 22, 2020

(…)

Li’s proposal [that China should diversity soy imports from the US and Brazil] would also be difficult to implement because of China’s industrialisation and concentration of livestock production, according to Gustavo Oliveira, an assistant professor with the University of California, Irvine, who tracks global soybean production.

“The main difficulty faced by China is about the continued industrialisation and concentration of livestock production, which guarantees that demand for soy-based livestock feed outpaces China’s capacity for domestic production and procurement from countries besides Brazil and the US,” he said.

For the full report, see: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3085579/china-urged-diversify-soybean-sources-curb-over-reliance-us