Consumption and commodity chains
This assignment focuses on the environmental damage that excessive global consumption causes, and measures to tackle these impacts. As one of your readings, Strange et al states, “Women’s status, workers’ rights and fairer trade are as much a part of sustainable development as protecting the environment. Making production and consumption sustainable implies recognising the true costs of what we make and what we buy, across the entire supply chain, from sourcing to retail distribution to waste disposal”.
The readings you are going to use (under this week’s materials):
Stacy VanDeveer’s “Consumption, Commodity Chains and the Global Environment”, a chapter from The Global Environment: Institutions, Law and Policy.
Chapter 5: Production and Consumption from Tracey, Strange, and Bayley Anne. OECD insights: sustainable development. Linking economy, society, environment. OECD Publishing, 2008.
Turn in a PDF file where you cover the following (word count doesn’t matter as far as you cover the points):
Choose one of the commodities that VanDeveer (or Strange et al) discusses, either in Table 15-1 or throughout the text (e.g. bananas, coffee, gold, diamonds, etc.). For this commodity:
Summarize both environmental and social (negative) impacts that the production and consumption of this commodity brings along.
Consider scenarios where each of the five policy options (banning/regulations, subsidies, taxation, certification, capacity building) from VanDeveer pages 327-328 is applied to the commodity under consideration, in Estonia — or in a different country of your choice, if you prefer so. Describe how it would be implemented (for example, taxation could be applied to bananas produced with unfair labor, meaning that importers who cannot provide evidence of good sourcing practices are taxed on their product; you would need to be a little more thorough in your response though!), and how feasible this policy is from the perspective of policy makers (who need to take into consideration the interests of businesses) and consumers (whose purchases would be affected). Would any of these five policies go through in any form?
For ideas, you could see some policy examples in the end of Chapter 5 in Strange et al under the section Powerful persuaders.
Following explanations in Chapter 5 of Strange et al, make a case for why things (food/consumer goods) being more expensive would be good for the environment.
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