The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the often-invisible underbelly of global trade and supply chains; the connections between distant communities brought together by the seemingly seamless flows of goods, capital, and labor. In the public imagination, these flows were “disrupted” during the pandemic and needed to be stitched together again; to be made more “resilient” in order to sustain global commerce in the future. Once global trade looked into the abyss of collapse, “resilience” became the buzzword of the hour in global policy circles—the World Economic Forum, for instance, rushed to set up a ‘“Resilience Consortium.” [1]
If the disruptions caused to global commerce in the pandemic were still diffuse, the six-day blockage of the Suez Canal by the huge container ship Ever Given in March 2021 clearly illustrated the many levels of global interdependence. But global supply chains are only one part in a story of global integration and connection. “Supply chain capitalism,” anthropologist Anna Tsing [2] argues, creates and exploits new “niches,” “gaps” or forms of “segregation” between classes, races, and regions around the globe. Restoring operational flows of just-in-time production and running a “stress test” for supply chains continues to overlook the hierarchies that are built into the human and material infrastructures of global commerce. It is time to ask how the infrastructures that the pandemic exposed as “critical” can be mobilized as vectors of critique against current modes of production.
An example comes from labor resistance, which is increasingly organized along global supply chains. Images of airports packed with Romanian seasonal workers flying to work on German asparagus fields during the first lockdowns are worth more than a thousand words: they illustrate how, during a fast-spreading pandemic and amidst a general standstill, food production in Europe’s core was maintained at the expense of the health and overall well-being of seasonal migrant farmworkers from the peripheries. Disrupting the “human supply chain” in food production would have meant that the asparagus harvest would go to waste, resulting in food shortages and disruptions in prices. “Disposable” labor in Germany was imported from elsewhere, and what Karl Polanyi calls the “satanic mill” kept grinding. The pandemic thus showed us that the systemic devaluation of these types of labor, and the exploitability of workers therein, are not a glitch. They are an intentionally built-in feature of global supply chains, carefully crafted through transnational laws and regulation. Current laws on both the national and international levels are shaping forms of precarious and exploitable labor through supply chain contracts, visa regimes, and social security exclusions that create strong worker dependence on employers, making judicial redress or access to justice for workers particularly difficult.
Another example comes from exposing the colonial continuities of Global North plundering that are sedimented into the material infrastructures of trade routes: ports, roads, and pipelines. These are deeply implicated in the structures and exclusionary dynamics of global trade: who gets a share of the pie of global trade, and who are located at the producing and/or receiving ends of trade flows are also determined by access to such infrastructures. In an era of scale, large ports have become bottlenecks, and their internal rules and pricing are crucial for accessing trading routes and buyer markets—even if largely out of sight.
During the pandemic, heaps of empty containers were stored in the Port of Rotterdam. Shipping infrastructure is emblematic of colonial trajectories. While container ships, during their lifetimes, primarily serve the consumer-oriented Global North, by the end of their lives, they are transferred to the highly dangerous, pollution-intense business of shipbreaking that mainly takes place in the Global South under the most treacherous conditions. [3] This circles back to the unseen human infrastructure of labor discussed above. The Ever Given is, itself, a testament to the complex and concealing legal arrangements designed to evade labor rights.
Held by a Japanese owner and managed by a German company, the ship had been leased to the Taiwanese firm Evergreen, was insured by a British broker, operated by an Indian crew, and sailed under the Panamanian flag. It is not unlikely that its graveyard will end up being one of the shipbreaking yards in Chittagong, Bangladesh. The ship made headlines for blocking a specific shipping route in the Suez Canal, one that supplies the full panorama of today’s consumer goods to the Global North. But considering its manifold connections to different countries and their various legal systems that exist to exploit workers’ rights and environmental laws, this ship and the blockage represent much more: in effect, the Ever Given became an emblematic, pressing reminder of the human dimension in every material infrastructure.
The path towards more sustainable global trade requires seeing human and material infrastructure as not just passive enablers of supply chains, but as sites of struggle for reform. The political push towards “resilience” opens a window of opportunity to go beyond patching global supply chains by protecting their flow. The political momentum goes towards fostering secure, crisis-proof supply chains. The proposed “Emergency Mechanism” supply chain in the EU or the Biden-Harris plans around “Secure Critical Supply Chains” [4] in the US exemplify that trend. The EU Commission’s Proposal for a Single Market Emergency Mechanism [5] seeks to provide a toolbox for the EU to respond to crisis-driven supply-chain disruptions. The idea is to give the EU the competence to declare emergency modes and oblige private actors to store and prioritize the order and production of certain crisis-relevant goods. The Biden-Harris plans build on a similar idea of ensuring the supply of essential goods in times of crisis. But these policy documents are, first and foremost, geopolitical endeavors, which aim to provide their respective regions with prioritized supply.
However, the manifest fragilities of global trade can also be turned into an emancipatory resource: as critiques that alter, contest, and transform the infrastructures of global trade, which are voiced through these very infrastructures. Down the line, lawyers will have the task of translating this resource into legal strategies. One possibility can be to rely on transnational liability for remedying the infrastructural work that is done by humans, but our options need to expand beyond the familiar legal terrain of liability and accountability. The emancipatory potential of infrastructure can only be untapped if we conceive of law as shaping access rights to infrastructure and, in turn, as empowered to disrupt.
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- FOOTNOTES
[1] World Economic Forum, “New Resilience Consortium to Forge Strategies for Recovery and Growth in Face of Multiple Crises,” May 20, 2022. <https://www.weforum.org/press/2022/05/new-resilience-consortium-to-forge-strategies-for-recovery-and-growth-in-face-of-multiple-crises/> accessed April 21, 2023.
[2] Anna Tsing, ‘Supply Chains and the Human Condition’ (2009) 21 Rethinking Marxism 150.
[3] NGO Shipbreaking Platform homepage, <https://shipbreakingplatform.org/> accessed April 21, 2023; see also Ioanna Hadjiyianni and Anna Kloni, ‘Regulating Shipbreaking as a Global Activity: Issues of Fragmentation and Injustice’ (2021) 33 Journal of Environmental Law 211.
[4] White House press release, “The Biden-Harris Plan to Revitalize American Manufacturing and Secure Critical Supply Chains in 2022.” (February 24, 2022) <https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/02/24/the-biden-harris-plan-to-revitalize-american-manufacturing-and-secure-critical-supply-chains-in-2022/> accessed April 21, 2023.
[5] COM (2022) 459 final.
IMAGE CREDITS
Wallowland / Çamuralem is an ongoing project by Cooking Sections addressing the draining of wetlands outside Istanbul, Türkiye. The landscape has been long inhabited by water buffalo, herders, and a multitude of species that are now threatened by the construction of a new shipping canal connecting the Marmara and Black Seas. Through the celebration of pastoralist practices and the role of buffalo milk in Turkish desserts, the project is working to preserve the cultural heritage of this unique wetland habitat. Photo: Deniz Sabuncu / Aposto.
