Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Impact of Free Trade Agreements on Supply Chain Logistics

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This project, which trains a graduate student in methods of conducting empirically-grounded scientific research, asks how people, corporations, and environments are affected by intensifying free trade agreements. In 2015, the United States, Japan, and ten other Pacific nations finalized negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), heralded as the centerpiece of U.S. trade policy's "pivot towards Asia." Free trade removes trade barriers such as tariffs and quotas, opening up local industries to international competition. These developments in economic policy impact the lives and livelihoods of agricultural producers and everyday consumers around the globe, in both developed and developing worlds. They determine the kinds of products that are available to consumers, shape the ways that corporations operate and relate to each other, and dictate agricultural practices on the ground. Often this can have significant agricultural ramifications. Free trade deals promote large-scale plantation industries, which have the dual effect of making affordable food more widely available, while promoting a culture of monocropping (the practice of growing a single crop on a very large scale, often with the intensive application of herbicides and pesticides). Monocultures also amplify the genetic narrowing of plant species, creating crops that are biologically more vulnerable to disease and commercial extinction. The data from this research will aid organizations, officials, and scientists engaged in identifying environmentally sustainable models for supply chain management in food production. Alyssa Paredes, under the supervision of Dr. William Kelly of Yale University, will explore how alternative supply chains evolve effective and scalable organizational structures and logistics in response to changes in free trade agreements. In recent decades, fair trade schemes, community-supported agriculture, organic farming, food co-ops and the like have strived to support local industries and preserve agro-biodiversity in the face of changes in trade and agriculture. In the United States and other industrial nations, however, these efforts have struggled to scale up, remaining dependent on niche markets and catering mostly to higher social classes. This project will investigate these questions through research conducted on a successful alternative trade model between the Philippines and Japan. It will focus on a wild Cavendish banana supply chain, which supports agrobiodiversity in landscapes dominated by monocropped plantations, and encourages civic participation for all the stakeholders involved. In order to understand supply chain management and logistics from the ground up, it will involve immersive research at sites for production, processing, packaging and transport in the Philippines, to sites for distribution, marketing and consumption in Tokyo and Fukuoka, Japan. It will pay particular attention to how stakeholders maneuver recent changes in trade policy, such as TPP. To analyze the impacts associated with each node of the supply chain, this project will use Life Cycle Assessment (ISO140140), a framework for the quantitative and qualitative assessment of inputs and outputs of the commodity system.