Date & Time: 16:00-17:30, Wednesday, 26 June, 2019
Place: Tonan-tei (Room no. 201), on the 2nd floor of Inamori Foundation
Memorial building, CSEAS

Title: Global Value Chain: an analytic tool for Natural Resource Management

Presenter: Professor Jun HE, School of Ethnology and Sociology, Yunnan
University, China, CSEAS Visiting Research Scholar (Jun. – Aug. 2019)

Moderator: Yasuyuki Kono, CSEAS, Kyoto University

Abstract:
Along with globalization, the farmers live in remote mountainous area
had been involved into the global market through commercialization of
their agricultural products. While the international market brings new
opportunities for cash income to those farmers, there is also potential
impacts on sustainability. Resource overexploitation, uneven
benefit-sharing as well as market control is the very question required
further investigation. As such, a new method, namely Global Value Chain,
was developed to understand the flow of a particular product from
harvesters to the end users. It helps to reveal the complexity of actors
involved, institution regulated the chain and benefit distribution in
the value chain. Clearly, a value chain is not organized only by legal
mechanism, there are a wide range of extra-legal mechanism determine how
the chain is formed, who can involve in the chain and who get most benefit.

This presentation is aimed to introduce this analytical tool of Global
Value Chain by three concrete examples: 1) Matsutake mushroom value
chain from China to Japan, 2) timber trade in China, and 3) cross-border
medical plant trade from Nepal to China. I use those three case-study as
illustrators to show the application of Global Value Chain in the
research of natural resource management. The research shows the
complicated social, economic, policy as well as cultural factors
affected the organization of, actors’ access to and benefit distribution
in the value chain among different products. It also argued those
factors is nexus like a network rather than a linear pattern that affect
the value chain. Finally, the research identified who reaped the most
benefit in the value chain at different level and why they benefit most.

The presentation calls for an attention of methodology development to
understand globalization in mountainous region. That require an
interdisciplinary research and holistic understanding to examine the
mountain complexity.

About the Speaker:
Jun He is professor in Human Ecology at School of Ethnology and
Sociology, Yunnan University. His expertise is in rural development from
perspectives of resource governance. With this interdisciplinary
approach, his recent research fields are consisted of three empirical
study aspects that has been applied in the wide geographical locations
which including North Korea, China and Southeast Asian. That includes:
1) Indigenous knowledge and Agroforestry Ecology with focus on
participatory agroforestry development and domestication,
crop-soil-water interaction etc.; 2) Forest Governance with focus on
decentralization, forest tenure reform, customary institutions etc.; 3)
Rural Market Access and Structure with focus on commodity chain/value
chain analysis. Jun He published widely in international peer-reviewed
journal including Land Use Policy, World Development, Forest Policy and
Economics, Human Ecology, International Forestry Review, Society and
Natural Resources among the others. Prof. He currently also serve as
Associate Editor in Society and Natural Resources, and as gust editor
edited a special issue in Journal Ethnopharmacology