Renegotiating a Timber Commodity Chain: Lessons from Indonesia on the Political Construction of Global Commodity Chains

This paper shows how political strategies and negotiations influence the construction of the market linkages that form global commodity chains. It provides an account of how an oligopoly of timber-producing firms in the peripheral nation of Indonesia came to dominate the production and export of processed tropical plywood from 1985 to 1998. The oligopoly forged alliances with the state to gain domestic control over producers of the raw material and negotiated an external alliance with Japanese importers to penetrate that core market. Exposing processes of political influence can enrich global commodity chain analysis of market processes in the global political economy.