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This chapter combines a global value chain methodology with the case of the development of the farmed Atlantic salmon industry in Chile to inform discussions regarding the globalization of economy and society. The research documents the shifting structure of the value chain from the north to the south as Chile replaced northern Europe as the locus of production and the major world supplier of farmed Atlantic salmon. Farmed salmon was supported by the Chilean state as part of its export-oriented industrialization model that attracted foreign direct investment (FDI) from northern TNCs. Chile's low costs of production combined with growing environmental problems in the north and global retailers' demand for large quantities of low-cost product resulted in the restructuring of the farmed Atlantic-salmon value chain as northern capital sourced the south as a lucrative production platform to service northern consumers. A detailed investigation of the rise in dominance of the firm Marine Harvest is provided to illustrate the process of industry concentration the Chilean farmed-salmon industry. This model has generated a legitimation crisis related to environmental degradation and labor abuses resulting in social movement organization both nationally and internationally. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of the Wal-Mart Effect on the agrifood industry in particular and in the farmed-salmon industry in particular.

The authors use Agarwal's (1992, 1997) research methodology for analyzing the intersection of gender, poverty and the environment in rural India and apply it to the case of fishing communities in Newfoundland. Here too, environmental degradation, “statization” and privatization of hitherto public resources, as well as technological development, and erosion of community management systems, effect similar adverse consequences on women. In both cases the effects are magnified by a retrenchment of liberal ideology that shrivels state social programs. We find the devaluation of women's fishing knowledge, their decreasing health and general nutrition, and the gendered nature of financial and temporal-spatial stress are associated with these larger trends.