Why are places with rich natural resources so often on both the ecological and economic edge of survival?

How can commodity systems can be transformed so they are stable, sustainable, and equitable?

Commodities that come directly from the earth — grain, meat, cotton, sugar, lumber, fish — are the raw materials at the foundation of every economy. The natural resource economies that have grown up to harvest, produce, process, refine, transport, and market these commodities exist at the intersection of human systems and the Earth's systems. These commodity economies are where business policies intersect with food webs, where trade rules meet nutrient cycles, where cultural assumptions must mesh with water flows and weather patterns. As the scale of commodity production increases, the potential for commodity systems to exceed the capacity of human communities and ecosystems to support them also increases.

Building Understanding

At the Sustainability Institute, we conducted research within two U.S. natural resource economies, forestry in New England and corn production in the Midwest, along with preliminary modeling of the shrimp system. With stakeholders in these systems, we built computer simulation models of production and distribution systems. The models are neutral, exploratory tools, easy to understand, and fascinating to use. They incorporate knowledge and assumptions of the system’s participants and help spell out logical — but often surprising — conclusions. Our goal in these projects was to build understanding with and for the stakeholders in the commodity systems, so they would understand where leverage points for change may be, and so they could summon the political will to make those changes. Since building these models, we have used them in many workshops to frame discussions about choices and constraints to achieving a sustainable future.

"Commodity System Challenges," April 2003 (425 k pdf), provides a map of the structures that produce the behavior common to many natural resource economies — ever-increasing production leading to the traps of over-harvest, pollution, and community decline. This paper combines results of Sustainability Institute research on corn and forest systems with insights from other commodity management systems.

Work on sustainable natural resource economies continues at SI. We are particularly interested in additional collaborations with stakeholders in commodity systems — producers, processors, and consumers. Such collaborations will explore how programs aimed at improving the environmental and community health in commodity producing regions can be implemented and maintained in the face of the drive to increase production and the globalization of markets.

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