Burning Questions
Fellowship Award Winners

Mehroosh Tak, Ivo Syndicus, Ambarish Karamchedu

Location: U.K.
Academic field: Economics (Tak); Anthropology (Syndicus); International development (Karamchedu)
Award category: PhD Team

Guidance Memo

• Title: Identifying economic and financial drivers of industrial livestock production - the case of the global chicken industry
• Keywords: Global agribusinesses. Corporate concentration. Livestock industrialization. Poultry industry. India.
• What We Learned From It:
  • Asymmetries of power and policies give rise to corporate concentration in livestock industries, including poultry.
  • A very useful analytical framework on how to research economic and global finance drivers of corporate expansion and concentration of industrialized livestock production systems in low- and middle-income countries. This framework explains how to map the economic organization of livestock industries from the local to global level. For example: What are the spheres of influence? How is market power concentrated in corporations? What are the firm ownership structures? What are the investment portfolios of public development banks?
  • The economic organization of the global poultry genetics industry.
  • A case study of how global finance and corporate consolidation is linked to the Indian poultry industry, examining how corporate concentration and public policies have shaped the Indian poultry industry into vertically integrated broiler production systems.
  • The Guidance Memo shows front-line persons and policy-makers the pathways and power-sharing practices between international and domestic private and public capital that support industrial livestock production systems and their negative externalities. It provides evidence that they can use to identify and address power imbalance in a financialized livestock industry, characterized by spheres of influences and political clientelism between IFIs, LMICs governments, multinational firms and domestic agribusinesses.

Links

• Read the Guidance Memo
• Read the Annotated Bibliography

Some of the Things We Really Liked when We Read the Application

• This application’s focus on economic and financial drivers is an excellent fit for Tiny Beam Fund. Our key goal is to deepen the understanding of the complexities in the industrial model and system of producing livestock.
• It is aimed specifically at delivering practical guidance to readers.
• We are very keen to support individuals with advanced training in applied economics, political economy, development economics. After all, industrial food animal production and “factory farms” are businesses. And in many developing countries, business, corporate, financial, and international trade issues are closely bound up with policies and politics.