© 2024
Local NPR for the Cape, Coast & Islands 90.1 91.1 94.3
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Why Commodities Are More Than Economic Indicators

Cacao, as a commodity, reveals much about social and religious differences between Europe and Mesoamerica.

We track the prices of everything from crude oil to milk for clues about the state of the economy. But what could they tell us about the environment?

Tune in to any television or radio newscast, and you'll hear how the stock market is performing today. The New York Times puts market indicators alongside the current temperature at the top of their website. Changes in unemployment or the prices of commodities like oil and milk regularly make headlines.

Environmental historian Dr. Ted Melillo, associate professor at Amherst College, says we need to re-envision what something like the price of oil really means - what it can reveal about not only our economic systems, but also our social, political, and environmental attitudes and practices.

"The environmental costs of producing these common commodities are often externalized to ordinary people in faraway places," Melillo says. "The people who are paying the true costs ... of oil production and oil extraction need to be accounted for, as well, in the total cost of a product."

Melillo doesn't actually spend much time researching or teaching about oil, because he says it's already familiar to most people. He prefers to study commodities that are less commonplace and which enable new insights into social and environmental attitudes - how they vary from place to place, and how they've changed over time. Here are three examples:

  1. Chocolate - Cacao was domesticated in the Americas and widely cultivated by Mesoamerican civilizations. When European explorers took cacao back across the Atlantic, Melillo says the bean made both a physical and a cultural journey. While Aztecs often drank bitter, even spicy, chocolate beverages, Europeans sweetened it and secularized it, stripping the drink of the religious associations it held in the Americas. Europeans later introduced cacao to western Africa, where much of our chocolate today originates.
  2. Cochineal - Crush 70,000 female scale insects (formally, Dactylopius coccus) and what do you get? One pound of a red dye that was the second most traded commodity in the Spanish empire (silver was the first). Europe's religious and political elite craved the deep, permanent color for fabrics. Today, cochineal (also called carmine, or natural red 4) lives on largely as an alternative to synthetic red food dyes that have been associated with hyperactivity. It's a case of pick your poison - synthetics, or squished bugs. Or you could hold out for a purple potato alternative under development.
  3. Sea cucumbers - If bug juice isn't weird enough, try sea cucumbers. Since the 14th century, sea cucumbers have been a Chinese culinary delicacy and medicinal staple, used for treating ailments from constipation, to kidney problems and impotence. In the 19th century, a number of New Englanders inserted themselves as mediators in the international trade of sea cucumbers. To this day, the export of sea cucumbers from Fiji to China is worth $3 million dollars a year. A recent report found that seven species of sea cucumbers are endangered due to overfishing, and Melillo says most Fijians don't benefit, either. It's the middle-men pulling in the profits.
Stay Connected