‘Hot Chocolate’: Financialized Global Value Chains and Cocoa Production in Ecuador

This paper explores the dialectical entanglements of the highly liquid and volatile trading of cocoa in its financial derivative form, and the small-scale, labour-intensive peasant production in its physical form. To do so this paper deploys financialization as a concept analytically subordinate to changes in global value relations which, we argue, shine a light on the internal relations between the global financial trading and local production of cocoa. Based upon detailed empirical research in the Ecuadorian cocoa sector, the paper demonstrates how the financialization of agro-industrial linkages have been internalized into uneven production relations between peasant producers facing low and volatile farm-gate prices, thereby producing a heterogeneous form of social class restructuring.