Business Exchanges in the Australian Desert: It's About More Than the Money

Abstract

This paper synthesizes research from the 'Bush Products from Desert Australia' (BPDA) research project, within the Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre. The paper presents a Netchain Analysis (NCA) of the supply chain associated with wild harvested bush tomatoes in central Australia, where trade between remote Aboriginal peoples and non-Aboriginal people is a prominent feature. The paper finds that while NCA provides some insight into identifying sources of economic value in the chain, some important sources of non-economic value are deeply embedded in social relationships within the chain. This value is difficult to assess within the NCA framework, and is not reflected in the final outputs of the chain. In light of these findings, the paper then determines that the chain itself represents something more than a supply chain within the conventional definitions of a supply chain. This work may have relevance to other situations where economic activity is deeply embedded in inter-cultural social relations, especially where remoteness and isolation are features of the operating environment