Is Supply Chain Transparency Impossible?

Forbes contributor Tim Worstall said in a recent article that the Behind the Barcode campaign, which is part of the larger corporate social responsibility movement, is using a “profoundly anti-market” method to achieve its goals.

Essentially, he concludes, “it’s impossible to actually plan or even monitor such a complex system” — like a supply chain — “from one vantage point.”

As quoted in the market news:

To understand what I mean take the case of Apple(they’re one of the firms mentioned in the report after all) and concentrate on just two of the demands that are made of that company. The first is about tantalum, that Apple make sure it does not come from slave labour in the DRC. But the entire joy of a market based system is that Apple doesn’t ever have to know where it’s tantalite (the ore) comes from. It’s not even interested in tantalum itself: it only wants for there to be capacitors available when it wishes to buy them. What a market system does is allows the producers of tantalum to be expert in their arena of operations, how you get tantalum out of tantalite, where you can get tantalite from, and no one else has to trouble themselves about that at all. And the producers of capacitors don’t have to worry about tantalite or tantalum either: they just have to know who the producers of the necessary tantalum powder are.

Click here to read the full Forbes report.