- [Nicole] Hey folks, today we're going to be looking at mapping industries and supply chains. So, the aims of this section are to gain an understanding of why it is useful to map a supply chain or get a kind of industry overview. We're going to want to gain an understanding of where industry information can be practically gathered from. We also want to understand the complexity of supply chains in a global capitalist system. That might be the topic of a PhD but we're just going to kind of look at it briefly. And I'm also going to show you some practical links of where to find UK export and import licences and other trade data. 

So, why is it useful to understand industries and supply chains? I think it's important to recognise that no company can be viewed in isolation. That all part of these broader capitalist systems with lots of like interconnected supply chains and people and countries. And I think it's really useful for organisers to understand like why the industries that companies operate in so that they can make like more strategic decisions about how to achieve the change they want. And also by like mapping an industry in its supply chains, it's may become more possible to identify vulnerabilities and like points of leverage. So where do we get the most bang for our buck in terms of targeting a company or trying to achieve a campaign goal. 

So, if you're looking to get insight on the industry of the particular company you're looking into, you're going to ask, like, where did the people in the industry hang out? How do they communicate? How do they share news with each other? What are their regular events? Where is the research undertaken? Like who are the leaders in the field? How are contracts awarded? 

So you can see here, this is a picture of the European Security and Defence Journal. So this is going to have articles by different people in the industry. There might be columns by people, industry heads and leaders that might communicate regular events and advertise things that are coming up. They might share latest research which can show you like where the research is undertaken. It could even talk about contracts in there. Like, what you just really want to do is like, find why that information is like every single industry has its own little world. Like if you're into gaming then there's going to be like gaming events and gaming celebrities and key bosses and key employers and like key things in history and magazines and blogs, all for gamers. If you're into like dance music, you're going to like your top DJs and your big events every year and, so you can tell I know nothing about dance music so don't know what I'm talking about, but you get the picture, like you're going to want to just zoom out, have this like bigger picture view of where are people hanging out in an industry. And one of the best things you can do is talk to someone who's got experience within an industry. And it's ideal if that person is sympathetic. 

When I was involved in a campaign to close down an animal testing company, there was someone in our group who formerly worked in the city in London. So, he had huge knowledge around finance and how companies stayed afloat and different types of investment, different types of shareholders. And that kind of information was so useful in the campaign. So yes, like industry insiders tell outsiders what is really going on behind the scenes so that people can take advantage of that knowledge. And it's often very different to what is publicly shared, like you're really going to get more of the dirt so to speak. So industry events are really great way to get kind of intelligence and information about an industry. You might be able to get information on key players, on trends, on individuals, on the key companies. And the great thing about industry events is that like, everyone's got their game face on, like everyone doing a stand wants to sell you something or show you something or make themselves look good. And so, people aren't going to be on guard in the same way. They're going to be there to like answer people's questions and be helpful. 

So this picture here is from the DSEI arms fair in London which is one of the biggest arms industries events in the world. And so yeah, for people that manage campaigners, that manage to get inside it, it's a very useful way of kind of getting an overview of what's happening in the arts industry. So yeah. In terms of attending industry events, you might have different aims. Obviously, some people attend industry events in order to like explicitly disrupt them. But if you're there in terms of like gathering information and research, you've probably got an aim to kind of blend in and what we say, like be grey, don't be noticeable, like large events are really great if you're going to be anonymous, but smaller events are maybe better if you want to kind of really build like trust and rapport with a certain individual, for example. 

So I've just got pictures here from a game fair. So obviously, I don't know everyone's politics during this course, but I personally really despise like fox hunting and killing animals for pleasure. And so a game fair might be a really good place for someone to go if they were like a hunt saboteur. And if they wanted to find out where the hunts are likely to be meeting, maybe they can get like a hunt game card, what are they called, date cards. So it will have all the dates of all the meets of where the hunt are going to be meeting for the season. Maybe it's a good way to find out emerging trends in industry. Oh, look like, rabbit shooting is on the app or I don't know. So I'm just like wildly making this up. But what I'm saying is, is really useful to attend industry events. And if you're going then, you kind of want to, you want to stand out, I mean, I'm like very heavily tattooed, but if I was going to an event, I would make sure they were covered up and I would make sure I kind of dress like everyone else. So, you might get some snazzy boots and snazzy coat, like in this picture here, but yeah, either way you just, you don't want to draw attention to yourself. You just want to fit in like everyone else and yeah, use it as a good opportunity to find it what's going on. 

So obviously groups do campaign against events and they also get into events and infiltrate them. So, one example of a successful campaign was kind of coalition of groups against Cardiff arms fair. So Cardiff in Wales, there was like an arms fair happening there. And local communities didn't want that to become a regular feature. So it was regularly targeted. And I believe like some people did get in and did find out useful information that was fed to various antiarms campaigns. So, yeah, it can be really useful. And if you can't get to physical events, another really great source of information is like industry websites and magazines. 

So, nearly every industry will have some sort of trade journal that shares news, events, research and these can be an absolute gold mine of information. Likewise, there's likely to be websites, forums, newsletters that are definitely worth subscribing to. So, here you've got construction magazine on the right which might be really useful if you're opposing like pressing construction, for example. So, yeah, so that's really useful. There might already be kind of industry focus groups. So, folks that have been organising or campaigning around a certain industry over the long term. So for example, electronics watch works on looking at kind of working conditions and the global electronics industry. And instead of starting from scratch, it's probably really worthwhile to talk to a group that's already got a bit of oversight over an industry. 

And then there's also great, business to business sources of information, so different kinds of business media, business databases, directories, there's loads of websites and organisations that do market research. So, they'll have huge profiles of industries and the key players and all of that stuff. And there's some great links to these resources here, on the corporate watch site from DIY guides. So, there's a list of business sources and a list of industry bodies and other industry sources to check out. So, the kind of next bit of this lesson is looking at supply chains. So, a supply chain is a network between a company and its suppliers to produce and distribute a specific product or service. This, the entities in the supply chain include producers, vendors, warehouses, transportation companies, distribution centres and retailers. And that's a very simplified definition of like some very complex supply chains that are possible. You can see this little overview here. 

So, for this customer to get whatever they want, I don't know a new t-shirt, maybe they've bought it in their physical shop. And some people have had to deliver to that physical shop and then some people have had to make it. And then maybe a supplier has supplied the raw materials. Maybe they've supplied them the cotton or the ink. And then someone's had to have grown those raw materials, have had to grow that cotton, for example. So yeah, it's very simplified example but you can kind of get the picture. So yeah, I think it's really useful in understanding a supply chain when you're targeting a company because yeah, you're going to, well, I'll talk about this in more detail in a minute but I'm just going to give a couple more examples to kind of cement this idea. 

So, this is the coal mine industry. So for example, we've got our inputs here. So, then what do they need to function right? They need mining and production equipment. They need land. And maybe so that, most likely private land ownership protected by government, could be government land. You've got the production processes here. So, finding the coal deposits like doing the surveys, preparing the sites and then you've got your actual processes. So, how they deal with all the waste products, how they do the actual mining and then that has to be transported. So maybe that's on via rail, maybe that's via ship. And ultimately that's going to go to its end market. So, two utilities, so how we keep the lights on or whatever, but every part of this chain, there are like opportunities for people to intervene strategically as campaigners. And that can be very useful, like to support those campaigns by doing this research and having this industry overview. So it might be that people are stopping the planning permission, so they're preventing access to land. So the whole process can't even begin. Maybe they are slowing down surveys, maybe they're targeting the companies that are doing the surveying or the prospecting, maybe they're actually trying to occupy or sabotage or something with the actual mining equipment to stop the production. Maybe those factories are getting closed down or whatever, maybe how the coal is getting moved around is getting, keep wanting to say sabotage, I don't want to encourage any law breaking of saying but I'm just giving an example, obviously, lots of partisans or resistance movements during wars have often targeted infrastructure to like reduce power to the Nazis, for example, and yeah. 

And or, there's also campaigns at this end, right? So, telling people to change their energy supplier or whatever. So that's just a little overview and I've got a couple more examples. So for example, animal liberation organisers, people who are campaigning against eating or exploiting animals, this is looking at the beef and leather supply chain. So, you've got your actual animal farms and your industrial animal farms, you've got your kind of slaughter houses, you've got the leather production, you've got your actual markets, right. Like where you're selling your dead animals to. And then you've got your distribution. So you've got your people that are driving carcasses around or whatever or driving final products around supermarkets. And then maybe you've got your marketing, the people that are encouraging, promoting animal farming, for example. And yeah. And that's obviously where the consumer are going to potentially buy what you've produced for them. But again, like different campaigners have focused on different parts of the supply chain. 

Like some people are really fighting like the animal farming, like in its principle, they're fighting against land grabbing or deforestation, maybe activists in the past have targeted slaughter houses or companies profiting from it. And that way maybe they've done demos at local markets giving out leaflets there, there's obviously like all these opportunities for intervention, but yeah, whatever industry your business that you're researching is in like, I really recommend mapping out their supply chain. So, yeah. 

Final example here about the fashion industry. So, like I said about the cotton before, there's all these different layers. So, you might have your homeworkers, your workshops who are subcontractors who are selling goods to factories and they're producing them and they're selling them to brands and retailers who are making a pretty penny on the internet. You might get your farms here that are growing the cotton and the traders and then people that are processing it in the mills and then that's being sold into this supply chain. So you can see, these are very like complicated globalised capitalist systems, but it's really useful to get an understanding of these industries. 

So just a case study again. So, I was fortunate to be quite active in the animal liberation movement from a very young age. And when I got involved, there was like quite a lot of successful campaigns in close succession. And the reason for this success was because there was a targeting of laboratory animal breeders. So, the focus in the kind of global supply chain was okay, we're going to prevent the labs from even having access to those animals. And that was by closing down like smaller farms. So, it might not be winnable to close down these huge university research labs or these huge companies that hunted in life sciences but it might be more achievable to close down some of their suppliers. And so, yeah, there was a beagle company that were breeding beagles for animal testing, they got closed and a cat farm and a monkey farm and a rabbit farm and then a guinea pig farm. And yeah, again, everyone's got a different worldview on tactics and actions or whatever, this movement involved a real diversity of tactics. But what I'm trying to emphasise is more that people took like an industry level view and that was what was effective in kind of impacting the industry in general. And similar to the fur industry. So, different parts of the supply chain were targeted. So, you had your people at Harrods doing demos, doing grassroots high street campaigns, giving out leaflets, doing billboards, trying to like create this cultural shift around fur in that it's like unethical. And then you had people like attacking the other end of the supply chain. So, you had people raiding farms, liberating animals, campaigning against fur auctions and fur trade organisations, for example. So, yeah, so there's always like different places to focus your efforts. 

And part of your research is about identifying like what's potentially the most strategic for you and your group. But lastly, I'm just going to introduce like another way of like understanding supply chains. And again, our government loves data. So, we're going to look at the import and export systems in the UK, and I'll just bring this up now. So, the UK trade info site is an absolute minefield of information. There's so much on here. So, you can look at all sorts of statistics. 

So, I've just pulled up just a couple of examples. So, an overseas of UK overseas trade in good statistics in January of this year. So, it's got how many billions worth of exports and imports there were, trades with the EU, top trading partners. So, combined imports and exports, the USA, China, top traded commodities. So precious metals, mechanical appliances, top exported things, top imported things. And yeah, you can download this as a spreadsheet and you can look at that data in more detail. So for example, here, this was from last summer but you can see the kind of value of the imports in, from the EU in July. So, there was millions of pounds worth of live animals and meat imported, coffee, cereals, beverages, tobacco, and you can see like the value of that input and how much we've imported into the UK. And another option that you can do, which is very useful is you can search traders. 

So, when you go to their search function, you've got different options here. So, you've got traders by commodity code, by commodity description, by postcode and by trader name. So, I've just put in BAE, British Aerospace who are an arms company and you can see they've got several different limited companies, but let's look at the military air, Overseas Limited, so we can see they exported all sorts of stuff, nuclear reactors even, data processing machines. And so you can download this as a spreadsheet and get kind of an overview of what they've been exporting. And then the other options are looking at arms export licences. So, the campaign against arms trade have already put together this export licence data which I just showed you. So they've got here. You can search for example, worldwide since 2019, let's have a look. And again, when I slow internet. And you can see the destination. So, can choose a specific country, what type of thing, maybe it's warships, maybe it's ammunition. You might want to Google a specific item or look at a particular company and you can see 8.8 billion pounds of licences approved and yeah. Saudi Arabia, over 2 billion, Qatar, USA. Yeah. So, yeah, so they've got, and feel free to drop them an email. They've got loads of great research on here. They've made it really accessible and they also have this EU export data too. So you can see, for example, how much, how many arms people have exported across the EU. That's really useful too. So, gratitude to them for the resources and yeah, I think that's everything. Yeah, okay, brilliant. 

So yeah, obviously a lot of information there about industries and supply chains and hopefully, some practical tools at the end but what I'd really encourage you to do now with your research is to yeah, identify the industry that your company is in and try and do a little mind map overview of it, who are the key players and maybe think about try and identify at least a couple of sources of information, for example, a trade journal or an annual event that happens where that could be a really useful source of information for your campaign. Okay, thanks.