As part of the TWAILR symposium on the United Nations Centre for Transnational Corporations (UNCTC), Caitlin Murphy 1 reflects on corporate ‘counter-strategies’ to the Third World’s NIEO agenda through the lens of a 1978 report produced jointly by the UNCTC and the UN Industrial Development Organisation on transnational corporations and the processing of raw materials.
TWAILR: Reflections ~ 84/2026
Halfway through a 1978 report from the UN Centre on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC) and the UN Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) on transnational corporations and the processing of raw materials, we can see two revealing statements. One is a quote from an executive of Shell Petroleum, who proclaims that the role of corporations in relation to commodity-producing states ‘remains vital’. The Shell executive listed the various virtues of corporate presence as including an ‘uninterrupted source of revenue’ and ‘the provision of essential technology and services’.2 Much could be said about these sentiments, but the analysis of UNIDO and UNCTC themselves is the second instructive statement: ‘as long as developing countries are highly dependent on TNCs [transnational corporations] in order to access markets abroad, it is evident that achieving “permanent sovereignty over natural resources by developing countries” is not enough’.3
This archive and the work of the UNCTC therefore provides material to build on the rich existing analysis connecting the extraction and production of commodities to legal regimes, political forms, financial markets and corporations. For the purposes of this short reflection, I want to focus on one specific aspect that relates to what the aforementioned report calls corporate ‘counter-strategies’ to the NIEO, and particularly on what we could see as the development of the supply chain form.
The Third World had sought to challenge the existing international economic order through tactics such as changing the terms of trade, commodity price buffers or permanent sovereignty over resources. The stakes of this project related to racialisation, colonial labour, trade and finance, and debt. Corporations responded to these challenges in a variety of ways. Firstly and most explicitly, in many cases they collaborated with efforts to de-stabilise governments that threatened their interests, or if this failed pursued significant compensation from states in the South for what the corporation framed as expropriations of their property. The 1978 report from UNCTC and UNIDO lists many instances where hundreds of millions of dollars were paid, including the largest amount of compensation at the time of the report’s publication: $500 million to Belgian corporation Union Minière du Haute Katanga, after copper mines were nationalised by the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1966.4 Secondly, and as was evident in the comments of the Shell executive, corporations also tried to frame their investment as beneficial for development. This was largely successful in the way that the discourses and practices of promoting corporate partnerships were taken up within international institutions. Thirdly, and most notably for my purposes here, this archival material also shows us that corporations pursued strategies that we might today call ‘value-added’ production, or diversification from a vertically-integrated structure in order to hold a particular market position. The UNIDO and UNCTC report calls this a ‘trend towards horizontal integration and the growth of a few multi-mineral corporations’, in direct response to decolonising states’ collective organising and assertions of control over natural resource sectors.5 In practical terms, this meant fragmenting different aspects of production – which had previously been conducted by the same company – into different corporate structures across multiple locations that may be more complicated to nationalise.
We can therefore trace several themes from the UNCTC and UNIDO’s insight about value-added production and its relationship to the NIEO that can serve as the foundation for further work. Firstly, it shows that the corporate practice of retaining control over formerly colonial resources was an inseparable part of the development of what we might now think of as a supply chain economy – more fragmented and dispersed, connected to global markets and finance, with a focus on trading or ‘adding value’ to products rather than only resource extraction. Indeed, commentators have traced this moment as one where resource trading, financialisation and intensification of market price mechanisms grew. At a meeting of the emergent G7 a couple of years before the publication of this UNCTC and UNIDO report, in 1975, then President of France Valéry Giscard d’Estaing even described the G77 proposal of buffer stocks to stabilise commodity prices in favour of the Global South as threatening ‘world equilibrium’. This has ongoing implications because, secondly, as I have argued elsewhere, we can see from this archive that the connection between political and economic forms in the international legal order and struggles at the time can help us to understand the work that the supply chain form does today to shape relations of production as well to circumscribe political possibilities.6
In short, substantial reorganisation of the global economy is structurally suppressed by supply chain forms. This second theme can also shed light on current corporate resource extraction of minerals for green energy technology, and the state subsidies and political support that often underpin such extraction. In this way, the UNCTC archive provides new materials to trace shifts and continuities in state and corporate practices to undermine Global South resource sovereignty and associated change to financial markets, in part through the development of a supply chain economy. This can inform our understandings of contemporary struggles to resist corporate practice and associated strategies that insist on the continuing relevance of colonial extraction, the intersections between racialisation, labour and production, and the need to eschew a corporate-led energy transition for more meaningful climate justice, reparations and solidarity.
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- Lecturer, RMIT and Research Fellow, Laureate Program on Global Corporations and International Law, Melbourne Law School. Email: Caitlin.murphy2@rmit.edu.au. With thanks to the editors of TWAILR, and to André Dao and Shahd Hammouri for their insights and for the work of compiling this archive.
- UNIDO, Industrial Development Board, ‘Transnational Corporations and the Processing of Raw Materials’ (Vienna, 16-26 May 1978), Twelfth Session, Agenda item 10, ID/B/209, 19
- Ibid, 19.
- UNIDO, ‘Transnational Corporations and the Processing of Raw Materials, 15. Union Minière now operates as Umicore, see ‘Our journey to becoming a leading circular materials technology company’.
- UNIDO, ‘Transnational Corporations and the Processing of Raw Materials’, 26.
- Caitlin Murphy, ‘Lithium and the form of supply chains in the international legal order’ (2025), PhD thesis, Melbourne Law School.