Invisible Brokers, Visible Haze: Value Chains and the Political Ecology of Northern Thailand’s Maize Economy

Each dry season, thick haze blankets northern Thailand. Maize cultivation, driven largely by demand for animal feed, is one of its most politically contested sources. Policy responses often target farmers through burning bans, technical fixes, and behavioural change campaigns. This article focuses on the middlemen who link upland maize fields to downstream feed markets. It shows that brokers, traders, and silo operators, by controlling access to credit, logistics, and markets, translate corporate demand, price volatility, and regulatory pressures into everyday farming practices. Moral economies of debt, reciprocity, and patronage intersect with buyer-driven value chain pressures to shape brokerage practices and disperse accountability for environmental harm. These practices reinforce farmers’ dependence on maize, and make burning appear the most viable option while displacing responsibility onto farmers and shielding large agribusinesses. The article demonstrates that market power operates through everyday social relations of credit, trust, and loyalty to reproduce unequal commodity relations. This helps explain why haze persists despite repeated policy interventions. The article integrates middlemen into environmental governance analyses, shows that value chain governance and moral economy combine to reproduce environmental injustice, and contributes to meatways scholarship, tracing the intermediary networks through which national and regional meat demand reproduces environmental harm.