A key aspect of transformative economic change is firms finding new ways to create and capture value, particularly as nations progress decarbonisation agendas. Economic geography has largely examined value creation and capture through the understanding that firms’ value-add by either profiting when they strategically couple with regional assets or where firms recognise value outside of traditional profits, such as through the livelihoods perspective. Both are different ways that local or extra-territorial firms might engage in global production networks, with findings particularly salient for manufacturing or service industries or certain areas of the world (such as Asia). There is much less know on how firms associated with primary production, such as mineral or agricultural commodities, in advanced capitalist nations might operate given the nature of global commodity markets where firm competitiveness depends on cost minimisation.
However, global calls to decarbonise entire production chains has pressured primary production industries to also decarbonise and to seek value outside of traditional low production cost strategies. Drawing understandings of value stream mapping from organisational theory and the Japanese ‘senary’ industry concept, this paper presents the findings of 16 interviews on agriculture production value add in Japan and Australia. Despite the different ways agriculture in each nation restructured during the neoliberalisation of the 1990s, it finds similarities in how firms have responded to transformative change, including decarbonisation and technology upgrading. Overall, value add appeared linked to how firms leveraged previously unused or underutilised parts (waste) of the regional economy. The results provide a novel means by which to understand links between production value add and regional development as global value chains decarbonise.