Contemporary capitalism has been in a process of restructuring driven by giant corporations for which the world as a whole has become the playing field, more than ever before. As such, components of a single end-use commodity/final output are conceived, designed, produced, procured, and processed in different parts of the globe, before being assembled at a specific destination for ultimate consumption, which again may have a global reach. This is the crux of what is termed Global Value Systems (GVSs) in this article, a notion which is introduced in its conceptual underpinnings and historical significance. This then applied to global agriculture, to argue that a key feature of contemporary capitalism is the expansion of Global Agricultural Value Systems (GAVSs), alongside the GVSs in industry and services. GAVSs have contributed to the strengthening of direct land acquisitions and contract farming or out-grower models in the peripheries across the South.
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