Stefan Ouma

Global standards, local realities: private agrifood governance and the restructuring of the Kenyan horticulture industry.

abstract Over the past decade, private food safety and quality standards have become focal points in the supply chain management of large retailers, reshaping governance patterns in global agrifood chains. In this article, I analyze the relationship between private collective standards and the governance of agrifood markets, using the EUREPGAP/GLOBALGAP standard as a vantage point. I discuss the impact of this standard on the organization of supply chains of fresh vegetables in the Kenyan horticulture industry, focusing on the supply chain relationships and practices among exporters and smallholder farmers. In so doing, I seek to highlight the often-contested nature of the implementation of standards in social fields that are marked by different and distributed principles of evaluating quality, production processes, and legitimate actions in the marketplace. I also reconstruct the challenges and opportunities that exporters and farmers are facing with regard to the implementation of and compliance with standards. Finally, I elaborate on the scope for action that producers and policymakers have under these structures to retain sectoral competitiveness in a global economy of qualities.

Assembling export markets : the making and unmaking of global food connections in West Africa

Description: Assembling Export Markets explores the new ‘frontier regions’ of the global fresh produce market that has emerged in Ghana over the past decade. Represents a major and empirically rich contribution to the emerging field of the social studies of economization and marketization Offers one of the first ethnographic accounts on the making of global commodity chains ‘from below’ Denaturalizes global markets by unpacking their local engagement, materially entangled construction, need for maintenance, and fragile character Offers a trans-disciplinary engagement with the construction and extension of market relations in two frontier regions of global capitalism Critically examines the opportunities and risks for firms and farms in Ghana entering global fresh produce markets

The new enclosures

Die „Agrarfrage“, also die Frage, in welcher Beziehung die innere Struktur der Landwirtschaft zu (globalen) kapitalistischen Transformationsprozessen steht, ist beinahe so alt wie Debatten uber „den Kapitalismus“ selbst. Wahrend sich diesbezuglich in der vielfach dynamisierten Landwirtschaft des 21. Jahrhunderts zahlreiche Anknupfungspunkte finden liesen, muss diese im Hinblick auf gegenwartige globale Einhegungen („enclosures“) neu gestellt werden (White et al. 2012).

The Making and Remaking of Agro-Industries in Africa

Abstract This article introduces the special section on the making and remaking of agro-industries in Africa. It examines what the contributions tell us about how agro-industries work, but also why national industries work the way they do, how they came to be that way and what factors and forces drive or hinder their dynamism.

Getting in between M and M′ or How farmland further debunks financialization

This commentary takes up some of the arguments Christophers develops in his piece on ‘The Limits to Financialization’ and spins them further through the prism of the ‘financialization’ of farmland and agriculture. The paper requalifies the optic, empiric, and strategic limits of the financialization literature that Christophers identifies, eventually making a call for ‘getting in between’ M and M′—exploring the practical activities of financial economization while at the same time maintaining the analytical validity of the category of capital. This is a frictional project. The contribution ends with a note on strategy, asking whether knowledge about such activities can be of any strategic political use.

Creating and Maintaining Global Connections: Agro-business and the Precarious Making of Fresh-cut Markets

Abstract This article reconstructs the evolution of a multinational fruit processing company from Ghana. Starting from the perspective that firms more generally aim at achieving stability in intra- and extra-organisational relations, the article explores the practical means (organisational forms, resources, technologies, strategies and routines) through which the case study company achieved relational stability in global markets, but also shows how this was eroded in changing market environments. Extending out from this case study, the article also addresses the questions why some agro-business firms in Africa have developed more sophisticated high-value market connections while others have not and whether foreign direct investments can serve as catalysts for agro-industrialisation.

The difference that ‘capitalism’ makes: on the merits and limits of critical political economy in African Studies

SUMMARY The goal of this Briefing is to weigh in carefully on the respective merits and limits of critical political economy perspectives in African Studies (and beyond) and to make a case for ontological and theoretical modesty. Rather than taking African capitalist societies for granted, we should unpick how particular social entities are being made.

Shrooms of hope: Can Matsutake save Global Commodity Chain Research…and ‘our’ dear world?TsingAnna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017; 352 pp.: 9780691178325,

the Matsutake Worlds Research Group itself, which is the collaborative project through which Tsing undertook her research. The Matsutake Worlds Research Group sought to understand how to develop an ‘emergent multispecies historical ecology’ (p. 143) by developing collective ways of working that might ‘encourage the unknown potential of scholarly advances’ (p. 286). In their ‘common intellectual woodland’ (p. 286), the research group finds that a collaborative project, as well as any latent commons, is inevitably always ‘imperfect and under revision’ (p. 255) and yet still engaged with attempts not only to notice relations but also to cultivate new world-making projects. From this mushroom-eye view, Tsing then demonstrates how matsutake offer ways of developing collective endeavours that take account of the diverse, entangled, contaminated and imperfect aspects of relations. By asking how it might be possible to ‘make common cause with other living beings’ (p. 254), we might in one way especially attend to sensing, listening and noticing as modes of ‘political work’ (p. 254). And yet, as Tsing notes, listening is not enough, since ‘the end of the world’ is less a scene of the planet as an apocalyptic fireball, and more an encounter with the relations that we have ignored, overlooked or even ruined. ‘Imagining the interactions among roots, hyphae, charcoal, and bacteria – as well as among Chinese, Japanese, and Finnish scientists’, Tsing writes, ‘is as good a way as any to refigure our understanding of survival as a collaborative project’ (p. 280). From these perspectives of mushrooms, mycorrhizal, forests, foragers, pickers, volunteers and collaborators, different worlds come into view that – among other things – even begin to rework how we could undertake practices of environmental research.

19.95, £14.95 (Paperback); 2015; 352 pp.: 9780691162751,

Over the past years, we have seen a swath of both popular and academic books being published on the changing positionality of Africa in the global economy. Many of these were either concerned with the growing engagement of China or India in African, or the new scramble for Africa more generally, and much of this debate has been overshadowed by the Africa rising discourse that heralds the continent as the last frontier of global capitalism (Radelet 2010). More recently, the attention has shifted to the rise of what Goldman Sachs analyst Jim O’Neill popularized as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). Pádraig Carmody’s latest book The Rise of the BRICS in Africa: The Geopolitics of South-South Relations adds to this debate. It is a welcome contribution given the fact that the new South-South connections reshaping Africa’s economic and political geographies have been largely ignored by economic geographers. This seems to be yet another missed boat (Dicken 2004)—in fact a very big boat. After all, the BRICS countries are home to more than 40 percent of the world’s population and “accounted for 55 per cent of global economic growth between 2000–08” (p. 2). While the book is situated at the intersections of critical geopolitics, international relations, and international political economy, it still has something to offer to economic geographers due to its ambition to explore how the rise of the BRICS reshapes Africa’s geopolitical and geoeconomic relations, and how it has impacted on patterns of investment, uneven development, and governance on the continent. The book makes three convincing arguments in the introduction, which are subsequently developed through individual chapters on each BRICS country. First, Carmody reckons that “the rise of the BRICS is fundamentally reshaping global governance and geopolitics, and also the prospects of African development” (p. 5). It represents a challenge to traditional powers and their neoliberal policy recipes, “opening up new policy space and reconfiguring and restructuring processes of globalization” (p. 6) on the continent. According to him, this “conjuncture opens up the potential for African states to play a greater role in the development process” (p. 6.). However, he is quick to point out that the BRICS are neither a uniform entity with common interests—despite their collective ambition to create a multipolar world order—nor is globalization, even if reconfigured by new powers, a universalizing force. Instead, the BRICS’ globalization strategies are shaped by different historical legacies, economic structures, ideologies, and interests. Their deepening engagement with African states results in selectively, translocally connected archipelagos with “graduated sovereignty” (a term he borrows from Aihwa Ong) rather than in the structural transformation of African economies as a whole. Eventually, Carmody is rather pessimistic in terms of the transformative power of the new South-South connections, emphasizing that the historical extraversion of African political economies “remains unchanged as the continent remains primarily a recipient of limited and natural-resource-concentrated foreign direct investments, an aid recipient and an exporter of primary commodities” (p. 137). What makes Africa a new battleground for old and new powers alike is commodity boom–induced economic growth, increasing resource scarcity and quest to maintain processes of surplus accumulation by expanding existing markets. This is particularly the case for China, South Africa, and Brazil. While African states display considerable agency when it comes to the question 223 BO O K R EV EW

29.95, £24.95 (Hardcover).

Over the past years, we have seen a swath of both popular and academic books being published on the changing positionality of Africa in the global economy. Many of these were either concerned with the growing engagement of China or India in African, or the new scramble for Africa more generally, and much of this debate has been overshadowed by the Africa rising discourse that heralds the continent as the last frontier of global capitalism (Radelet 2010). More recently, the attention has shifted to the rise of what Goldman Sachs analyst Jim O’Neill popularized as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). Pádraig Carmody’s latest book The Rise of the BRICS in Africa: The Geopolitics of South-South Relations adds to this debate. It is a welcome contribution given the fact that the new South-South connections reshaping Africa’s economic and political geographies have been largely ignored by economic geographers. This seems to be yet another missed boat (Dicken 2004)—in fact a very big boat. After all, the BRICS countries are home to more than 40 percent of the world’s population and “accounted for 55 per cent of global economic growth between 2000–08” (p. 2). While the book is situated at the intersections of critical geopolitics, international relations, and international political economy, it still has something to offer to economic geographers due to its ambition to explore how the rise of the BRICS reshapes Africa’s geopolitical and geoeconomic relations, and how it has impacted on patterns of investment, uneven development, and governance on the continent. The book makes three convincing arguments in the introduction, which are subsequently developed through individual chapters on each BRICS country. First, Carmody reckons that “the rise of the BRICS is fundamentally reshaping global governance and geopolitics, and also the prospects of African development” (p. 5). It represents a challenge to traditional powers and their neoliberal policy recipes, “opening up new policy space and reconfiguring and restructuring processes of globalization” (p. 6) on the continent. According to him, this “conjuncture opens up the potential for African states to play a greater role in the development process” (p. 6.). However, he is quick to point out that the BRICS are neither a uniform entity with common interests—despite their collective ambition to create a multipolar world order—nor is globalization, even if reconfigured by new powers, a universalizing force. Instead, the BRICS’ globalization strategies are shaped by different historical legacies, economic structures, ideologies, and interests. Their deepening engagement with African states results in selectively, translocally connected archipelagos with “graduated sovereignty” (a term he borrows from Aihwa Ong) rather than in the structural transformation of African economies as a whole. Eventually, Carmody is rather pessimistic in terms of the transformative power of the new South-South connections, emphasizing that the historical extraversion of African political economies “remains unchanged as the continent remains primarily a recipient of limited and natural-resource-concentrated foreign direct investments, an aid recipient and an exporter of primary commodities” (p. 137). What makes Africa a new battleground for old and new powers alike is commodity boom–induced economic growth, increasing resource scarcity and quest to maintain processes of surplus accumulation by expanding existing markets. This is particularly the case for China, South Africa, and Brazil. While African states display considerable agency when it comes to the question 223 BO O K R EV EW