Global Standards, Local Realities: PrivateAgrifood Governance and the Restructuringof the Kenyan Horticulture Industry

Stefan OumaDepartment of Human

GeographyGoethe University of

FrankfurtRobert-Mayer-Straße 6-860325 FrankfurtGermanyouma@em.uni-frankfurt.de

Key words:private standardsEUREPGAPGLOBALGAPexport horticulturegovernanceglobal value chainsmarketsKenya

abst

ract Over the past decade, private food safety and quality

standards have become focal points in the supplychain management of large retailers, reshaping gov-ernance patterns in global agrifood chains. In thisarticle, I analyze the relationship between privatecollective standards and the governance of agrifoodmarkets, using the EUREPGAP/GLOBALGAP stan-dard as a vantage point. I discuss the impact of thisstandard on the organization of supply chains of freshvegetables in the Kenyan horticulture industry, focus-ing on the supply chain relationships and practicesamong exporters and smallholder farmers. In sodoing, I seek to highlight the often-contested natureof the implementation of standards in social fieldsthat are marked by different and distributed principlesof evaluating quality, production processes, andlegitimate actions in the marketplace. I also recon-struct the challenges and opportunities that exportersand farmers are facing with regard to the implemen-tation of and compliance with standards. Finally, Ielaborate on the scope for action that producers andpolicymakers have under these structures to retainsectoral competitiveness in a global economy ofqualities.ecge_1065 197..222

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful for commentsand suggestions on earlierdrafts of the article byWendy Larner, Peter Lindner,Sabine Dörry, ChristianBerndt, Martin Müller, EvelynMoser, three anonymousreviewers, and the editors ofEconomic Geography.Allerrors are, of course, mine.

Over the past decade, the rise of private food safetyand quality standards has been one of the most out-standing trends in the global agrifood system, chang-ing the rules of the game for participant firms andfarms. The proliferation of these standards is rooted inthe restructuring of consumer markets, competitivedynamics in the retail sector, and the regulatory devo-lution of quality assurance from public authorities toretailers and certification bodies in NorthAmerica andthe European Union (EU). Responding to variousfood scares that swept through these markets in the1990s and increasing concerns of both consumers andpublic regulators about the origin of food, largeretailers have reorganized their supply chainsaround notions of traceability, food safety, and qualityassurance.

The landscape of private food regulators hasbecome diverse. Private agrifood standards have beendeveloped by individual companies (company- orvalue chain–specific standards); business coalitions(sector-specific standards), such as the British RetailConsortium (BRC); or broad-based public-privatenetworks of multiple stakeholders, such as in the caseof the Common Code for the Coffee Community (4C-Initiative), a pioneering standard that ensures ethicalsourcing practices among coffee traders and grinders(cf. Nadvi and Wältring 2004; Tallontire 2007).

These standards differ from public standards laiddown in national or multilateral food safety regula-tions (such as the EU Food Law) in a number of ways.With most of them driven by powerful corporationsand business coalitions, these private standards oftenlack the broad-based legitimacy or contestability ofpublic food standards (e.g., as granted under the WTOAgreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures).They also embrace a more precautionary fork-to-farmapproach to food safety and quality assurance thatdiffers from the border-based, ex-post approach ofmany public-sector agencies (Jaffee and Masakure2005).

Moreover, these standards have become more thanmere private institutions enforcing the safety andquality of food. Food safety1 is widely treated as a

1 A distinction is usually made between food safety/food qualityand labor, environmental, social, fair-trade, and ethical stan-dards (cf. Nadvi and Wältring 2004). In this article, I make thisdistinction for technical not theoretical reasons, since all theseattributes refer to the spatiotemporal framing of a product(Callon 2005, 7) according to different principles of evaluation.

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noncompetitive factor in the marketplace, with retailers increasingly trying to competeless over sanitary and phytosanitary issues than by embedding “extra quality” into productand process standards through claims of sustainability, well-being, fair trade, andmorality.

It is evident that private agrifood standards have become a business in itself. As retailmarkets have become highly competitive and food markets have become more saturatedin North America and the EU, corporate rent seeking through the branding and differen-tiation of products has become a distinct feature of contemporary retail capitalism(Freidberg 2007). The move of retailers like Tesco to develop in-house standards exem-plifies this development. Although Tesco has been crucial in driving a number of sector-based agrifood standards, such as the BRC, to ensure a minimum standard of food safetyat the sector level, it has tried to distinguish itself simultaneously from its competitors bydeveloping its own brand, Nature’s Choice, whose standards are far more rigid, compre-hensive, and exclusive than other baseline standards.

The repercussions and impacts of the proliferation of private agrifood standards onsmallholder farmers and exporters in the global South are perceived to be significant.Although optimists have identified opportunities for modernizing agricultural exportsystems and have anticipated potential regulatory spillovers to domestic markets in thewake of their diffusion (Jaffee and Masakure 2005, 332), critics of private agrifoodstandards have highlighted the high costs of compliance and their inherent technicalcomplexity, condemning them as nontariff trade barriers (UNCTAD 2007). Privateagrifood standards may eventually act as entry barriers to global agrifood chains, exclud-ing small firms and farms in the global South from markets, or, at least, lower theprofitability of high-value food exports. As some authors have argued, particularlyAfrican firms and farms may be negatively affected by the proliferation of privateagrifood standards because many struggle with poor access to implementation know-how,capital, and low-cost certification services and, as a result, are “traded down” in regula-torily dynamic markets (Gibbon and Ponte 2005).

Although some studies have reported the negative effects of private agrifood standardson African smallholders (e.g., Dolan and Humphrey 2004; Fold 2008; see Maertens andSwinnen 2009 for a critical assessment), some striking questions remain. Little is knownin economic geography and related disciplines about how food safety and quality stan-dards, as new models of organizing socioeconomic and socioenvironmental relationships,are actually implemented, enforced, negotiated, and contested along supply chains andbetween standard bearers and standard setters. Pressing questions remain about how localfirms, farmers, and institutional actors, such as industry associations and policymakers,engage with these standards; how these actors translate private agrifood into particularsettings, since global standards often collide with regulatory systems as well as economic,management, and environmental realities (“local realities”) in particular places; how thisprocess transforms given institutionally, culturally, and environmentally embedded eco-nomic practices and relationships of production and exchange; and how local implemen-tation experiences feed back into standard-setting networks at a global scale.

In light of these shortcomings, this article reconstructs the restructuring of the Kenyanhorticulture industry through the proliferation of the EUREPGAP standard. EUREPGAPhas become the most widely applied private agrifood quality assurance scheme since1997 and was renamed GLOBALGAP (the name used hereafter) in September 2007 in an

Thus, I do not distinguish among the physical/material, process, and symbolic attributes of products butconsider them as different configurations of product framings in the sense of actor-network-theory.Therefore, in this article, I use the term quality in a broad sense.

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effort to mark its global relevance.A particularly interesting case is Kenya, one ofAfrica’sleading exporters of horticultural products to the European Union, whose future wasperceived to be at stake owing to the rise of GLOBALGAP. The fears of the negativedevelopmental effects of GLOBALGAP justify a more detailed analysis. Although someaccounts of the potentially exclusionary impact of the standard on African producersexist, they have been anecdotal (Freidberg 2004, 2007), lacked a general theoreticalframework (Graffham, Karehu, and MacGregor 2007), or focused on donor policy issues(Humphrey 2008).

Hence, compared to previous work, I provide two original contributions. Conceptually,I plead for a different understanding of governance in global value chains (GVC).2

Departing from the general proposition that the concept of governance “highlights theconcrete practices and organizational forms through which a specific division of labourbetween lead firms and other economic agents involved in the conceptualization, produc-tion and distribution of goods in global industries is established and managed” (Gibbon,Bair, and Ponte 2008, 319), I draw attention to a new momentum whereby powerfulretailers try to change the very institutional framework of markets (“institutional gover-nance”) and the economic practices of suppliers within them to achieve certain corporatetargets that are related to compliance with food safety and quality standards. I argue thatGLOBALGAP resembles a retailer-driven attempt to enforce a market-based mode ofself-regulation through which individual farmers’ skills are benchmarked against eachother. This fixing of relationships and economic practices enhances the scopes of export-ers, importers, and retailers to calculate the quality performance of their supply base at aregional vis-à-vis a global scale and ensures the legibility of distant suppliers.

I analyze this process through a critique of established notions of governance in GVCanalysis, drawing on insights from recent reformulations of governance within the GVC(Ponte and Gibbon 2005; Gibbon, Bair, and Ponte 2008; Tallontire 2007) and the globalproduction networks (GPN) framework (Coe and Hess 2007). First, this critique extendsthe notion of governance from a chain level to a collective or sector level; second, I arguethat governance through externally audited standards can be understood as an attempt tonormalize farming and business practices according to prescriptive models of organizingsupply chains.

Such a process of normalization, however, leaves space for deviance, compromises,and negotiation along the supply chain and between standard setters and standard bearers,to some extent dismissing Leviathan-like notions of governance that many studies ofglobal commodity chains (GCC) and GVC have embraced (Dicken, Kelly, Olds, andYeung 2001). Here I draw on a practice-oriented3 sociology of markets to show thatnormalization poses an organizational problem because markets are usually sites ofdifferent evaluative principles with regard to what counts as “quality” and what isconsidered legitimate behavior in the marketplace (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006;Thévenot 2001). Particular market models, such as standards, are invoked in practice onlyif market agents agree on these models. The central issue, then, is how and when standardsbecome effective and when they do not. Thus, governance is articulated as a problem of

2 For a more detailed discussion of different typologies of chains and networks, see Gereffi, Humphrey,Kaplinksy, and Sturgeon (2001); Bair (2005); and the 2008 special issues of the Journal of EconomicGeography and Economy and Society.

3 There is a wide range of conceptions of practice in the social science literature (for an excellent overview,see Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, and Von Savigny 2001). In this article, I draw on Fold’s (2008, 99) use of theterm practice in the sense of “different actors’ way of going about daily activities and routines involvingproduction, exchange or—for that matter—consumption of agricultural products.”

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streamlining different frames of evaluation to make coordination possible in fields of“multiple principles of evaluation” (Stark 2009). This effort is the subject of the first partof the article.

My second contribution is an empirical one. I first reconstruct changes in the organi-zation, relationships, and economic practices within supply chains following the imple-mentation of GLOBALGAP in the Kenyan horticulture industry. I focus particularly onhow the introduction of GLOBALGAP has affected the organizational relationshipsbetween exporters and smallholder producers of fresh vegetables because the latter havetraditionally been the backbone of a globally oriented export sector. I also discuss themajor entry barriers for smallholder farmers and exporters and the potential benefits theycan reap from compliance with the standard.

Furthermore, I elaborate on the scope for action that producers have under the GLOBAL-GAP regime. This scope is usually formed in wider organizational spaces of standardsnegotiation and knowledge circulation. Quality experts at the industry level, developmentorganizations acting as advocates for smallholder farmers, and providers of agrobusinessservices have all been engaged in a multistakeholder dialogue with standard setters toenhance the scope of implementation for Kenyan producers. These transnational nego-tiations of standards have so far received little attention in GVC analyses.

Ultimately, I show that the often-attested negative impact of the standard on small-holder farmers in Kenya (see Graffham, Karehu, and MacGregor 2007) must be reas-sessed for the time being, since many farmers continue to participate in value chainsthrough backstage arrangements and situated compromises on what counts as “qualityproduce” in the marketplace, notwithstanding the steady enclosure of markets through thecreation of more robust “certified spaces” (Mutersbaugh 2005a, 394). These issues aredealt with in the second part of the article.

Managing Markets at a DistanceGLOBALGAP: A Global Network for Good Agricultural Practices

The GLOBALGAP standard has attracted the attention of researchers and developmentpractitioners alike over the past few years because of its rapid proliferation and strictrequirements for quality assurance. The scheme was launched as a business-to-businessstandard by a coalition of mainly British and Dutch retailers in 1997 to harmonize existingdisparate (chain-specific) supermarket protocols on the safety and quality of food.

Since then, the standard has successively increased its membership base (see Figure 1).It has evolved from an exclusively retailer-based coalition to a more open multistake-holder network, consisting of retailers, producers, input suppliers, and certification bodiesfrom the North and South alike. Nevertheless, the executive power still rests with anexclusive club made up of representatives of big retailers and suppliers mainly from theglobal North (see Figure 1).

GLOBALGAP obliges producers to demonstrate good agricultural practices (GAPs),and its main concerns are sanitary, phytosanitary, and environmental issues. In that, itdiffers from some other chain-based private standards, such as Tesco’s Nature’s Choice,which are usually much more rigid and comprehensive on social and ethical issues.GLOBALGAP has adopted a process-based precautionary approach toward food safetyand quality, requiring producers systematically to reduce and manage risks along theproduction process at the farm level (see Table 1).

A central requirement is the traceability of products from “fork to field,” ensuring areconnection between buyers and far-distant producers. To comply with GLOBALGAP’sstipulations regarding the quality and safety of food, producers have to make

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Figure 1. Trends in GLOBALGAP certification (as of February 2009). Source: Own design, datafrom Foodplus (2009).

Table 1

Major Control Points of GLOBALGAP

Area of Performance Practice

Traceability Growers must guarantee that the produce can be traced back to the farm level byregistering the exact planting and harvesting date of produce on signs attached toindividual plots.

Recordkeeping andinternal self-inspection

Producers are required to keep records on all substances applied to crops, the exactamount, and the date of application.An internal self-inspection must be performed atleast once a year.

Varieties and rootstocks Only certified/authorized seed varieties may be used.Site history and site

managementThe history of a farm site has to be checked for environmental issues, for example, if trees

were felled for cultivation or whether the land has been contaminated (e.g., throughheavy metals).

Risk assessment Potential risks during the production process have to be systematically identified, assessed,and reduced.Water and soil analyses have to be taken and checked for heavy metals.Maximum residue samples have to be taken at least once a year for a certain number ofplots. Health risks must be assessed for workers.

Fertilizer use Only approved fertilizers may be used; inorganic and organic fertilizers have to be storedseparately from crops or seeds.

Irrigation Contaminated water must not be used for irrigation.Integrated pest

managementPests must be dealt with in ecologically sensitive ways. Crops must be treated with

pesticides punctually if affected. Producers must ensure a minimum time betweenspraying and harvesting.

Harvesting and producehandling

Hygienic treatment of harvested produce must be ensured.

Source: Adapted from Foodplus (2007).

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knowledge- and capital-intensive investments in upgrading the infrastructure of farms(pesticide stores, grading rooms, and toilet and shower facilities to ensure hygiene onfarms), implementing a quality management system (QMS)/internal control system(ICS), and applying new farm management and agricultural practices. Rigid documen-tation, farm labeling, and input calculation are crucial metrological technologies forensuring intersubjective compliance and control at a distance (see Table 1).

Producers have to be certified by an internationally accredited third-party organizationon either an individual (option 1) or a group basis (option 2), the latter being relevant tomany groups of smallholder farmers and cooperatives in the global South. Third-partycertification helps retailers achieve credibility by externalizing the monitoring andenforcement of quality to independent third parties, to limit their liability by demonstrat-ing due diligence, and to shift responsibility and the costs of certification and qualitycompliance to suppliers further upstream (Hatanaka, Bain, and Busch 2005). Moreover,GLOBALGAP provides a benchmarking option under which other quality assuranceschemes could be treated as equivalent if the requirements of the standard are met.

Compliance with the standard poses problems for smallholder farmers, since they haveto adjust to a capital- and knowledge-intensive model of farming, which was generated ina different normative and practical context. The costs of standard compliance are par-ticularly problematic. Following a widespread World Bank (2005, 67) definition, they canbe defined as “the additional costs necessarily incurred by government and/or privateenterprises in meeting the requirements to comply with a given standard in a givenexternal market.” In the case of GLOBALGAP, these additional costs can be separatedinto nonrecurring costs (one-off or time-limited investments in farm infrastructure,training, and certification to be able to achieve compliance) and recurrent costs (recerti-fication, monitoring, training, labor, equipment, and analysis of pesticide residue) tomaintain the system.

GoverningThrough the Market: Collective Standards as Institutional GovernanceScholars in the social sciences, including economic geographers, have highlighted the

role of private standards more generally as new modes of governance in the globaleconomy and have made assumptions about their impact on the organization of agrifoodchains and about their positive and negative effects on participant firms and farms (e.g.,Freidberg 2004; Mutersbaugh 2005a, 2005b; Fold 2008). Often they have done so from aGCC, GVC, or GPN perspective (Gereffi, Humphrey, Kaplinsky, and Sturgeon 2001;Nadvi 2008; Coe, Dicken, and Hess 2008).

Seen through these analytical lenses, the evolution, proliferation, and implementationof the GLOBALGAP standard raise some important questions about three interrelatedprocesses: the construction and management of quality in global agrifood chains throughpowerful retailers; the embeddedness of this process into formal systems of governanceat a broad sector scale; and the practical invocation of new rules, routines, behaviors,organizational relationships, metrological systems, and modes of evaluation and calcu-lation, which finally co-constitute new markets from below.

These processes have been addressed in various degrees in different strands of GVCand GPN analysis but have yet to be analyzed in a more comprehensive and empiricallygrounded manner. More recent work in the economic sociology of markets has helped tobridge this effort by complementing perspectives on governance at the sector level withmicrolevel insights on the practical realization of particular markets.

Much of the work in GVC analysis about the relationship between quality manage-ment, codification, implementation, and governance has so far focused on individualchains (see Dolan and Humphrey 2004; Gereffi, Humphrey, and Sturgeon 2005). Such a

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chain-based perspective neglects the wider organizational spaces of the definition, codi-fication, and negotiation of standards, as is the case with sector-based standards. Thus,GVC analysis has so far had little to say about how powerful actors have managed toreconfigure markets at a more general level because the constructive nature of marketsdeserves no further attention. Markets are frequently treated as mere “coordinationmechanisms,” rather than as contested social spaces. For instance, Humphrey andSchmitz (2002, 7) restricted the concept of governance to “non-market coordination” ofeconomic relationships. Supporting the criticism of Ponte and Gibbon (2005, 5–6), thisarticle disagrees with such a restriction, since the term can be applied equally to situationsin which lead firms achieve quasi market coordination through the development andmainstreaming of collective standards in a sense of “governing through the market.”

Although markets were reframed as a “governance mechanism” by Gereffi, Humphrey,and Sturgeon (2005), who drew on transaction costs economics, this attempt did not solvethe problem of a preconfigured notion of markets: the constructive nature of markets doesnot deserve a prominent place in their reconceptualization of governance. Rather, Gereffi,Humphrey, and Sturgeon treated markets as neoclassical forms of coordination—as a poleof a spectrum of governance from hierarchies to networks—for a situation in whichinformation about a product’s quality is not complex and easily available at themoment of transaction between two market agents or no uncertainties exist about asupplier’s ability to meet quality requirements. In other cases, when product specifica-tions are complex or uncertainties about a seller’s compliance with quality exist, theymention firm hierarchies, networks, captive arrangements, or standards as means ofdealing with uncertainty. However, such a refined focus on chain governance tells us littleabout why the information to be embedded in standards actually exists or about theasymmetrically structured fields of knowledge construction in which standards aredefined and proliferated.

A less functionalist rereading of standards suggests that standards should be conceivedof less as self-emergent institutions to reduce uncertainties about transactions (cf. Braun2005, 4) and more as socially constructed and enforced conventions that not only aim toachieve specific corporate targets but also emerge from and reinscribe specific powerasymmetries in terms of the ability to define what counts as quality and as legitimatebehavior in the marketplace (Ponte and Gibbon 2005; Morgan, Marsden, and Murdoch2006; Tallontire 2007). Changing the rules of the game at the sector level enables leadfirms to drive a particular market in domains in which collective rule making is less costlyand risky than chain-specific solutions or in situations in which expanding commoninstitutional frameworks for market encounters may enhance the efficiency of the market,raise profit margins, or help internalizing externalities, such as food safety or environ-mental pollution. Arguing from a GPN perspective, Coe and Hess (2007, 12) referred tothis market-constructive dimension of governance as institutional or political gover-nance. The attempt by powerful actors to format the very institutional framework of awhole market through the development of horizontal standards, such as GLOBALGAP, isthen pivotal for understanding the internal dynamics of individual chains.

Beyond Market Orders from Above: Governance as a Normalization of PracticesAlthough the concept of institutional governance broadens our understanding of

market formatting through sectorwide standards and how this process influences dynam-ics in individual value chains, it suffers from a particular shortcoming that it shares withconceptualizations of chain governance: it operates with all-encompassing, “Leviathan-like” notions of institutions and power, which provides little space to accommodate the

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implementation practices of actors.4 Compliance with standards—especially the onerelated to the intangible attributes of quality—is much more often a messy and contestedprocess because markets represent “an intensively competitive economic and spatial‘battlefield of knowledge’ ” (Morgan, Marsden, and Murdoch 2006, 71; Levy 2007; Long1992). From this perspective, the proliferation of GLOBALGAP can be understood as aretailer-driven attempt to mainstream codified forms of authoritative knowledge that tryto overscribe other forms of knowledge and production practices through a market-basedmode of self-regulation; it aims to normalize production and business practices (Gibbon,Bair, and Ponte 2008, 324; Hughes 2001) and to internalize “compliance cultures within[farmer] organizations” (Power 1997, 3) and on individual farms to achieve its aim.Embedding practices and compliance cultures in systems of formal certification andmetrology (e.g., documentation of farming practices and labeling of farm plots; cf.Table 1) enhances the legibility of suppliers, which grants both retailers and exportersextended spatial scopes for accumulation because they are able to calculate the perfor-mances of their supply base. As Larner and Le Heron (2004, 223) stressed, practices ofcalculation are crucial for efforts “to find long-term governance solutions to perceived,anticipated and actual coordination problems,” since they enhance the cognitive scopes ofgoverning actors and preclude alternative actions by fixing production practices andrelationships.

But how successful are these processes of normalization and internalization of com-pliance cultures? How successful are governance models in achieving their desiredoutcomes? How do local policymakers, exporters, and farmers deal with new prescriptivemodels of organizing supply chains? Rather than assume that “the model of the world[i.e., GLOBALGAP or other market templates] becomes the world of the model” (Thrift2000, 694; Berndt and Boeckler 2009, 543) in a straightforward and smooth way, one canargue that markets are sites in which different and distributed evaluative principles onwhat counts as quality and legitimate action clash, overlap, and need to be integrated intoa “higher common principle” of engagement (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006, 28) formaking coordination possible (see also Thévenot 2001; Stark 2009). The rules andregulations that are set at a macrolevel invoke particular governance modes only if theimplementation practices of actors, embedded in specific institutional and environmentalcontexts and particular business cultures (“ways of doing things”), converge with theseprescriptive templates.

This convergence is hardly given by implication, and thus one has to look at thesituational compromises between different market agents that are equipped with differentframes for evaluating quality and legitimate actions to understand the functioning ofparticular value chains. There is no single pathway of standard performance or isometrictranslation of abstract market models into concrete practices. Speaking of markets moregenerally, Callon (2005, 11) acknowledged that market models—which, broadly defined,include standards as “templates of market encounter”—may have a transformative powerin specific situations, but not necessarily. Hence, one must acknowledge that markets ormore specific value chains are always opened up to practical contingencies and experi-ments in organization, especially in domains in which the objectification of products isdifficult, as is the case with intangible quality attributes. For instance, Gibbon and Ponte(2008) found that models of supply chain management in the U.S. manufacturing industryhave been less isometrically applied than official (prescriptive) industry discourses wouldsuggest. In a similar vein, work on the implementation of fair trade and ethical standards

4 At least proponents of the GPN approach have highlighted the practical and constructed dimension ofmarket encounters to some extent (Dicken, Kelly, Olds, and Yeung 2001; Levy 2007).

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in African horticulture found that compliance with process standards often has a “staged”character (Blowfield and Dolan 2008, 14), being invoked only on specific occasions, suchas when producers expect an external audit.

Rather than deem this as dishonest behavior or as “virtual compliance” with standards(as Blowfield and Dolan 2008 did), one can argue that these different practices emergefrom the coexistence of “multiple evaluative principles” (Stark 2009, 15) on quality andlegitimate action among organizations and individuals in a given situation, and marketsare the battleground on which these frames are played out. Thus, reconstructing theimplementation of market models requires going into the field in the literal sense andstudying the “backstage actions” (Busch 2007, 453), arrangements, and situated com-promises about quality in GVCs and wider fields of standard setting and negotiation.

Ultimately, it may be more valuable to ask through which rationalities, organizationalarrangements, institutions, conventions, practices, and systems of measurement andcalculation particular market orders from below are invoked, rather than to embraceLeviathan-like notions of governance in the analysis of global connections. Answers tothese questions not only provide a more grounded understanding of processes of marketinclusion and market exclusion but also highlight the sometimes “frictional” interplayamong universal market principles (food safety protocols, quality management systems,and the like) and institutionally, socioculturally, and socioenvironmentally embeddedbusiness and production practices. “Friction” (Tsing 2005) results from encounters ofmultiple principles of evaluation, from the encounters of an abstract standard withconcrete situated economic practices. I now reconstruct these encounters along supplychains and in the sphere of standard setting and quality assurance for the concrete case ofthe Kenyan horticulture subsector.

Standards in Action:Transforming Organizations,Relationships, and Practices in the KenyanHorticulture IndustryResearching Kenyan Horticulture

In 2007, Africa’s top 13 horticultural producers exported products (fresh fruit andvegetables, roots, tubers, cut flowers, and other ornamentals) worth 3.67 billion euros (U.S.$5.3 billion) to the EU-15 countries (see Figure 2). Kenya, the “East African miracle,” hasbeen at the forefront of this development, having become one of the largest suppliersof horticultural products from Africa to the EU. In 2007, the total earnings from exporthorticulture reached approximately 700 million euros ($884 million f.o.b.), making it thelargest earner of foreign currency ahead of the tourism industry. This amount representeda 20-percent increase from 2006 (Kenya Horticultural Development Programme, KHDP2008). At the same time, the proliferation of GLOBALGAP was perceived by researchersand practitioners alike as a tremendous challenge that could eventually jeopardize thissuccess, justifying a more detailed analysis of the standard’s real impact.

The material presented here was derived from field research conducted in Kenya in 2007and from follow-up interviews with experts in 2008, together with filled-out questionnaireswith fresh vegetable exporters (12); altogether, 46 interviews were conducted, includingfocus group discussions with one-off certified, uncertified/delisted, and recertified farmergroups (13); interviews with individual farmers, middlemen, and agribusiness serviceproviders, including the four certification bodies based in the country; and interviewswith the GLOBALGAP secretariat in Germany (called Foodplus), sector associations,public authorities, two importers in Germany and one in the United Kingdom, and several

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Figure 2. Horticultural exports fromAfrica into EU-15 in 2007. Source: Eurostat/Comext (2008),own design.

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international development organizations (5). The empirical work was complemented byfield visits, the analysis of donor project documents, consultancy reports, and topic-specificsecondary literature. Moreover, I participated in three crucial expert round-sessions inKenya and the United Kingdom on the proliferation of GLOBALGAP and other privateagrifood standards in developing countries more generally.

The research project adopted a qualitative approach aimed at understanding the strat-egies, perceptions, and practices, as well as the relational and territorial embeddedness, ofdifferent value chain actors (cf. Henderson et al. 2002). The primary research subjectswere exporters and groups of smallholder farmers in the central and eastern provinces ofKenya, who were selected through a purposeful sample that was stratified according tospecific characteristics (size, certification status, nature of exporter-farmer relationships,and end markets). Exporting companies were classified according to the volumes ofexports by small-size (<1,000 t/a), medium-size (1,000–5,000 t/a), and large exporters(>5,000 t/a). These exporters accounted for an estimated 50 percent to 60 percent of theKenyan fresh vegetable exports. A smallholder farmer was defined as a farmer with fewerthan 5 acres (2,025 hectare) under crops.

The Arrival of GLOBALGAP: New Challenges to the KenyanHorticulture Industry?

Stringent quality standards are not new to Kenyan producers. Prior to the introductionof EUREPGAP/GLOBALGAP, the industry had been exposed to increasingly stringentpublic EU food safety standards and supermarket-specific quality protocols from the late1990s onward. During that time, export chains became increasingly buyer driven (Gereffi1994), with retailers in the United Kingdom in particular enforcing their own qualityprotocols. In light of these developments, the Kenyan horticulture industry raised qualitystandards for export, for instance, by implementing an industry code of practices andborder-based sanitary and phytosanitary quality checks (Jaffee 2003). Larger Kenyanexporters repositioned themselves on the basis of product and process innovations aspremium suppliers of high-care products and ready-to-eat vegetable mixes (Dolan andHumphrey 2004), which had an impact on the organization of supply chains and onfarming and business practices. Moreover, a small group of larger exporters experienceda surge of company-based standards, such as Tesco’s Nature’s Choice and Marks andSpencer’s Field to Fork. Compliance with these standards may grant exporters a “pre-ferred supplier status” but does not result in significant price increases to compensate forthe additional costs of meeting these standards. Commenting on the structural asymme-tries in this economy of qualities, a senior outgrower manager of one of the largestexporters remarked:

I have seen a lot of companies in Africa going down over the [past few] years. Even othersupermarkets are worried because some two or three companies out there are dominating themarket. The market concentration has led to increased buyer power in Europe. Some of thesupermarkets come in and dictate their demands without concessions or negotiations. We arealready at the bottom of the business. . . . We are currently sticking to 15 different productionstandards, including Tesco’s Nature’s Choice, EUREPGAP, Field to Fork, and Fairtrade; this ismadness.

The specificity of company standards vis-à-vis GLOBALGAP is that these standards areusually implemented only by larger exporters, who use a small prestigious group offarmers for certification, which grants them additional market security in their “exclu-sive” relationship with retailers.

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Accordingly, it would be misleading to claim that GLOBALGAP was the only factorthat contributed to the restructuring of supply chains in the Kenyan horticulture industry.It was, however, a significant one alongside corporate restructuring because of marketinnovations and general considerations of economies of scale in light of rising marketdemands. The specifically new dimension of GLOBALGAP rested with its collectivecodification of existing individual supermarket protocols and the knowledge- and capital-intensive investments it required at the farm level, which exceeded earlier requirements byfar, as well as its embeddedness in formal market-based schemes of certification andauditing.

The first rounds of certification started in 2003—often with the support of internationaldevelopment organizations. Most exporters were given deadlines by their buyers tobecome compliant by the end of 2007. Kenya was somewhat privileged in dealing with thechallenges posed by GLOBALGAP (and other agrifood standards), since donor-driveninvestments in business support services, institutional capacity building, quality assur-ance schemes, and certification of farmer groups were significant. Other African horti-culture industries received far less support than did the Kenyan industry. Furthermore,international certification bodies, acting not only as certifiers but also as consultants,transferred crucial knowledge to the industry. These efforts resulted in the certification ofvarious farmer groups from early 2005 onward, but not all these projects could besustained economically (cf. Ouma 2009; Humphrey 2008). Estimates from April 2006show that at least 1,423 farms were certified for fresh produce exports in Kenya, includinglarge-scale independent and small-scale growers, who were members of farmer groups.By December 2007, more than 2,210 farmers5 had received certification for fresh fruitsand vegetables, and more than 6,000 had received certification for processed vegetables.The U.S.-funded KHDP (2008) estimated that Kenya had more than 20,000 farmersgrowing fresh produce for the export market in early 2008.6 These figures, however,contradict earlier estimates by Dolan and Humphrey (2004, 501) and obscure the intri-cacies of internal restructuring in the industry over the course of time.7

In conclusion, the proliferation of various standards and quality requirements for theKenyan horticulture industry, in combination with a diversity of end markets, resulted ina heterogeneous landscape of differently governed export chains, with clear differencesamong U.K. retail markets, continental European retail markets, and European andnon-European wholesale markets. For instance, while U.K. supermarkets are consideredto be strict and usually perform their own “in-house audits” in a highly managerial and

5 These figures have to be interpreted with caution. Official GLOBALGAP statistics list only the number ofcertificates per country, given to both individual farmers and farmer groups. In January 2008, Kenya had133 registered certificates (personal communication with Foodplus, Cologne, July 2008).

6 Personal communication with KHDP project manager, Nairobi, May 2008.7 Figures on the number of smallholder farmers who were involved in export horticulture in Kenya differ

significantly. For instance, Dolan and Humphrey (2004, 9) stated that by the mid-1980s, an estimated15,000 smallholder farmers were involved in export horticulture, accounting for up to 75 percent of fruitand vegetable exports in the early 1990s. This share had declined to 47 percent by early 2000 (Jaffee 2003).Asfaw, Mithöfer, and Waibel (2007, 86) counted about 12,000 smallholders producing for the vegetableexport market in 9 districts of Kenya in 2006, while the Fresh Produce Exporters Association of Kenya(FPEAK) estimated 150,000 smallholders in export horticulture in total (Mbithi 2008). There are severalreasons for the difference in the estimates, such as different products sampled, different definitions of asmallholder, variations in the spatial coverage of the studies, high volatility in participation in the exportmarket, and a complex configuration of informal supply chain arrangements and temporary spot-marketsalongside more formal supply chain arrangements.

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paternalistic fashion, retailers in continental Europe are less demanding on quality issuesand have traditionally applied a more hands-off form of supply chain management.

Practicing GLOBALGAP: Trajectories of ImplementationPrior to the introduction of GLOBALGAP, many exporters had been working with

farmer groups through arm’s length relationships without formal contracts, often medi-ated through so-called middlemen or brokers. In the wake of the introduction of GLOBAL-GAP, 80 percent of the exporters who were surveyed introduced contracts for theirfarmers and started to reorganize their relationships with them.8 In all cases, this reorga-nization passed through different phases and was marked by experimentation, trial, anderror. The adjustment process was shaped by both farmers’ and exporters’ implementa-tion capabilities and access to financial resources and agrobusiness support services, aswell as by the scope for action in specific value chains. In this regard, the cooperative ornoncooperative behavior of associated importers or retailers also shaped the GLOBAL-GAP implementation process. In pursuing compliance with the standard, the exportersand farmers were forced to implement sophisticated quality management and controlsystems to ensure compliance with the standard (see Figure 3).

In general, the farmers were not able to meet the requirements of the standard withoutexternal assistance provided by exporters or development organizations. Especially forsmaller exporters, the organizational and operational changes required by GLOBALGAP

8 At the time of the research, the exporters sourced between 5 percent and 70 percent of their produce fromsmallholder farmers, with a mean of 57 percent.

Figure 3. Quality management system of a large exporter placed in the wider industry context.

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resulted in a previously unknown degree of formal supply-base monitoring and qualityassurance, since they had hitherto relied largely on loose spot-market relationships withmany farmers. This arrangement allowed flexibility in exporting produce from a varietyof sources while keeping the need for investments in the supply base low.

The interviews with the exporters and the survey data indicated that the monitoringcosts of exporters rose by 30 percent to 40 percent because of the restructuring of thesupply chain. Only three firms were supported by importers during the adjustmentprocess. In these cases, both the exporters and importers were closely linked through closecooperative arrangements or vertically integrated structures (cf. Dolan and Humphrey2004). Furthermore, no price premium was paid for certified produce to cover the highcosts of compliance and certification, which had far-reaching consequences in terms ofincentive structures for farmers on the ground. The retailers shifted the costs of com-pliance and certification onto the importers and subsequently onto the exporters andfarmers, squeezing them increasingly between price and quality imperatives, as oneGerman importer highlighted:

No. That [raising prices] is absolutely impossible considering the pressure we are facing fromretailers. . . . If we attempt to get premium prices, for instance, for green beans . . . then you arerapidly pushed out [of the market], since the consumers or the retailers do not see why theyshould pay a premium. We are talking about quality standards here. You simply can’t enforce ahigher price; otherwise you are pushed out, and then the exporter also loses. It is always theconsumer who is used as a pretext, but in my view, and actually I am not allowed to commenton that as a supplier, most products do not reflect the value or the price they should actually have.

Kenyan exporters reacted in a number of ways to the proliferation of GLOBALGAP,which affected their supply chain relationships with farmers. Restructuring took placearound the following considerations: reducing compliance costs and enhancing organi-zational efficiency in light of the costs of implementing and complying with the standard;ensuring adequate monitoring of the supply base and reducing “nonconformities”9 tomeet the standard’s requirements; exploiting supply-base economies of scale by sourcingfrom larger farms; and fostering long-term relationships with farmers who were consid-ered business minded, cooperative, and able to meet the requirements of GLOBALGAP(see Figure 4). Often these responses included a certain degree of experimentation andcompromises between the formal prescriptions of the standard and actual implementationand compliance practices. The organizational responses of exporters, compromises, andproblems with implementing the standard are discussed in the following sections.

Organizational Responses of Exporters and the Rearrangement of Supply ChainsThe proliferation of the standard did not resemble a uniform, institutionally homoge-

neous process, but was articulated in a complex landscape of overlapping supply chainarrangements owing to different end-market requirements, individual exporter-buyeragreements, or clandestine practices of exporting companies aimed at bypassing thesystem.

For instance, one large exporter, with the assistance of an international certificationbody, established an internal audit unit (IAU) that monitored a selected number offarmers’ compliance with the system. This monitoring was devolved to the company’sinternal auditors, who did mock audits on associated farmers and the farm management

9 Nonconformity: the failure to comply with one of the control points of GLOBALGAP. A certain number ofnonconformities during the annual external audit will lead to the withdrawal of the certificate.

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division of the company. The system-check and final certification audit were done by thecertification body. Although the establishment of the IAU was costly, it reduced the costsof compliance in the long run because it reduced inherent risks and the time spent onexpensive external audits (see Figure 3). Under this approved arrangement, the certifi-cation body needed only to cross-check a small sample of suppliers during the actualaudits. Moreover, the exporter was able partially to retain the costs of compliance andcertification through cross-costing because of its vertically integrated firm structure,achieving gains in efficiency and cost savings in the area of logistics and import. Becauseof its reorganization, availability of financial resources, and access to expert knowledge,the exporter was able to reap economic rents (Henderson et al. 2002), which gave it anedge over its competitors.

The company also restructured its supply chain organization by sourcing through loosearrangements from additional farmers in new frontier regions in Central and WesternKenya as it tried to venture into new and less strictly regulated markets (the Middle East,Canada, and South Africa). It also reduced the pool of farmers delivering to high-endmarkets in Europe to a class of “business-minded” farmers, who, in the long run, wouldbe able to meet the costs of certification on their own and to associate themselves with thecompany as “independent growers.” A minimum hectare policy of 2 ha (5 acres) perfarmer was introduced to ensure the economic viability of the company’s operations.

Figure 4. Reorganization of supply chains by exporters because of GLOBALGAP.

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The reduction of risks among its spatially extended supply base posed a significantorganizational challenge to the company. To mitigate the risks of failure within the wholesystem in the case of nonconformities in quality, which are likely to affect spatiallyextended farming schemes, the production base was divided into four regions using acloned QMS for every region (cf. Figure 3). Within these regions, the company consid-ered geographic proximity and the communality of natural resources (water and land) ascritical factors to reduce the final costs of compliance. This approach reduced costs fortraining farmers, risk assessments, laboratory tests, and audits considerably. Three otherlarge exporters implemented similar systems.

Standard Implementation and Compliance as Situated CompromisesThe more visible front-stage arrangements and practices outlined here were

complemented by a number of “backstage actions” and arrangements (Busch 2007,453). Reflecting upon specific local management and environmental realities andthe need to sustain the market with sufficient produce, some exporters managedto agree with their importers, sometimes without the knowledge of the retailers, oncertifying a certain share of their supply base and to maintain an equal level of qualityassurance for their noncertified suppliers. This arrangement allowed them tocontinue sourcing produce from uncertified farmers. However, the compliance withGLOBALGAP was less consistent than it officially appeared and was embedded in asocial field in which different evaluative principles clashed. In times of high marketdemand, some exporters still exported uncertified produce without the knowledge of theirimporters and retailers. They could do so because Kenyan farmers had been widelyexposed to good agricultural practices, assuring a high degree of quality among evennoncertified farmers, and because GLOBALGAP registers only producing farms, not thevolumes that these farms can produce. These practices and loopholes also explain whyexports from Kenya continued to grow in 2007 and 2008 in volume and value (cf. KHDP2008).

This finding shows that governance may be less pervasive than the conventional GCCor GVC literature suggests (cf. Dicken, Kelly, Olds, and Yeung 2001; Gibbon and Ponte2008), since different frames for evaluating quality and the forms of expert knowledgethat inform them may oppose each other.10 This point is well illustrated by the case of oneof the largest exporters in Kenya, who creatively interpreted some blurry sections in theGLOBALGAP protocol. With the help of a Dutch certification body and financial supportfrom donor organizations, the company certified the individual plots of some 100 farmersas a single farm (option 1), which reduced the costs of certification significantly. After asuccessful first certification, the company implemented the same system for another 170farmers. The organizational and social implications of this approach were significantbecause farmers de jure became “workers” on their own farms, while quality assurancewas centralized by the company.

The Dutch certification body not only helped to develop this cost-efficient arrangementand provided implementation expertise but also repeatedly defended the integrity of theapproach during technical meetings of GLOBALGAP stakeholders, who were concernedwhether this approach would conform to the food safety and quality requirements of thestandard. The intervention of this “knowledge broker,” who certified a similar project in

10 Well aware of these flaws, the technical working group of GLOBALGAP developed a full-care electronictraceability system (called “Unique Area ID”) that registers the location, size, and production volumes offarms in a database to make the selling of uncertified produce much more difficult (interview withGLOBALGAP official, October 2007).

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Senegal, played a crucial role in the revision of the GLOBALGAP protocol toward morelocally adapted solutions for certification during 2008 and informed the strategiesof other exporters in Kenya, who envisaged the same solution to reduce their costs ofcompliance.

The Problem of Fixing Supply Chain Relationships and Practices“The spread of EUREPGAP (GLOBALGAP) has come close to a revolution in

agriculture,” the managing director of a big Kenyan exporter readily acknowledgedduring an interview. Besides enforcing a new technical and managerial dimensionof food production, its proliferation had one particular impact: it required both small-holder farmers and exporters to make investments in a system that had previouslybeen characterized in many cases by volatile spot-market relationships, low levels of trust,and supply chain investment. True contractual relationships did not exist on a broad scale,and if they did, they were frequently broken as a result of opportunism by both parties.Owing to the low reliability of smallholder farmers and for reasons of economic viabilityat a time of market restructuring, exporters shifted or intended to shift to larger indepen-dent farmers who were perceived as practicing “farming as a business” instead of“farming as a lifestyle,” a notion that was frequently highlighted in interviews with theexporters. The exporters and importers evaluated these farmers as reliable supplierswho had, in addition to exposing the necessary material resources and organizationalcapacity, internalized the new rules of the market and embraced long-term businessrelationships:

The problem is the reliability of these smallholder farmers and their narrow scope of think-ing. . . . It is this traditional way which lacks an international orientation. . . . It is their reliabil-ity which questions the future of the so-called small-scale growers; they question themselvesbecause they have never proven their reliability and will never prove it—according to ourexperience. And that is why they will not receive any further support in the near future fromexporters because they don’t deliver what had been agreed upon, but sell it out to someone else.(German importer)

The farmers are feeling that the company [the exporter] benefits from EUREPGAP [GLOBAL-GAP]; that is what they feel, and it is hard to change them. Probably with time, but you see, interms of monetary benefits, the farmers don’t see any. . . . The farmers just think of today. Whatdrives them is at what price is the company [the exporter] buying today. What drives them ismoney, money, money! (Company agronomist at a small exporter)

The managing director of another large export company remarked in a similar tone:

You have invested into the groups, and the only thing that matters to them is money. . . . Theproblem is that there is [a] lack of laws. Nothing protects certified farmers from poachingexporters. . . . This will kill the small companies [exporters]. . . . For me, it is not the number offarmers that is important. . . . I want the farmers to be committed. They have to know that theyhave to pay someone at the end of the month. We want to have farmers who do horticulture not[for their] daily bread, but as a business.

This is not to say that the exporters and retailers did not appreciate the material quality ofthe products that the smallholder farmers provided. In general, smallholder farmers areconsidered better caretakers of labor-intensive, high-value crops than are wage-earningfarm laborers on larger commercial farms (cf. also Jaffee 2003) because of their com-

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mitment and disciplined family labor.11 It was more that the farmers had various problemsin adapting to the stringent process and management requirements of GLOBALGAP, aswell as to the new frames of evaluation, engagement, and calculation that are aimed atstrategic investments in “durable” and certified supply chains. While the exporters wereforced to rethink their procurement practices in relation to “rational choices,” as well assuppliers’ performance- and cost-benefit criteria, the farmers were prompted to reevaluatetheir farm management techniques, organizational capacity, and business practices. Theseevaluations were not always geared toward compliance with the new institutional envi-ronment constituted by GLOBALGAP. In many cases, when the certification of farmergroups was supported externally by exporters and development organizations, the farmersfrequently resisted and creatively engaged with the new conditions. Although theymaintained the integrity of the system for the sake of auditing, various smallholder groupsviolated the principle of traceability by side-selling to exporters other than those withwhom they signed formal contracts according to GLOBALGAP regulations. As a con-sequence, especially smaller exporters who were affected by the opportunistic behavior ofthe supplying farmers could not recover the investments they made and experiencedserious financial problems.

Markets as Sites of Different Evaluative PrinciplesThe problem described here is much deeper than simple opportunism, ignorance, or the

lack of business-mindedness among farmers as the exporters frequently claimed. Thedynamics in the Kenyan industry can be attributed to the frictional interplay of differentframes of evaluating both the quality of products and the legitimate actions in themarketplace. This interplay resulted in the problem of establishing a higher commonprinciple of engagement among exporters and farmers on the basis of the philosophy ofGLOBALGAP (cf. Thévenot 2001; Boltanski and Thévenot 2006). Many farmers reluc-tantly complied with GLOBALGAP, since certification did not come with price incen-tives. Instead of selling through externally approved supply chains to exporters, who hadinvested in certification schemes, the farmers frequently sold produce to competitors,since they still had opportunities to sell uncertified produce in times of high marketdemand. In this case, the exporters were prompted “to bring whatever they can bring,”regardless of a certificate, to sustain the market. Products in this case were evaluatedsolely in terms of their material quality, scarcity, and price by the farmers and exporters,not in terms of their conformity with the GLOBALGAP requirements.

The flexible use of different evaluative principles allowed some exporters to sustain themarket demand even without the sufficient availability of certified produce. As Stark(2009, 15) pointed out, entrepreneurial success in some contexts builds on the “ability tokeep multiple evaluative principles in play,” a view that dismisses an overgoverned notionof organizations or markets more generally. Both the farmers and exporters switchedbetween different frames of evaluating quality in a situation of high market demand,shortages of supplies, loopholes in the system, and evaluative diversity. In so doing, theymobilized established practices and situated knowledge of doing business, which hadbeen constitutive of the Kenyan export model of “flexi-supply.” The success of this modelis paradoxically built on the ability of some larger companies to sustain their final marketsthrough backstage activities, albeit to the detriment of other exporters. As I show in thefollowing section, this coexistence of different frames of evaluating quality and legitimate

11 Furthermore, flexi-sourcing from smallholder farmers ensures a perennial supply in a generally volatileand risk-prone market, since vertical integration had been only a limited option to exporters in Kenyabecause of the low elasticity of agricultural land.

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action allowed many farmers to stay in the market on a spot basis, although manyexporters officially dropped unreliable or nonskilled farmers.

Standard-Related Entry Barriers and Reward Structures:A Differentiated ViewData from a large-scale survey suggest that the high nonrecurrent and recurrent costs

of compliance with GLOBALGAP are the main market-entry barriers for smallholderfarmers and smaller exporters. For instance, calculations based on Graffham, Karehu, andMacGregor (2007, iv) show that the nonrecurrent costs of group certification (option 2)were at an estimated £1,183 (U.S. $2,317) per grower (n = 1,978) in 2006. On average, thefarmers paid 36 percent, the exporters paid 44 percent, and the donors paid 20 percent ofthe costs. Recurrent costs amounted to £760 ($1,488) per grower, with the farmers paying14 percent and the exporters paying 86 percent of the total costs. Considering the averagenet farm incomes, which ranged from £98 ($191) to £1,250 ($2,448) per annum, the costsof compliance were a critical barrier to entry for smallholder farmers. Obviously, certi-fication costs in general are not scale neutral and had decreased by 2009 because ofgreater competition in the certification business.

Graffham, Karehu, and MacGregor’s (2007, iii) study, which covered 11 exporters whoaccounted for 90 percent of the fresh vegetable exports of Kenya in 2006, also highlightedthe exclusionary consequences of compliance with GLOBALGAP. Six of these exporterswere also sampled for this study. According to Graffham, Karehu, and MacGregor, thenumber of smallholder farmers who supplied these firms decreased in real terms after theintroduction of EUREPGAP/GLOBALGAP in September 2003. At that time, 9,342farmers with 45,000 family dependents were supplying these firms, but by the end of2006, 60 percent of the farmers had been dropped by the exporters.

Although I do not refute the adverse effects of supply chain reorganization, I argue thatnoncertified farmers continue to be integrated into value chains through backstagearrangements, whether through compromises between exporters and importers becauseof generally high levels of quality production among farmers—attributed to knowledgespillovers—or through clandestine sourcing practices. Graffham, Karehu, and MacGre-gor’s (2007) study did not refer to these issues or the potentially positive effects of thediffusion of GLOBALGAP-related knowledge to noncertified farmers. Yet, with thesteady consolidation of the supply base and the planned establishment of a GPS-basedtraceability system by GLOBALGAP—which locates each certified farm and registersthe volumes that are supplied—these loopholes may close for many farmers in the nearfuture.

Furthermore, the peculiarities of smallholder production systems constrain compliancewith the GLOBALGAP standard to some extent: weather-based production failures maytemporarilyleadtocash-flowproblemsandpreventfarmersfrommaintainingtheGLOBAL-GAP quality management system consistently. Successful maintenance and integrityof the system depend on firm linkages with exporters, who can provide the adequatemonetary and technical support, since the break-even point for the implementation ofGLOBALGAP was estimated to be in the third year after the initial certification. Thus,new structural asymmetries within value chains are induced because it is usually export-ers who pay for and subsequently own the certificates.

Notwithstanding these adverse impacts, well-organized farmer groups with pertinentlinkages and “value chain capital,” as well as with a sufficient asset base, may reapbenefits by attaining or retaining access to the market. They can also earn rents throughorganizational development and enhance farm management and productivity levels byoptimizing the use of farm inputs.

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In conclusion, a final assessment with regard to the impact of GLOBALGAP oncertified and noncertified farmers and the wider regional economies remains difficultowing to situated arrangements and contingencies within specific value chains. Anyfigures regarding the local impact of GLOBALGAP need to be treated carefully, sincemany smallholder farmers continue to be integrated into high-value markets throughinformal arrangements and secret sourcing practices on a spot basis for the time being.Furthermore, consolidation of the supply base may entail significant direct and indirectlocal economic effects through labor and service externalities that are generated by largergrowers, an assumption that was empirically confirmed by Maertens and Swinnen (2009)for the export-oriented fresh vegetable subsector in Senegal. Thus, to assess the fullimpact of the proliferation of private agrifood standards more generally, the long-termregional social, economic, and ecological effects of highly structured value chainsdeserve more attention in the future, to reconnect GVC research with the earlier concernof GCC analysis to excavate the local ruptures and disarticulations of contemporary(retail) capitalism, a point similarly made by Fold (2008) for the case of export horticul-ture in Ghana (see also Bair 2005).

Enhancing Local Scopes for Action:The Contested Spaces of Quality AssuranceThe implementation of GLOBALGAP in Kenya can be reconstructed comprehensively

only if the national and transnational spaces of agrifood governance and standard settingare considered (see also Figure 3). From 2003 onward, international development orga-nizations, the industry association FPEAK, a National Technical Committee on EUREP-GAP, and the National Horticultural Task Force have played a significant role in shapingadjustment dynamics in the subsector. There has been crucial donor support to theindustry in terms of building up national certification capacities and certifying small-holder farmer groups. For instance, in 2005, an internationally accredited local certifi-cation body (Africert) was established with the assistance of the German TechnicalCooperation (GTZ) and an international agricultural research institute to lower the costsof GLOBALGAP certification and some other standards in a business environment thatuntil then had been oligopolistically dominated by a few big global players (e.g., Check-mate International). In 2006, to lower the costs of analyzing pesticide residues, as requiredby GLOBALGAP, the Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Services (KEPHIS) was accred-ited to ISO17025, the benchmark for phytosanitary testing services under the standardscheme. Transnationally connected expert networks, coordinated by the European Unionand the U.K. Department for International Development (DFID), among others, alsomainstreamed implementation know-how among FPEAK, policymakers, service provid-ers, exporters, and farmer groups. These knowledge brokers injected global implemen-tation experiences and best practices into policymaking at the industry level and fed backlocal implementation experiences into the transnational GLOBALGAP community.FPEAK, several larger exporters, and development organizations operating in Kenyawere repeatedly invited to the GLOBALGAP annual conferences to advance the discus-sion of smallholder certification and to make various sections of the standard protocolmore smallholder friendly. In these multistakeholder discussions, Kenyans and associatedexperts from development organizations contested the universality of the standard, pro-moted locally adapted protocols, and confronted the standard setters with the managerial,economic, technical, and environmental constraints of implementation.

In 2007, in an effort both to reply to criticism about its unfriendliness to smallholderfarmers and to enhance its legitimacy in the market, the GLOBALGAP secretariatFoodplus finally agreed with GTZ and DFID to institutionalize the position of a small-holder ambassador for developing countries. This standard broker was to provide more

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opportunities for the representation of smallholders in the standard-setting process and tofoster the “practical evaluation of tools and global best practice [to facilitiate] standardimplementation by smallholders worldwide” (Africa Observer 2009). This move indi-cated that even transnational Leviathans, such as retailers, are forced to make certaincompromises about the governance of markets. In addition, a Smallholder Taskforce wasfounded by GTZ, GLOBALGAP, and DFID to adapt the standard to the needs of farmersin developing countries. A positive result of these initiatives was the revision of thestandard protocol concerning regulations on quality management systems or infrastruc-tural requirements at the farm level. Nevertheless, critics maintain that the true impact ofthese initiatives is questionable, and they are likely to be not more than public relationscoups, since retail members on the GLOBALGAP executive board have so far embracedthese initiatives only halfheartedly.

Despite the considerable success of Kenyan key industry players to insert themselvesinto GLOBALGAP’s standard-setting processes and to enhance their national qualityassurance capacities, not all of these initiatives have been fruitful. This situation is besthighlighted by the so-far rather ineffective implementation of the national quality assur-ance scheme KENYAGAP.A benchmarking option under GLOBALGAP in theory allowscountries to implement their own national quality assurance schemes if their schemes areinternationally accredited for equivalence. These schemes may be more adapted to localrealities of production and may reduce the costs of certification for local producers.Moreover, according to Humphrey (2006, 41), regional branding strategies or “brandingfrom below” represent strategic means for capturing or enhancing value in global valuechains. Thus, the domestication of GLOBALGAP (then EUREPGAP) was a promisingeffort to upgrade the local industry, the more so because other countries, such as Chile,Mexico, New Zealand, Colombia, and China, have all successfully developed bench-marked schemes (see Figure 1). At the end of August 2007, KENYAGAP was launchedafter a protracted and expensive process under the auspices of FPEAK. Kenya was the firstcountry in Africa to develop a national benchmarked scheme, and the implementation ofKENYAGAP was a “showpiece” for the local industry, as one expert put it.

To date, the implementation of the scheme has been ineffective for local firms andfarms for a number of reasons. First, the scheme reduces the costs of audits andcompliance only marginally, since KENYAGAP is obliged to comply with all majorGLOBALGAP requirements. Second, it can hardly outweigh the structural constraints ofsmallholder production systems, which face a critical threshold of economic viabilityconsidering the technical and monetary entry barriers posed by the standard. Third, theacceptance of “Third World quality assurance” is at the mercy of European buyers, whohave so far been reluctant to accept KENYAGAP as a full equivalent to GLOBALGAPbecause of concerns about its integrity. This experience is similar to that of CHILEGAP,which has been shunned for similar reasons. By December 2008, not one single Kenyancompany had been certified under KENYAGAP (personal communication with Africert,23 December 2008), and the standard was undergoing a complete rebenchmarking againstthe new GLOBALGAP version at the time of writing.

The cases of the Smallholder Ambassador/Smallholder Taskforce and the flawedimplementation of KENYAGAP show that standard-setting processes, notions of quality,and the governance structures invoked by them resemble a contested terrain in whichcompeting principles of evaluation and practices are negotiated (Morgan, Marsden, andMurdoch 2006). As the case of Kenyan horticulture shows, building up national qualityassurance schemes and capacities for the implementation of agrifood standards requiresmore than technical capacities but depends on attaining legitimacy in shaping thedefinition, standardization, evaluation, and calculation of quality in asymmetrically struc-

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tured standard-setting networks (cf. also Callon 2005, 11). Reflecting upon this issue, themanaging director of Africert, a local certification body, highlighted the flaws and limitsof domestic agrifood governance: “If there is no guarantee that benchmarking gives anadvantage, then we should shut down such a process. We do not want to do shelf-policymaking. KENYAGAP may go the same way as CHILEGAP. . . . If developing localcertification capacity has no guarantee, we are wasting our time.”

ConclusionTaking GLOBALGAP as a vantage point, this article developed a framework for

studying the proliferation of collective (sector-based) agrifood standards. In this regard, Imoved beyond conventional notions of governance in GVC analysis. I first showed thatpowerful firms can reshape value chains through more hands-off forms of governancethrough the institutional reformatting of a whole market, yet without losing their drivingpower. They can do so through collective forms of governance at a sector level by tryingto invoke a market-based mode of self-regulation: suppliers are disciplined at a distancethrough the attempted normalization of farming practices, with risks and costs beinglowered for retailers while scopes for calculation at a global scale being extended assuppliers are benchmarked and made legible.

To avoid an overstylized notion of market governance, I argued for incorporating morepractice-oriented approaches from the sociology of markets into GVC analysis that allowanalysts to reconstruct the practical invocation of market models, such as standards frombelow. Such a perspective allows analysts to excavate the often-frictional implementationof standards in specific local settings, marked by particular economic, institutional, andsocioenvironmental realities. Taking the case of Kenya as an example, I tried to demon-strate that the successful global proliferation of GLOBALGAP cannot be understoodwithout reconstructing the situated compromises along and beyond the supply chain whenit comes to local implementation and compliance with the standard.

Some of these compromises are more obvious, as I tried to demonstrate for the case ofthe negotiation of the standard in heterogeneous standard-setting networks, in whichdifferent forms of expert knowledge have been mobilized to make the standard moresmallholder friendly. Although Kenyan key industry players have been successful to someextent in inserting local implementation knowledge into the GLOBALGAP network, ininfluencing debates, and in attracting advocates for their concerns from developmentorganizations, this success should not distract from the fact that actors from developingcountries command much less authoritative or definitional knowledge than do retailersand standard setters from Europe. These asymmetries naturally constrain the scopes forcompromises in formal standard-setting processes.

I also showed, however, that conventional macroperspectives on governance fall shortof acknowledging the frictions and compromises along supply chains with regard to theimplementation of the GLOBALGAP standard. I demonstrated empirically that thisfriction is the result of coexisting principles of evaluating the quality of a product andlegitimate action in the marketplace and that this situation has had an impact on thedynamics of adjustment in the Kenyan horticulture industry. In this regard, the emergenceof new certified markets posed a Janus-headed issue: on the one hand, it required farmersand exporters to commit themselves to a higher common principle of production, coop-erative investment, and durable supply chains in the marketplace to comply with therequirements of GLOBALGAP. On the other hand, it was the ability of certain exportersand farmers to keep multiple evaluative principles in play that explains the recent growthof the industry despite the often-attested exclusion of smallholder farmers from the

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