Global agro-food trade and standards: challenges for Africa, edited by Peter Gibbon, Stefano Ponte and Evelyne Lazaro, Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 256 pp., £60.00 (hardback), ISBN 9780230579514
The central premise addressed by this book is that ‘Africa is screwed by standards’ (p. 238). Standards refer to the process/product requirements that suppliers have to meet to sell into certain markets. The fear for exporters from developing countries is that they will lack the capacity to become compliant. In this way, standards would operate as non-trade barriers, effectively replacing tariffs and subsidies as a means of protecting developed countries from imports of agriculture and food. This threat is of particular concern to Africa since most countries on the continent lack the infrastructure, institutions, equipment and expertise to easily adapt to the new regulatory requirements. Moreover, to the extent that certain firms do adapt, it is expected that it will be those that are bigger and better-resourced, resulting in an industry ‘shake out’ of smallholder farming and artisanal fisheries.
This gloomy premise is assessed against the experiences of African firms exporting to the European Union. The book draws together 13 researchers based in East Africa and seven based in Denmark to look predominantly at the implementation and welfare impacts of standards ‘on the ground’ in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. It also feeds into two of the editors' over-arching research agendas on the governance of global value chains. Manifest in their 2005 publication Trading down: Africa, value chains and the global economy, Gibbon and Ponte's work on the increasing importance of lead firms in buyer-driven chains and the limited opportunities for upgrading by suppliers provides the book's theoretical backdrop. In this light, the proliferation of standards is seen as a result of lead firms' attempts to differentiate their products based on competing quality claims. Thus the traditional food-safety requirements are now accompanied by standards on the organic, ethical and environmental characteristics of production. This has ‘frayed’ the value chain into multiple threads, expanding the application of standards horizontally across different issues and vertically throughout the production and distribution chain.
The major empirical contribution of the book is to suggest that the pessimism about standardisation is unwarranted. For example, one chapter based on a household-level study of smallholder organic certification concludes that ‘scheme participants received significantly higher mean net revenues from certified crops than control groups’ (p. 97). Likewise, another chapter argues that those people working in the artisanal segment of the Nile Perch export chain have superior livelihood conditions compared to ‘participants in other fishery chains also based on Lake Victoria but not linked to global markets through conformity with EU food standards’ (p. 163). Caveats are attached to these findings. For one, dependence on foreign donors to provide training to smallholders in the absence of meaningful public support is acknowledged, as is the fact that beneficiaries of standardised supply chains tended to have greater resource endowments in the first place, thereby creating the possibility of selection bias. Nevertheless, it is argued that through the use of contract farming schemes or special provisions for group certification, the inclusion of small producers could be advanced and their marginalisation prevented.
The book's major analytical contribution rests with its blurring of some of the prevailing assumptions about agro-food standards. One example is the oft-cited dichotomy between public and private standards, in which public governance operates a ‘rule-and-punish’ system and private governance a ‘self-regulating’ system. Another chapter on the Nile Perch fisheries concludes that in the requirements set on minimum fish size ‘the content of the standard was set by the public authority, the control of conformity with the standard is delegated to the private sector and […] sanctioning reverts back to the public sector’ (p. 201). The result is a hybrid ‘market-and-punish’ system of monitoring, which suggests an ongoing and evolving role for traditional state power in value chain governance. Another assumption relates to the motivation of firms seeking certification. In the case of the UTZ sustainability standards in the coffee chain, it is noted how many firms see compliance more as a means to reduce market risk, especially price shocks, rather than to gain market access per se. Furthermore, the prescriptions contained in such standards were often interpreted and applied with a degree of flexibility. One consequence was that companies could learn to ‘perform’ compliance, simply promoting increased documentation and audit trails rather than monitoring systems that actively involved worker participation.
A challenge of studying agro-food standards is that they tend to overlap with one another and can be extremely scientific in detail. This often results in a legalistic and technocratic analysis, which, from the perspective of a politics scholar, leaves you somewhat feeling that you can't see the wood for the trees. Perhaps inevitably, certain sections of the book also succumb to this approach. I would wager that only the specialist would be interested in the methodological intricacies of carbon footprinting, or the details of Tanzania's different food-testing institutions, detailed in chapters two and three, respectively. Both of these in fact turn out to be of limited relevance to exports anyway, at least at the present time. That said, the editors do a fantastic job in the bookend chapters of summarising what is surely a growing trend in agro-food trade, and some authors, notably Riisgaard, offer valuable insights into the local politics of standards and how these are shaped by the continued power of Northern retailers within the value chain.