Global Standards, Local Realities: Private

ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY
Agrifood Governance and the Restructuring
of the Kenyan Horticulture Industry

Stefan Ouma
Department of Human
Over the past decade, private food safety and quality

abstract
Geography
Goethe University of standards have become focal points in the supply
Frankfurt chain management of large retailers, reshaping gov-
Robert-Mayer-Straße 6-8 ernance patterns in global agrifood chains. In this
60325 Frankfurt article, I analyze the relationship between private
Germany collective standards and the governance of agrifood
ouma@em.uni-frankfurt.de markets, using the EUREPGAP/GLOBALGAP stan-
dard as a vantage point. I discuss the impact of this
standard on the organization of supply chains of fresh 1
vegetables in the Kenyan horticulture industry, focus-
ing on the supply chain relationships and practices
Key words: among exporters and smallholder farmers. In so
private standards doing, I seek to highlight the often-contested nature
EUREPGAP of the implementation of standards in social fields
GLOBALGAP

••(••):••–••. © 2010 Clark University.

that are marked by different and distributed principles
export horticulture of evaluating quality, production processes, and
governance legitimate actions in the marketplace. I also recon-
global value chains
struct the challenges and opportunities that exporters
markets
Kenya and farmers are facing with regard to the implemen-
tation 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.
ecge_1065 1..26
www.economicgeography.org
 ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for comments
and suggestions on earlier
drafts of the article by
Wendy Larner, Peter Lindner,
Sabine Dörry, Christian
Berndt, Martin Müller, Evelyn
Moser, three anonymous
reviewers, and the editors of
Economic Geography. All
errors are, of course, mine.
2 The landscape of private food regulators has
Over the past decade, the rise of private food safety
and 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 and
farms. The proliferation of these standards is rooted in
the restructuring of consumer markets, competitive
dynamics in the retail sector, and the regulatory devo-
lution of quality assurance from public authorities to
retailers and certification bodies in North America and
the European Union (EU). Responding to various
food scares that swept through these markets in the
1990s and increasing concerns of both consumers and
public regulators about the origin of food, large
retailers have reorganized their supply chains
around notions of traceability, food safety, and quality
assurance.
become diverse. Private agrifood standards have been
developed by individual companies (company- or
value chain–specific standards); business coalitions
(sector-specific standards), such as the British Retail
Consortium (BRC); or broad-based public-private
networks of multiple stakeholders, such as in the case
of the Common Code for the Coffee Community (4C-
Initiative), a pioneering standard that ensures ethical
sourcing practices among coffee traders and grinders
(cf. Nadvi and Wältring 2004; Tallontire 2007).
These standards differ from public standards laid
down 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 corporations
and business coalitions, these private standards often
lack the broad-based legitimacy or contestability of
public food standards (e.g., as granted under the WTO
Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures).
They also embrace a more precautionary fork-to-farm
approach to food safety and quality assurance that
differs from the border-based, ex-post approach of
many public-sector agencies (Jaffee and Masakure
2005).
Moreover, these standards have become more than
mere private institutions enforcing the safety and
quality of food. Food safety1 is widely treated as a
1
A distinction is usually made between food safety/food quality
and labor, environmental, social, fair-trade, and ethical stan-
dards (cf. Nadvi and Wältring 2004). In this article, I make this
distinction for technical not theoretical reasons, since all these
attributes refer to the spatiotemporal framing of a product
(Callon 2005, 7) according to different principles of evaluation.
 Vol. •• No. •• 2010

noncompetitive factor in the marketplace, with retailers increasingly trying to compete

less over sanitary and phytosanitary issues than by embedding “extra quality” into product
and process standards through claims of sustainability, well-being, fair trade, and
morality.
It is evident that private agrifood standards have become a business in itself. As retail
markets have become highly competitive and food markets have become more saturated
in 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 safety
at the sector level, it has tried to distinguish itself simultaneously from its competitors by
developing 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 on
smallholder farmers and exporters in the global South are perceived to be significant.
Although optimists have identified opportunities for modernizing agricultural export 3
systems and have anticipated potential regulatory spillovers to domestic markets in the
wake of their diffusion (Jaffee and Masakure 2005, 332), critics of private agrifood

PRIVATE AGRIFOOD GOVERNANCE IN KENYA

standards have highlighted the high costs of compliance and their inherent technical
complexity, condemning them as nontariff trade barriers (UNCTAD 2007). Private
agrifood 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 the
profitability of high-value food exports. As some authors have argued, particularly
African firms and farms may be negatively affected by the proliferation of private
agrifood 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 standards
on African smallholders (e.g., Dolan and Humphrey 2004; Fold 2008; see Maertens and
Swinnen 2009 for a critical assessment), some striking questions remain. Little is known
in 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 and
between standard bearers and standard setters. Pressing questions remain about how local
firms, farmers, and institutional actors, such as industry associations and policymakers,
engage with these standards; how these actors translate private agrifood into particular
settings, since global standards often collide with regulatory systems as well as economic,
management, and environmental realities (“local realities”) in particular places; how this
process 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 Kenyan
horticulture industry through the proliferation of the EUREPGAP standard. EUREPGAP
has become the most widely applied private agrifood quality assurance scheme since
1997 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 but
consider 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.
 ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

effort to mark its global relevance. A particularly interesting case is Kenya, one of Africa’s
leading exporters of horticultural products to the European Union, whose future was
perceived to be at stake owing to the rise of GLOBALGAP. The fears of the negative
developmental effects of GLOBALGAP justify a more detailed analysis. Although some
accounts of the potentially exclusionary impact of the standard on African producers
exist, they have been anecdotal (Freidberg 2004, 2007), lacked a general theoretical
framework (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 the
concrete practices and organizational forms through which a specific division of labour
between 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 powerful
retailers try to change the very institutional framework of markets (“institutional gover-
4 nance”) and the economic practices of suppliers within them to achieve certain corporate
targets that are related to compliance with food safety and quality standards. I argue that
GLOBALGAP resembles a retailer-driven attempt to enforce a market-based mode of
self-regulation through which individual farmers’ skills are benchmarked against each
other. 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 a
regional 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 GVC
analysis, drawing on insights from recent reformulations of governance within the GVC
(Ponte and Gibbon 2005; Gibbon, Bair, and Ponte 2008; Tallontire 2007) and the global
production networks (GPN) framework (Coe and Hess 2007). First, this critique extends
the notion of governance from a chain level to a collective or sector level; second, I argue
that governance through externally audited standards can be understood as an attempt to
normalize farming and business practices according to prescriptive models of organizing
supply 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 of
global commodity chains (GCC) and GVC have embraced (Dicken, Kelly, Olds, and
Yeung 2001). Here I draw on a practice-oriented3 sociology of markets to show that
normalization poses an organizational problem because markets are usually sites of
different evaluative principles with regard to what counts as “quality” and what is
considered legitimate behavior in the marketplace (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006;
Thévenot 2001). Particular market models, such as standards, are invoked in practice only
if market agents agree on these models. The central issue, then, is how and when standards
become 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 Economic
Geography 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 the
term practice in the sense of “different actors’ way of going about daily activities and routines involving
production, exchange or—for that matter—consumption of agricultural products.”
 Vol. •• No. •• 2010

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 part
of 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 on
how the introduction of GLOBALGAP has affected the organizational relationships
between exporters and smallholder producers of fresh vegetables because the latter have
traditionally been the backbone of a globally oriented export sector. I also discuss the
major entry barriers for smallholder farmers and exporters and the potential benefits they
can 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 standards
negotiation and knowledge circulation. Quality experts at the industry level, development
organizations acting as advocates for smallholder farmers, and providers of agrobusiness
services have all been engaged in a multistakeholder dialogue with standard setters to
enhance the scope of implementation for Kenyan producers. These transnational nego- 5
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-

PRIVATE AGRIFOOD GOVERNANCE IN KENYA

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 chains
through backstage arrangements and situated compromises on what counts as “quality
produce” in the marketplace, notwithstanding the steady enclosure of markets through the
creation of more robust “certified spaces” (Mutersbaugh 2005a, 394). These issues are
dealt with in the second part of the article.

Managing Markets at a Distance

GLOBALGAP: A Global Network for Good Agricultural Practices
The GLOBALGAP standard has attracted the attention of researchers and development
practitioners alike over the past few years because of its rapid proliferation and strict
requirements for quality assurance. The scheme was launched as a business-to-business
standard by a coalition of mainly British and Dutch retailers in 1997 to harmonize existing
disparate (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 bodies
from the North and South alike. Nevertheless, the executive power still rests with an
exclusive club made up of representatives of big retailers and suppliers mainly from the
global 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, it
differs 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 safety
and quality, requiring producers systematically to reduce and manage risks along the
production process at the farm level (see Table 1).
A central requirement is the traceability of products from “fork to field,” ensuring a
reconnection between buyers and far-distant producers. To comply with GLOBALGAP’s
stipulations regarding the quality and safety of food, producers have to make
 ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

Figure 1. Trends in GLOBALGAP certification (as of February 2009). Source: Own design, data
from 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 by
registering the exact planting and harvesting date of produce on signs attached to
individual plots.
Recordkeeping and Producers are required to keep records on all substances applied to crops, the exact
internal self-inspection amount, and the date of application. An internal self-inspection must be performed at
least once a year.
Varieties and rootstocks Only certified/authorized seed varieties may be used.
Site history and site The history of a farm site has to be checked for environmental issues, for example, if trees
management were felled for cultivation or whether the land has been contaminated (e.g., through
heavy 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 of
plots. Health risks must be assessed for workers.
Fertilizer use Only approved fertilizers may be used; inorganic and organic fertilizers have to be stored
separately from crops or seeds.
Irrigation Contaminated water must not be used for irrigation.
Integrated pest Pests must be dealt with in ecologically sensitive ways. Crops must be treated with
management pesticides punctually if affected. Producers must ensure a minimum time between
spraying and harvesting.
Harvesting and produce Hygienic treatment of harvested produce must be ensured.
handling
Source: Adapted from Foodplus (2007).
 Vol. •• No. •• 2010

knowledge- and capital-intensive investments in upgrading the infrastructure of farms

(pesticide stores, grading rooms, and toilet and shower facilities to ensure hygiene on
farms), 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 for
ensuring intersubjective compliance and control at a distance (see Table 1).
Producers have to be certified by an internationally accredited third-party organization
on either an individual (option 1) or a group basis (option 2), the latter being relevant to
many groups of smallholder farmers and cooperatives in the global South. Third-party
certification helps retailers achieve credibility by externalizing the monitoring and
enforcement 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 quality
compliance to suppliers further upstream (Hatanaka, Bain, and Busch 2005). Moreover,
GLOBALGAP provides a benchmarking option under which other quality assurance
schemes could be treated as equivalent if the requirements of the standard are met.
Compliance with the standard poses problems for smallholder farmers, since they have
to adjust to a capital- and knowledge-intensive model of farming, which was generated in 7
a different normative and practical context. The costs of standard compliance are par-
ticularly problematic. Following a widespread World Bank (2005, 67) definition, they can

PRIVATE AGRIFOOD GOVERNANCE IN KENYA

be defined as “the additional costs necessarily incurred by government and/or private
enterprises in meeting the requirements to comply with a given standard in a given
external market.” In the case of GLOBALGAP, these additional costs can be separated
into 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) to
maintain the system.

Governing Through the Market: Collective Standards as Institutional Governance

Scholars in the social sciences, including economic geographers, have highlighted the
role of private standards more generally as new modes of governance in the global
economy and have made assumptions about their impact on the organization of agrifood
chains 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 a
GCC, 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 implementation
of the GLOBALGAP standard raise some important questions about three interrelated
processes: the construction and management of quality in global agrifood chains through
powerful retailers; the embeddedness of this process into formal systems of governance
at 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 GVC
and GPN analysis but have yet to be analyzed in a more comprehensive and empirically
grounded manner. More recent work in the economic sociology of markets has helped to
bridge this effort by complementing perspectives on governance at the sector level with
microlevel 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 individual
chains (see Dolan and Humphrey 2004; Gereffi, Humphrey, and Sturgeon 2005). Such a
 ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

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 to
reconfigure markets at a more general level because the constructive nature of markets
deserves no further attention. Markets are frequently treated as mere “coordination
mechanisms,” rather than as contested social spaces. For instance, Humphrey and
Schmitz (2002, 7) restricted the concept of governance to “non-market coordination” of
economic relationships. Supporting the criticism of Ponte and Gibbon (2005, 5–6), this
article disagrees with such a restriction, since the term can be applied equally to situations
in which lead firms achieve quasi market coordination through the development and
mainstreaming 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 solve
the problem of a preconfigured notion of markets: the constructive nature of markets does
not deserve a prominent place in their reconceptualization of governance. Rather, Gereffi,
Humphrey, and Sturgeon treated markets as neoclassical forms of coordination—as a pole
8 of a spectrum of governance from hierarchies to networks—for a situation in which
information about a product’s quality is not complex and easily available at the
moment of transaction between two market agents or no uncertainties exist about a
supplier’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, they
mention firm hierarchies, networks, captive arrangements, or standards as means of
dealing with uncertainty. However, such a refined focus on chain governance tells us little
about why the information to be embedded in standards actually exists or about the
asymmetrically structured fields of knowledge construction in which standards are
defined and proliferated.
A less functionalist rereading of standards suggests that standards should be conceived
of less as self-emergent institutions to reduce uncertainties about transactions (cf. Braun
2005, 4) and more as socially constructed and enforced conventions that not only aim to
achieve specific corporate targets but also emerge from and reinscribe specific power
asymmetries in terms of the ability to define what counts as quality and as legitimate
behavior in the marketplace (Ponte and Gibbon 2005; Morgan, Marsden, and Murdoch
2006; Tallontire 2007). Changing the rules of the game at the sector level enables lead
firms to drive a particular market in domains in which collective rule making is less costly
and risky than chain-specific solutions or in situations in which expanding common
institutional 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 to
this market-constructive dimension of governance as institutional or political gover-
nance. The attempt by powerful actors to format the very institutional framework of a
whole market through the development of horizontal standards, such as GLOBALGAP, is
then pivotal for understanding the internal dynamics of individual chains.

Beyond Market Orders from Above: Governance as a Normalization of Practices

Although 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 with
conceptualizations of chain governance: it operates with all-encompassing, “Leviathan-
like” notions of institutions and power, which provides little space to accommodate the
 Vol. •• No. •• 2010

implementation practices of actors.4 Compliance with standards—especially the one

related to the intangible attributes of quality—is much more often a messy and contested
process because markets represent “an intensively competitive economic and spatial
‘battlefield of knowledge’ ” (Morgan, Marsden, and Murdoch 2006, 71; Levy 2007; Long
1992). From this perspective, the proliferation of GLOBALGAP can be understood as a
retailer-driven attempt to mainstream codified forms of authoritative knowledge that try
to overscribe other forms of knowledge and production practices through a market-based
mode 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 and
metrology (e.g., documentation of farming practices and labeling of farm plots; cf.
Table 1) enhances the legibility of suppliers, which grants both retailers and exporters
extended 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 of
calculation are crucial for efforts “to find long-term governance solutions to perceived,
anticipated and actual coordination problems,” since they enhance the cognitive scopes of 9
governing actors and preclude alternative actions by fixing production practices and
relationships.

PRIVATE AGRIFOOD GOVERNANCE IN KENYA

But how successful are these processes of normalization and internalization of com-
pliance cultures? How successful are governance models in achieving their desired
outcomes? How do local policymakers, exporters, and farmers deal with new prescriptive
models 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” (Thrift
2000, 694; Berndt and Boeckler 2009, 543) in a straightforward and smooth way, one can
argue that markets are sites in which different and distributed evaluative principles on
what counts as quality and legitimate action clash, overlap, and need to be integrated into
a “higher common principle” of engagement (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006, 28) for
making coordination possible (see also Thévenot 2001; Stark 2009). The rules and
regulations that are set at a macrolevel invoke particular governance modes only if the
implementation practices of actors, embedded in specific institutional and environmental
contexts and particular business cultures (“ways of doing things”), converge with these
prescriptive templates.
This convergence is hardly given by implication, and thus one has to look at the
situational compromises between different market agents that are equipped with different
frames for evaluating quality and legitimate actions to understand the functioning of
particular value chains. There is no single pathway of standard performance or isometric
translation of abstract market models into concrete practices. Speaking of markets more
generally, Callon (2005, 11) acknowledged that market models—which, broadly defined,
include standards as “templates of market encounter”—may have a transformative power
in specific situations, but not necessarily. Hence, one must acknowledge that markets or
more specific value chains are always opened up to practical contingencies and experi-
ments in organization, especially in domains in which the objectification of products is
difficult, 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 industry
have been less isometrically applied than official (prescriptive) industry discourses would
suggest. 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 of
market encounters to some extent (Dicken, Kelly, Olds, and Yeung 2001; Levy 2007).
 ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

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, such
as 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 emerge
from the coexistence of “multiple evaluative principles” (Stark 2009, 15) on quality and
legitimate action among organizations and individuals in a given situation, and markets
are the battleground on which these frames are played out. Thus, reconstructing the
implementation of market models requires going into the field in the literal sense and
studying 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, organizational
arrangements, institutions, conventions, practices, and systems of measurement and
calculation particular market orders from below are invoked, rather than to embrace
Leviathan-like notions of governance in the analysis of global connections. Answers to
these questions not only provide a more grounded understanding of processes of market
10 inclusion and market exclusion but also highlight the sometimes “frictional” interplay
among universal market principles (food safety protocols, quality management systems,
and the like) and institutionally, socioculturally, and socioenvironmentally embedded
business and production practices. “Friction” (Tsing 2005) results from encounters of
multiple principles of evaluation, from the encounters of an abstract standard with
concrete situated economic practices. I now reconstruct these encounters along supply
chains and in the sphere of standard setting and quality assurance for the concrete case of
the Kenyan horticulture subsector.

Standards in Action:Transforming Organizations,

Relationships, and Practices in the Kenyan
Horticulture Industry
Researching Kenyan Horticulture
In 2007, Africa’s top 13 horticultural producers exported products (fresh fruit and
vegetables, 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,” has
been at the forefront of this development, having become one of the largest suppliers
of horticultural products from Africa to the EU. In 2007, the total earnings from export
horticulture reached approximately 700 million euros ($884 million f.o.b.), making it the
largest earner of foreign currency ahead of the tourism industry. This amount represented
a 20-percent increase from 2006 (Kenya Horticultural Development Programme, KHDP
2008). At the same time, the proliferation of GLOBALGAP was perceived by researchers
and practitioners alike as a tremendous challenge that could eventually jeopardize this
success, justifying a more detailed analysis of the standard’s real impact.
The material presented here was derived from field research conducted in Kenya in 2007
and from follow-up interviews with experts in 2008, together with filled-out questionnaires
with fresh vegetable exporters (12); altogether, 46 interviews were conducted, including
focus group discussions with one-off certified, uncertified/delisted, and recertified farmer
groups (13); interviews with individual farmers, middlemen, and agribusiness service
providers, including the four certification bodies based in the country; and interviews
with the GLOBALGAP secretariat in Germany (called Foodplus), sector associations,
public authorities, two importers in Germany and one in the United Kingdom, and several
 Vol. •• No. •• 2010

11

PRIVATE AGRIFOOD GOVERNANCE IN KENYA

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

international development organizations (5). The empirical work was complemented by

field visits, the analysis of donor project documents, consultancy reports, and topic-specific
secondary literature. Moreover, I participated in three crucial expert round-sessions in
Kenya and the United Kingdom on the proliferation of GLOBALGAP and other private
agrifood 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, of
different value chain actors (cf. Henderson et al. 2002). The primary research subjects
were exporters and groups of smallholder farmers in the central and eastern provinces of
Kenya, who were selected through a purposeful sample that was stratified according to
specific characteristics (size, certification status, nature of exporter-farmer relationships,
and end markets). Exporting companies were classified according to the volumes of
exports 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 the
Kenyan fresh vegetable exports. A smallholder farmer was defined as a farmer with fewer
than 5 acres (2,025 hectare) under crops.
12
The Arrival of GLOBALGAP: New Challenges to the Kenyan
Horticulture Industry?
Stringent quality standards are not new to Kenyan producers. Prior to the introduction
of EUREPGAP/GLOBALGAP, the industry had been exposed to increasingly stringent
public EU food safety standards and supermarket-specific quality protocols from the late
1990s onward. During that time, export chains became increasingly buyer driven (Gereffi
1994), with retailers in the United Kingdom in particular enforcing their own quality
protocols. In light of these developments, the Kenyan horticulture industry raised quality
standards for export, for instance, by implementing an industry code of practices and
border-based sanitary and phytosanitary quality checks (Jaffee 2003). Larger Kenyan
exporters repositioned themselves on the basis of product and process innovations as
premium suppliers of high-care products and ready-to-eat vegetable mixes (Dolan and
Humphrey 2004), which had an impact on the organization of supply chains and on
farming and business practices. Moreover, a small group of larger exporters experienced
a surge of company-based standards, such as Tesco’s Nature’s Choice and Marks and
Spencer’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 for
the 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 largest
exporters remarked:

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

The specificity of company standards vis-à-vis GLOBALGAP is that these standards are
usually implemented only by larger exporters, who use a small prestigious group of
farmers for certification, which grants them additional market security in their “exclu-
sive” relationship with retailers.
 Vol. •• No. •• 2010

Accordingly, it would be misleading to claim that GLOBALGAP was the only factor
that contributed to the restructuring of supply chains in the Kenyan horticulture industry.
It was, however, a significant one alongside corporate restructuring because of market
innovations and general considerations of economies of scale in light of rising market
demands. The specifically new dimension of GLOBALGAP rested with its collective
codification of existing individual supermarket protocols and the knowledge- and capital-
intensive investments it required at the farm level, which exceeded earlier requirements by
far, as well as its embeddedness in formal market-based schemes of certification and
auditing.
The first rounds of certification started in 2003—often with the support of international
development organizations. Most exporters were given deadlines by their buyers to
become compliant by the end of 2007. Kenya was somewhat privileged in dealing with the
challenges posed by GLOBALGAP (and other agrifood standards), since donor-driven
investments 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, 13
transferred crucial knowledge to the industry. These efforts resulted in the certification of
various farmer groups from early 2005 onward, but not all these projects could be

PRIVATE AGRIFOOD GOVERNANCE IN KENYA

sustained economically (cf. Ouma 2009; Humphrey 2008). Estimates from April 2006
show that at least 1,423 farms were certified for fresh produce exports in Kenya, including
large-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 fruits
and 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 farmers
growing 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 the
Kenyan horticulture industry, in combination with a diversity of end markets, resulted in
a heterogeneous landscape of differently governed export chains, with clear differences
among U.K. retail markets, continental European retail markets, and European and
non-European wholesale markets. For instance, while U.K. supermarkets are considered
to 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 of
certificates per country, given to both individual farmers and farmer groups. In January 2008, Kenya had
133 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 estimated
15,000 smallholder farmers were involved in export horticulture, accounting for up to 75 percent of fruit
and 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 vegetable
export 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 several
reasons for the difference in the estimates, such as different products sampled, different definitions of a
smallholder, variations in the spatial coverage of the studies, high volatility in participation in the export
market, and a complex configuration of informal supply chain arrangements and temporary spot-markets
alongside more formal supply chain arrangements.
 ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

14

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

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

Practicing GLOBALGAP: Trajectories of Implementation

Prior 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 their
farmers 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, and
error. The adjustment process was shaped by both farmers’ and exporters’ implementa-
tion capabilities and access to financial resources and agrobusiness support services, as
well as by the scope for action in specific value chains. In this regard, the cooperative or
noncooperative behavior of associated importers or retailers also shaped the GLOBAL-
GAP implementation process. In pursuing compliance with the standard, the exporters
and farmers were forced to implement sophisticated quality management and control
systems to ensure compliance with the standard (see Figure 3).
In general, the farmers were not able to meet the requirements of the standard without
external assistance provided by exporters or development organizations. Especially for
smaller 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 from
smallholder farmers, with a mean of 57 percent.
 Vol. •• No. •• 2010

resulted in a previously unknown degree of formal supply-base monitoring and quality

assurance, since they had hitherto relied largely on loose spot-market relationships with
many farmers. This arrangement allowed flexibility in exporting produce from a variety
of sources while keeping the need for investments in the supply base low.
The interviews with the exporters and the survey data indicated that the monitoring
costs of exporters rose by 30 percent to 40 percent because of the restructuring of the
supply chain. Only three firms were supported by importers during the adjustment
process. In these cases, both the exporters and importers were closely linked through close
cooperative arrangements or vertically integrated structures (cf. Dolan and Humphrey
2004). Furthermore, no price premium was paid for certified produce to cover the high
costs of compliance and certification, which had far-reaching consequences in terms of
incentive structures for farmers on the ground. The retailers shifted the costs of com-
pliance and certification onto the importers and subsequently onto the exporters and
farmers, squeezing them increasingly between price and quality imperatives, as one
German importer highlighted:

No. That [raising prices] is absolutely impossible considering the pressure we are facing from 15
retailers. . . . If we attempt to get premium prices, for instance, for green beans . . . then you are
rapidly pushed out [of the market], since the consumers or the retailers do not see why they

PRIVATE AGRIFOOD GOVERNANCE IN KENYA

should pay a premium. We are talking about quality standards here. You simply can’t enforce a
higher price; otherwise you are pushed out, and then the exporter also loses. It is always the
consumer who is used as a pretext, but in my view, and actually I am not allowed to comment
on 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 place
around 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 to
meet the standard’s requirements; exploiting supply-base economies of scale by sourcing
from 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 and
compromises between the formal prescriptions of the standard and actual implementation
and compliance practices. The organizational responses of exporters, compromises, and
problems with implementing the standard are discussed in the following sections.

Organizational Responses of Exporters and the Rearrangement of Supply Chains

The proliferation of the standard did not resemble a uniform, institutionally homoge-
neous process, but was articulated in a complex landscape of overlapping supply chain
arrangements owing to different end-market requirements, individual exporter-buyer
agreements, or clandestine practices of exporting companies aimed at bypassing the
system.
For instance, one large exporter, with the assistance of an international certification
body, established an internal audit unit (IAU) that monitored a selected number of
farmers’ compliance with the system. This monitoring was devolved to the company’s
internal 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 of
nonconformities during the annual external audit will lead to the withdrawal of the certificate.
 ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

16

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

division of the company. The system-check and final certification audit were done by the
certification body. Although the establishment of the IAU was costly, it reduced the costs
of compliance in the long run because it reduced inherent risks and the time spent on
expensive 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 actual
audits. Moreover, the exporter was able partially to retain the costs of compliance and
certification through cross-costing because of its vertically integrated firm structure,
achieving gains in efficiency and cost savings in the area of logistics and import. Because
of 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 an
edge over its competitors.
The company also restructured its supply chain organization by sourcing through loose
arrangements from additional farmers in new frontier regions in Central and Western
Kenya 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-end
markets in Europe to a class of “business-minded” farmers, who, in the long run, would
be able to meet the costs of certification on their own and to associate themselves with the
company as “independent growers.” A minimum hectare policy of 2 ha (5 acres) per
farmer was introduced to ensure the economic viability of the company’s operations.
 Vol. •• No. •• 2010

The reduction of risks among its spatially extended supply base posed a significant
organizational challenge to the company. To mitigate the risks of failure within the whole
system in the case of nonconformities in quality, which are likely to affect spatially
extended farming schemes, the production base was divided into four regions using a
cloned 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) as
critical factors to reduce the final costs of compliance. This approach reduced costs for
training farmers, risk assessments, laboratory tests, and audits considerably. Three other
large exporters implemented similar systems.

Standard Implementation and Compliance as Situated Compromises

The 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 and
the need to sustain the market with sufficient produce, some exporters managed
to agree with their importers, sometimes without the knowledge of the retailers, on
certifying a certain share of their supply base and to maintain an equal level of quality 17
assurance for their noncertified suppliers. This arrangement allowed them to
continue sourcing produce from uncertified farmers. However, the compliance with

PRIVATE AGRIFOOD GOVERNANCE IN KENYA

GLOBALGAP was less consistent than it officially appeared and was embedded in a
social field in which different evaluative principles clashed. In times of high market
demand, some exporters still exported uncertified produce without the knowledge of their
importers and retailers. They could do so because Kenyan farmers had been widely
exposed to good agricultural practices, assuring a high degree of quality among even
noncertified farmers, and because GLOBALGAP registers only producing farms, not the
volumes that these farms can produce. These practices and loopholes also explain why
exports from Kenya continued to grow in 2007 and 2008 in volume and value (cf. KHDP
2008).
This finding shows that governance may be less pervasive than the conventional GCC
or GVC literature suggests (cf. Dicken, Kelly, Olds, and Yeung 2001; Gibbon and Ponte
2008), since different frames for evaluating quality and the forms of expert knowledge
that inform them may oppose each other.10 This point is well illustrated by the case of one
of the largest exporters in Kenya, who creatively interpreted some blurry sections in the
GLOBALGAP protocol. With the help of a Dutch certification body and financial support
from donor organizations, the company certified the individual plots of some 100 farmers
as a single farm (option 1), which reduced the costs of certification significantly. After a
successful first certification, the company implemented the same system for another 170
farmers. The organizational and social implications of this approach were significant
because farmers de jure became “workers” on their own farms, while quality assurance
was centralized by the company.
The Dutch certification body not only helped to develop this cost-efficient arrangement
and provided implementation expertise but also repeatedly defended the integrity of the
approach during technical meetings of GLOBALGAP stakeholders, who were concerned
whether this approach would conform to the food safety and quality requirements of the
standard. 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 electronic
traceability system (called “Unique Area ID”) that registers the location, size, and production volumes of
farms in a database to make the selling of uncertified produce much more difficult (interview with
GLOBALGAP official, October 2007).
 ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

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

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 acknowledged
during an interview. Besides enforcing a new technical and managerial dimension
of food production, its proliferation had one particular impact: it required both small-
holder farmers and exporters to make investments in a system that had previously
been 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 viability
at a time of market restructuring, exporters shifted or intended to shift to larger indepen-
18 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 the
exporters. The exporters and importers evaluated these farmers as reliable suppliers
who had, in addition to exposing the necessary material resources and organizational
capacity, internalized the new rules of the market and embraced long-term business
relationships:

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 themselves
because they have never proven their reliability and will never prove it—according to our
experience. And that is why they will not receive any further support in the near future from
exporters 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, in
terms of monetary benefits, the farmers don’t see any. . . . The farmers just think of today. What
drives them is at what price is the company [the exporter] buying today. What drives them is
money, 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. . . . The
problem is that there is [a] lack of laws. Nothing protects certified farmers from poaching
exporters. . . . This will kill the small companies [exporters]. . . . For me, it is not the number of
farmers that is important. . . . I want the farmers to be committed. They have to know that they
have 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 of
the products that the smallholder farmers provided. In general, smallholder farmers are
considered better caretakers of labor-intensive, high-value crops than are wage-earning
farm laborers on larger commercial farms (cf. also Jaffee 2003) because of their com-
 Vol. •• No. •• 2010

mitment and disciplined family labor.11 It was more that the farmers had various problems
in adapting to the stringent process and management requirements of GLOBALGAP, as
well as to the new frames of evaluation, engagement, and calculation that are aimed at
strategic investments in “durable” and certified supply chains. While the exporters were
forced to rethink their procurement practices in relation to “rational choices,” as well as
suppliers’ performance- and cost-benefit criteria, the farmers were prompted to reevaluate
their farm management techniques, organizational capacity, and business practices. These
evaluations were not always geared toward compliance with the new institutional envi-
ronment constituted by GLOBALGAP. In many cases, when the certification of farmer
groups was supported externally by exporters and development organizations, the farmers
frequently resisted and creatively engaged with the new conditions. Although they
maintained the integrity of the system for the sake of auditing, various smallholder groups
violated the principle of traceability by side-selling to exporters other than those with
whom they signed formal contracts according to GLOBALGAP regulations. As a con-
sequence, especially smaller exporters who were affected by the opportunistic behavior of
the supplying farmers could not recover the investments they made and experienced
serious financial problems. 19
Markets as Sites of Different Evaluative Principles

PRIVATE AGRIFOOD GOVERNANCE IN KENYA

The problem described here is much deeper than simple opportunism, ignorance, or the
lack of business-mindedness among farmers as the exporters frequently claimed. The
dynamics in the Kenyan industry can be attributed to the frictional interplay of different
frames of evaluating both the quality of products and the legitimate actions in the
marketplace. This interplay resulted in the problem of establishing a higher common
principle of engagement among exporters and farmers on the basis of the philosophy of
GLOBALGAP (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 had
invested in certification schemes, the farmers frequently sold produce to competitors,
since they still had opportunities to sell uncertified produce in times of high market
demand. 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 evaluated
solely 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 the
market demand even without the sufficient availability of certified produce. As Stark
(2009, 15) pointed out, entrepreneurial success in some contexts builds on the “ability to
keep multiple evaluative principles in play,” a view that dismisses an overgoverned notion
of organizations or markets more generally. Both the farmers and exporters switched
between 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, they
mobilized established practices and situated knowledge of doing business, which had
been constitutive of the Kenyan export model of “flexi-supply.” The success of this model
is paradoxically built on the ability of some larger companies to sustain their final markets
through backstage activities, albeit to the detriment of other exporters. As I show in the
following 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 volatile
and risk-prone market, since vertical integration had been only a limited option to exporters in Kenya
because of the low elasticity of agricultural land.
 ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

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

Standard-Related Entry Barriers and Reward Structures: A Differentiated View

Data from a large-scale survey suggest that the high nonrecurrent and recurrent costs
of compliance with GLOBALGAP are the main market-entry barriers for smallholder
farmers and smaller exporters. For instance, calculations based on Graffham, Karehu, and
MacGregor (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, the
farmers paid 36 percent, the exporters paid 44 percent, and the donors paid 20 percent of
the costs. Recurrent costs amounted to £760 ($1,488) per grower, with the farmers paying
14 percent and the exporters paying 86 percent of the total costs. Considering the average
net farm incomes, which ranged from £98 ($191) to £1,250 ($2,448) per annum, the costs
of 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 of
20 greater competition in the certification business.
Graffham, Karehu, and MacGregor’s (2007, iii) study, which covered 11 exporters who
accounted for 90 percent of the fresh vegetable exports of Kenya in 2006, also highlighted
the exclusionary consequences of compliance with GLOBALGAP. Six of these exporters
were also sampled for this study. According to Graffham, Karehu, and MacGregor, the
number of smallholder farmers who supplied these firms decreased in real terms after the
introduction of EUREPGAP/GLOBALGAP in September 2003. At that time, 9,342
farmers with 45,000 family dependents were supplying these firms, but by the end of
2006, 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 that
noncertified farmers continue to be integrated into value chains through backstage
arrangements, whether through compromises between exporters and importers because
of generally high levels of quality production among farmers—attributed to knowledge
spillovers—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 the
diffusion of GLOBALGAP-related knowledge to noncertified farmers. Yet, with the
steady consolidation of the supply base and the planned establishment of a GPS-based
traceability system by GLOBALGAP—which locates each certified farm and registers
the volumes that are supplied—these loopholes may close for many farmers in the near
future.
Furthermore, the peculiarities of smallholder production systems constrain compliance
with the GLOBALGAP standard to some extent: weather-based production failures may
temporarilyleadtocash-flowproblemsandpreventfarmersfrommaintainingtheGLOBAL-
GAP quality management system consistently. Successful maintenance and integrity
of the system depend on firm linkages with exporters, who can provide the adequate
monetary and technical support, since the break-even point for the implementation of
GLOBALGAP 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 pertinent
linkages and “value chain capital,” as well as with a sufficient asset base, may reap
benefits by attaining or retaining access to the market. They can also earn rents through
organizational development and enhance farm management and productivity levels by
optimizing the use of farm inputs.
 Vol. •• No. •• 2010

In conclusion, a final assessment with regard to the impact of GLOBALGAP on

certified and noncertified farmers and the wider regional economies remains difficult
owing to situated arrangements and contingencies within specific value chains. Any
figures regarding the local impact of GLOBALGAP need to be treated carefully, since
many smallholder farmers continue to be integrated into high-value markets through
informal arrangements and secret sourcing practices on a spot basis for the time being.
Furthermore, consolidation of the supply base may entail significant direct and indirect
local economic effects through labor and service externalities that are generated by larger
growers, an assumption that was empirically confirmed by Maertens and Swinnen (2009)
for the export-oriented fresh vegetable subsector in Senegal. Thus, to assess the full
impact of the proliferation of private agrifood standards more generally, the long-term
regional social, economic, and ecological effects of highly structured value chains
deserve more attention in the future, to reconnect GVC research with the earlier concern
of 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).
21
Enhancing Local Scopes for Action:The Contested Spaces of Quality Assurance
The implementation of GLOBALGAP in Kenya can be reconstructed comprehensively

PRIVATE AGRIFOOD GOVERNANCE IN KENYA

only if the national and transnational spaces of agrifood governance and standard setting
are 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 shaping
adjustment dynamics in the subsector. There has been crucial donor support to the
industry 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 Technical
Cooperation (GTZ) and an international agricultural research institute to lower the costs
of GLOBALGAP certification and some other standards in a business environment that
until 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 required
by GLOBALGAP, the Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Services (KEPHIS) was accred-
ited to ISO17025, the benchmark for phytosanitary testing services under the standard
scheme. Transnationally connected expert networks, coordinated by the European Union
and the U.K. Department for International Development (DFID), among others, also
mainstreamed 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 back
local implementation experiences into the transnational GLOBALGAP community.
FPEAK, several larger exporters, and development organizations operating in Kenya
were repeatedly invited to the GLOBALGAP annual conferences to advance the discus-
sion of smallholder certification and to make various sections of the standard protocol
more smallholder friendly. In these multistakeholder discussions, Kenyans and associated
experts 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 smallholder
farmers and to enhance its legitimacy in the market, the GLOBALGAP secretariat
Foodplus 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
 ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

opportunities for the representation of smallholders in the standard-setting process and to

foster the “practical evaluation of tools and global best practice [to facilitiate] standard
implementation by smallholders worldwide” (Africa Observer 2009). This move indi-
cated that even transnational Leviathans, such as retailers, are forced to make certain
compromises about the governance of markets. In addition, a Smallholder Taskforce was
founded by GTZ, GLOBALGAP, and DFID to adapt the standard to the needs of farmers
in developing countries. A positive result of these initiatives was the revision of the
standard protocol concerning regulations on quality management systems or infrastruc-
tural requirements at the farm level. Nevertheless, critics maintain that the true impact of
these initiatives is questionable, and they are likely to be not more than public relations
coups, since retail members on the GLOBALGAP executive board have so far embraced
these initiatives only halfheartedly.
Despite the considerable success of Kenyan key industry players to insert themselves
into GLOBALGAP’s standard-setting processes and to enhance their national quality
assurance capacities, not all of these initiatives have been fruitful. This situation is best
highlighted by the so-far rather ineffective implementation of the national quality assur-
22 ance scheme KENYAGAP. A benchmarking option under GLOBALGAP in theory allows
countries to implement their own national quality assurance schemes if their schemes are
internationally accredited for equivalence. These schemes may be more adapted to local
realities of production and may reduce the costs of certification for local producers.
Moreover, according to Humphrey (2006, 41), regional branding strategies or “branding
from below” represent strategic means for capturing or enhancing value in global value
chains. Thus, the domestication of GLOBALGAP (then EUREPGAP) was a promising
effort 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 launched
after a protracted and expensive process under the auspices of FPEAK. Kenya was the first
country in Africa to develop a national benchmarked scheme, and the implementation of
KENYAGAP 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 and
farms for a number of reasons. First, the scheme reduces the costs of audits and
compliance only marginally, since KENYAGAP is obliged to comply with all major
GLOBALGAP requirements. Second, it can hardly outweigh the structural constraints of
smallholder production systems, which face a critical threshold of economic viability
considering the technical and monetary entry barriers posed by the standard. Third, the
acceptance of “Third World quality assurance” is at the mercy of European buyers, who
have so far been reluctant to accept KENYAGAP as a full equivalent to GLOBALGAP
because 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 Kenyan
company had been certified under KENYAGAP (personal communication with Africert,
23 December 2008), and the standard was undergoing a complete rebenchmarking against
the new GLOBALGAP version at the time of writing.
The cases of the Smallholder Ambassador/Smallholder Taskforce and the flawed
implementation of KENYAGAP show that standard-setting processes, notions of quality,
and the governance structures invoked by them resemble a contested terrain in which
competing principles of evaluation and practices are negotiated (Morgan, Marsden, and
Murdoch 2006). As the case of Kenyan horticulture shows, building up national quality
assurance schemes and capacities for the implementation of agrifood standards requires
more than technical capacities but depends on attaining legitimacy in shaping the
definition, standardization, evaluation, and calculation of quality in asymmetrically struc-
 Vol. •• No. •• 2010

tured standard-setting networks (cf. also Callon 2005, 11). Reflecting upon this issue, the
managing director of Africert, a local certification body, highlighted the flaws and limits
of domestic agrifood governance: “If there is no guarantee that benchmarking gives an
advantage, 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 local
certification capacity has no guarantee, we are wasting our time.”

Conclusion
Taking GLOBALGAP as a vantage point, this article developed a framework for
studying the proliferation of collective (sector-based) agrifood standards. In this regard, I
moved beyond conventional notions of governance in GVC analysis. I first showed that
powerful firms can reshape value chains through more hands-off forms of governance
through the institutional reformatting of a whole market, yet without losing their driving
power. They can do so through collective forms of governance at a sector level by trying
to invoke a market-based mode of self-regulation: suppliers are disciplined at a distance
through the attempted normalization of farming practices, with risks and costs being 23
lowered for retailers while scopes for calculation at a global scale being extended as
suppliers are benchmarked and made legible.

PRIVATE AGRIFOOD GOVERNANCE IN KENYA

To avoid an overstylized notion of market governance, I argued for incorporating more
practice-oriented approaches from the sociology of markets into GVC analysis that allow
analysts to reconstruct the practical invocation of market models, such as standards from
below. Such a perspective allows analysts to excavate the often-frictional implementation
of standards in specific local settings, marked by particular economic, institutional, and
socioenvironmental realities. Taking the case of Kenya as an example, I tried to demon-
strate that the successful global proliferation of GLOBALGAP cannot be understood
without reconstructing the situated compromises along and beyond the supply chain when
it comes to local implementation and compliance with the standard.
Some of these compromises are more obvious, as I tried to demonstrate for the case of
the negotiation of the standard in heterogeneous standard-setting networks, in which
different forms of expert knowledge have been mobilized to make the standard more
smallholder friendly. Although Kenyan key industry players have been successful to some
extent in inserting local implementation knowledge into the GLOBALGAP network, in
influencing debates, and in attracting advocates for their concerns from development
organizations, this success should not distract from the fact that actors from developing
countries command much less authoritative or definitional knowledge than do retailers
and standard setters from Europe. These asymmetries naturally constrain the scopes for
compromises in formal standard-setting processes.
I also showed, however, that conventional macroperspectives on governance fall short
of acknowledging the frictions and compromises along supply chains with regard to the
implementation of the GLOBALGAP standard. I demonstrated empirically that this
friction is the result of coexisting principles of evaluating the quality of a product and
legitimate action in the marketplace and that this situation has had an impact on the
dynamics of adjustment in the Kenyan horticulture industry. In this regard, the emergence
of new certified markets posed a Janus-headed issue: on the one hand, it required farmers
and exporters to commit themselves to a higher common principle of production, coop-
erative investment, and durable supply chains in the marketplace to comply with the
requirements of GLOBALGAP. On the other hand, it was the ability of certain exporters
and farmers to keep multiple evaluative principles in play that explains the recent growth
of the industry despite the often-attested exclusion of smallholder farmers from the
 ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

market. To grasp these processes, I emphasized the need to focus more on the actual
practice of markets rather than to treat markets as mere coordination mechanisms.

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