Assembling Export Markets: The Making and Unmaking of Global Food Connections in West Africa

Assembling Export Markets  explores the origins of global agrifood chains through an examination of the new ‘frontier regions’ of the global fresh produce market that has emerged in the West African Republic of Ghana over the past decade. Building on an organizational ethnography of two large agribusiness enterprises which have contracted local farmers for export production, author Stefan Ouma demonstrates that what is commonly naturalized as ‘market integration’ in contemporary development discourses is, in actuality, a frictional and ontologically transformative process. Through original research on organizational strategies and everyday market encounters between agribusiness enterprises and farmers in southern and northern Ghana, Ouma reveals that the practical enactment and local engagement of seemingly universal forces must be considered to understand the ongoing extension of global market relations. Innovative and ground–breaking,  Assembling Export Markets  sheds important new light on our understanding of the origins, evolution and crisis moments of global agrifood connections.

Stefan Ouma  is Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Geography at the Goethe University of Frankfurt. Being an economic geographer by training, he has worked extensively on global commodity chains, agrifood standards, smallholder agriculture, and contract farming in East and West Africa.

USA: Annals of the American Association of Geographers Economic Geography Review of International Political Economy Socio–Economic Review ROW: African Affairs Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers Cambridge Journal for Regions, Economy and Society Development and Change Environment and Planning A Economy and Society Global Networks Globalizations Progress in Human Geography Journal of Agrarian Change Journal of Modern African Studies Science and Technology Studies