Global Value Chains and Agribusiness in Africa: Upgrading or Capturing Smallholder Production?

Abstract

This article critically examines the concept of agrarian value chains in Africa, exploring the extent to which they reflect the expansion of agribusiness and its influence on agriculture. It traces the rise of agribusiness in the United States as a system based on extracting value through control over input marketing, processing, and retailing in the post-war period. It examines the close relationship between US imperialism and the expansion of agribusiness and the facilitation of agribusiness interests by the rise of neoliberalism and the opening of global markets. Against the the backdrop of monopolies, mergers, and takeovers, it questions the extent to which conceptions of upgrading through smallholder integration into agribusiness chains accurately reflects the fortunes of smallholder farmers. It argues that far from constituting a dynamic system of entre partnership that facilitates the acquisition of new skills by farmers, upgrading of production and higher incomes, agribusiness constitutes a system of value capture in which transnational corporations extend their control overproduction and marketing through takeovers and contractual arrangements that control farmers’ production. This is largely absent from value chain frameworks since they focus on the transformations of commodities rather than the existing relations of production, make assumptions about the relationship between upgrading and integration into global markets, and assume that failures to upgrade result from the peculiarities of national and regional settings rather than agribusiness practice. Three case studies are presented focusing on monopolies within the seed breeding, cocoa and pineapple and their impact on smallholders and national patterns of accumulation.