When agricultural commercialization fails: ‘Re-visiting’ value-chain agriculture and its ruins in northern Ghana
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Date
2022
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Globalizations
Abstract
Commercialization via value-chain agriculture, under which small farmers often
Collaborating with big companies has become a prominent development strategy
across Africa. Often framed in win-win terms, the dark sides of such projects (e.g.
project failures and related losses are often sidelined in both academic and
practitioner discourses on agricultural commercialization. Informed by a
collaborative ethnography of a failed value-chain agriculture project in Ghana,
this paper seeks to contribute to a better understanding of how farmers,
agribusiness companies and development organizations engage with and
shape commercialization processes, and how those most affected—farmers
and their communities—experience often risky and conflict-prone ventures.
In contrast to the win-win-rhetoric adopted by funders and corporations
partners in such projects, we foreground the uneven distribution of risk and
sacrifices and losses between farmers, communities, and corporate partners; the
socially and materially disruptive nature of commercialization projects for
host communities; and the clashes between a planner’s view of the world and
the environmental realities of commercialization.
Description
Research Article
Keywords
contract farming, agrarian change, Africa