Chapter One
Introduction: Struggling with "World Market Integration"

It has become a familiar scene in Densu Valley, Aborobe district, southern Ghana: Trucks piled with fresh pineapples struggle through the rough rural terrain, making their way to the nearby processing facility of a multinational agribusiness company. Upon arrival, the fruits are sliced and packed, and flown "fresh from farm" and "just-in-time" to retailers in Europe, where an affluent and quality-conscious urban clientele would buy the little 200?g packages of pineapple chunks, making the farmers distant participants in the convenience food revolution.

For some time now, Densu Valley has been one of the new sites of the global agrifood economy. In the past, many farmers in the valley - until the 1950s a major cocoa-growing area, when all the plants were destroyed by disease - had mainly been involved in food crop production or had left to seek their fortunes in Ghana's sprawling cities, but it was in the late 1980s that a much more lucrative window of business opportunity opened. With European consumers hungry for fresh pineapples, some farmers and pioneer exporters ventured into pineapple production, which subsequently took off on a broad scale from the early 1990s onwards. However, "the market" was frequently deceitful, shaped by mistrust and uncertainty, with both exporters and farmers often being cheated by one another or by buyers in distant Europe, in a trade that was mainly organized around volatile spot-market relations. With the arrival of the exporter-processor Ton:go Fruits1 (TF) in the late 1990s, times seemed to change for a few chosen ones. Through its operations, some farmers were integrated into more tightly regulated, dynamic, and demanding supply chains via more solid contractual arrangements. Under close supervision of the company's agronomists and through its financial support, the farmers were introduced to the world of European retailers, with its demands for food safety, quality, freshness, supply chain management. Many farmers fared well with the just-in-time model. Their new riches materialized through the opening of shops and the construction of houses in the area, symbolizing the relative fortunes that a new class of "big-time farmers" (as they are known locally) had acquired through the blessings of international trade.

Depending on one's theoretical inclination, the integration of Densu Valley farmers into agrobusiness supply chains may be seen through very different prisms. In their seminal work Living under Contract, Little and Watts (1994) conceived of the "world market integration" of farmers in the Global South through specific contractual relations with (often large) agribusiness companies as an industrial appropriation of selected rural activities, expressive of a new global regime of capital accumulation based on "global fresh" and the penetration of new agrarian frontiers (see also Friedmann 1993). In the same book, Watts (1994) reflected extensively and with impressive historical detail upon the social implications of contract farming in the rural South,2 arguing that through such a mode of market integration "[n]ominally independent growers retain the illusion of autonomy but have become in practice what Lenin called propertied proletarians, workers cultivating company crops on private allotments" (ibid.: 64). Watts' argument can be placed in a lineage with other political economy texts that have critically discussed how agribusiness operates and takes control over production in the Global South, and what role smallholder farmers (or "peasants") play in a globalized agrifood economy (Feder 1976; Bernstein 2010).

Agrarian political economy's critical stance towards "world market integration" and global capitalism more generally can be contrasted to the position of neoclassical economics and the policy descriptions derived from it. From the viewpoint of the World Bank economists who in the 1980s and 1990s urged the Ghanaian government to liberalize markets, attract foreign direct investments (FDI), and embrace export promotion strategies, the case of TF and its farmers might have been considered as nothing less than a success story. From the 1980s onward, the World Bank singled out the promotion of non-traditional exports (NTEs) as a new panacea for development, as prices for traditional commodities such as cocoa, coffee, and sugar were declining. As part of a new paradigm advocating "private-sector development with an emphasis on export-led growth, monetary and fiscal reform, and government deregulation in agricultural production and marketing" (Little & Dolan 2000: 63), countries like Ghana were promised a rosy future, given their comparative advantage with regard to land, labor, climate and proximity to European markets. As the World Bank (1993: 40) noted back then, "[a]ccelerated growth is predicated on a rapid integration of the Ghanaian economy into world markets, and Ghana has a comparative advantage in horticulture and (potentially) fruit and vegetable processing industries."

Indeed, TF invested in Ghana owing to the country's comparative advantages and a range of tax incentives the structurally adjusted Ghanaian state provided to foreign investors under a free zone model promoted by the World Bank - which some may consider ostensible proof that export promotion policies can attract precious FDI. The case also seems to provide striking evidence that the diversification of Ghana's economy, which since colonial times had relied upon the export of cocoa, minerals, and timber, is feasible. TF moved beyond the mere export of crude fruits by adding local value through processing, generating employment and transferring skills and knowledge to workers and suppliers alike. In this regard, the company also seems to have helped evade the trap of crude (low-value) exports, the yoke under which most export-oriented economies across sub-Saharan Africa had found themselves since colonial times.

Despite their different theoretical inclination and treatment of the consequences of "world market integration", the agrarian political economy and neoclassical take on markets do share a striking commonality. Implicitly, they both render the global market an "organismic totality" (Gibson-Graham 2006 [1996]: 98). Through scholarly abstraction, an essential, absolute economic entity with a self-evident quality is created.3 In these narratives, "the market" to varying degrees either features as a grand destructive or grand empowering force (and thus either as an object of critique or glorification), but it is rarely made an object of discussion in itself. While many critical political economy approaches often treat markets, and capitalism more generally, as abstract machines whose "dominance is guaranteed by a logic of profitability, a telos of expansion, an imperative of accumulation, a structure of ownership and control, or some other quality of feature [.]" (Gibson-Graham 2006 [1996]: 15), neoclassical economics in its various disguises does so by naturalizing and dehistoricizing them (see also Barnes 2005). By abstracting markets, these readings often unintentionally join tracks by black-boxing how markets (and "capital" more generally) come into being practically. Far from natural, smooth, or straightforward, this is often a contested, interrupted, and precarious process.

Many hundred miles north of Densu Valley, we encounter another frontier of the global agrifood economy. Since the late 1990s, a company, hereafter referred to as Organic Fruits Ltd. (OFL), has tried to create a market for organic mangoes in northern Ghana, a region where farmers had neither grown trees for export, nor trees under contract before. Where subsistence farming based on a slash and burn system is still the dominant mode of production, where rural land is largely held as a communal property, and daily life is deeply entangled with customary and religious values and forms of authority, market-making becomes a complex project. Ghana's north has always been marked by high incidences of poverty and food insecurity, having fared less well during Ghana's economic recovery that took shape in the 1980s. Having been structurally "underdeveloped" since colonial times, it has largely served as a labor reservoir for the cocoa, mining and urban economies in the country's south. A Ghanaian geographer attuned to critical political economy once described it as "a marginal, peripheral and 'distant' rural space in the context of capital accumulation" (Songsore 1989; cited in Kasanga 1995: 221). Choosing a different wording, even more liberal economists subscribe to such a diagnosis, arguing that the "high incidence of poverty in northern Ghana is [.] attributed to exclusion from trade" (Al-Hassan & Diao 2007: 5).

In both discourses on the developmental condition of northern Ghana, categories such as "marginal," "peripheral," "distant," and "excluded" are usually based on the idea that the market has a boundary, which, according to Mitchell (2007: 246-247), "is thought to separate the market from the large areas of material activity and...