Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
selected by horticultural export companies. For example, Kenya's largest (and ar-
guably, most respected) ethical trading horticultural export company officially re-
quires smallholders with five or more acres of land in order to create the economies
of scale necessary to ensure sufficient continuity and quantity of produce to offset
the costs of accreditation for multiple small farmers. his potentially loks out very
small-scale outgrowers. As all the smallholders in this researh owned less than ive
acres, they would have undoubtedly been among those excluded from the discus-
sions. Indeed, only one group out of five interviewed were actually aware of a recent
audit or visit being conducted on their farms. Thus, the structure of exporter-small-
holder relations meant that while the Kenya-GAP negotiations atempted to repres-
ent every category of grower, in reality the majority of contact was via medium-
sized exporters.
Although FPEAK wanted to generate a Kenya-GAP whih was botom-up and
not foreign, most Kenya-GAP hanges appear to have come from FPEAK's tehnical
experience in documenting what smallholders are doing on their farms. In the hem-
ical storage box example discussed earlier, the idea for equivalence came from ob-
servations that farmers were already successfully storing hemicals safely in metal
boxes. This is in direct contrast to participatory auditing that Auret and Barrientos
(2006) advocate for dealing with smallholders in Africa. As they explain, auditing
whih focuses on formal management 'snapshots' is useful for piking up visible is-
sues suh as health and safety, but less useful for inding out about more complex
ethical issues suh as freedom, discrimination or culturally-based inequalities (Auret
and Barrientos, 2006). The negotiations also did not necessarily open up spaces for
smallholders themselves to comment, largely because FPEAK formally involved pro-
ducer cooperatives but did not address existing inequalities within these.
Producer cooperatives and their alternatives
Ethical trade regulations are enacted at the local level through interactions between
the exporting company - whose responsibility it is to monitor and enforce standards
- and smallholder producer cooperatives. These groups, used in the majority of green
bean export production, have been described as playing 'a major part in the suc-
cess that has been experienced in [Kenya's] horticultural industry' (Borot de Bat-
tisti
et al.
, 2009, p27) by providing opportunities for farmers to pool produce and
resources, facilitate market access and increase knowledge of market requirements
suh as GLOBALG.A.P and the ETI. In brief, smallholder farmer cooperatives were
