Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
set up by exporting companies for the purposes of organizing and informing small
groups of farmers in eah area, and thus formed the basis for the Kenya-GAP teh-
nical committees.
The issue, however, is that cooperative membership often privileges land owners.
The most marginalized smallholders - i.e. farm workers and women (who contribute
80 per cent of the labour) - were found to be excluded from most tehnical training,
information sessions and decision-making opportunities associated with farmer co-
operatives. Even where these farmers participate, for example as employees involved
in record keeping or in sorting and grading produce, they are not often formal mem-
bers. For women in particular, their husbands oten atend meetings instead. FPEAK
suggested that this problem 'had to do with the cultural seting more than anything
else'.
As a result of poor representation in producer cooperatives, smallholders' know-
ledge about aspects of the food system beyond the production level was extremely
low. Women smallholders especially had litle understanding of the global market
for frenh beans; some were aware that the beans were exported, but did not know
the final destination, although they realized that produce was destined for foreign
consumers due to the fact that frenh beans were not part of the local diet. hey had
trouble selling surplus on the local market for a decent price, and did not know how
to prepare the food for family consumption. This meant that high quality 'ethical'
surplus or reject vegetables were commonly used as animal feed, and farmers lost
valuable income. his has important implications for the role of standards suh as
GLOBALG.A.P and Kenya-GAP to contribute to improving the livelihoods and food
security of smallholder farmers at the national and local level.
Smallholders were also unaware of any global regulatory standards, beyond im-
mediate health regulations. When asked about specific parts of GLOBALG.A.P or
the ETI code for example - suh as collective bargaining, freedom of association,
fair wages and so on - many responded with, 'you know, I don't know many rules'.
Smallholders were not familiar with the process of auditing or accreditation, des-
pite noting that sometimes representatives from the exporting company can be seen
walking around their shambas (farms). In the case of one farm that had recently ex-
perienced what was perhaps an audit, even the farm manager had very litle know-
ledge of what this entailed:
I think there was something like that. Because there was time when there was
some white people just like you came and wanted to see the standard of how we
