Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
In Uganda, although group certification has the potential to empower producer
cooperatives vis-à-vis global standard bodies, smallholders argued that this had not
reduced the practical problems that dependence on exporters had for smallholders
in those cooperatives. Lak of information, lak of market access and oversupply of
produce were problems that continued to affect the Katuulo producer cooperative
despite the hanges to local auditing and inspection processes. hese problems were
likewise experienced by Kenyan smallholders, suggesting that both Kenya-GAP and
Ugo-Cert represent localized solutions to problems that can be quantified in the lan-
guage of audits, rather than ones that require more complex negotiation of cultural
and structural constraints on smallholders. This limits the broader livelihood bene-
fits of smallholder engagement in global trade, and restricts the flow of benefits into
local food systems as well. As suggested by Dolan (2005, p424), these kinds of ex-
periences raise important questions about 'the types of development they actually
engender and whose interests these outcomes serve'.
At first glance, these findings tend to support criticisms that ethical, fair and or-
ganic standards reproduce market-based inequalities through audit tehnologies that
advance global neoliberalism. Although standards are often construed as governance
instruments non-specific to geography, culture and commodity, Dolan (2008) argues
that the audit process actually authorizes and naturalizes categories (whih measure
social and environmental values) that have often been developed without the input
of producers in the South, thus reproducing Northern ethical values and empowering
Northern actors in the process. Neither FPEAK nor NOGAMU had been able to
address these systemic inequalities at the local level. The smallholder exclusion re-
ported in this hapter has demonstrated, to some extent, exactly these inequities.
Mutersbaugh (2004) haracterizes the exclusion of smallholder farmers in these ne-
gotiations as a form of eco-colonialism; referring to the imposition of Northern re-
tailer and consumer interests upon the livelihoods of Southern farmers. As suh,
while alternative food networks - and the certification systems that underpin them
- are frequently discursively framed around notions of 'empowerment', 'participa-
tion' and 'partnership' (see also Dolan, 2010), this shadows issues of lak of power,
exclusion and inequality experienced by smallholder farmers.
However, more positively, our discussions with smallholders have also shown
them to be active agents of hange. here is a great diversity of localized knowledge,
experiences, impacts and hallenges associated with smallholders' participation in,
or exclusion from, ethical trade in the South. Our findings reinforce how closely re-
