Assembling Export Markets: The Making and Unmaking of Global Food Connections in West Africa

Assembling Export Markets explores the origins of global agrifood chains through an examination of the new ‘frontier regions’ of the global fresh produce market that has emerged in the West African Republic of Ghana over the past decade. Building on an organizational ethnography of two large agribusiness enterprises which have contracted local farmers for export production, author Stefan Ouma demonstrates that what is commonly naturalized as ‘market integration’ in contemporary development discourses is, in actuality, a frictional and ontologically transformative process. Through original research on organizational strategies and everyday market encounters between agribusiness enterprises and farmers in southern and northern Ghana, Ouma reveals that the practical enactment and local engagement of seemingly universal forces must be considered to understand the ongoing extension of global market relations. Innovative and ground-breaking, Assembling Export Markets sheds important new light on our understanding of the origins, evolution and crisis moments of global agrifood connections.