Over the past decade, private food safety and quality standards have become focal points in the supply chain management of large retailers, reshaping governance patterns in global agrifood chains. In this article, I analyze the relationship between private collective standards and the governance of agrifood markets, using the EUREPGAP/GLOBALGAP standard as a vantage point. I discuss the impact of this standard on the organization of supply chains of fresh vegetables in the Kenyan horticulture industry, focusing on the supply chain relationships and practices among exporters and smallholder farmers. In so doing, I seek to highlight the often-contested nature of the implementation of standards in social fields that are marked by different and distributed principles of evaluating quality, production processes, and legitimate actions in the marketplace. I also reconstruct the challenges and opportunities that exporters and farmers are facing with regard to the implementation of and compliance with standards. Finally, I elaborate on the scope for action that producers and policymakers have under these structures to retain sectoral competitiveness in a global economy of qualities. Copyright (c) 2010 Clark University.

No abstract

This editorial provides an analytical intervention to accompany the theme issue’s empirical papers on “Rethinking the Financialization of Nature.” The papers turn our attention towards three often neglected themes in prior research on finance and nature: (1) the frictional processes through which money leverages nature and resource-based ventures to produce more money (“Getting between M-C-M’”); (2) the role played by moralities, values, and affect in the financialization of nature and resistance levelled against it; and (3) the multiple roles of the state in mediating the circulation of finance in and through nature. We also engage with the politics of information and legitimation accompanying the financialization of nature to tease out levers for political critique. Finally, we map out a forward-looking agenda calling for research to engage more substantially with both the methodological questions accompanying the study of the financialization of nature, and the class dimensions of the process.

No abstract

Drawing on several years of fieldwork-based research on and in the “farmland investment space”, this paper argues that a combined reading of debates on assets and assetization in financialized capitalism and convention theory offers novel insights into the moral struggles associated with the transformation of farmland into an “alternative asset class”. It demonstrates that central to the assetization of farmland is the globally distributed effort to bestow it with a legitimate financial worth. While many financial actors paint the picture that farmland has an absolute or intrinsic value, and that this value can be “unlocked”, the paper demonstrates that farmland only gains its financial worth through collective yet contested practices of classification, valuation and valorization. This process has internal (related to the financial industry) and external (related to “society”) dimensions. Farmland only becomes a legitimate asset class if it can be meaningfully set in relation to other asset classes, and if the underlying “assets” generate legitimate returns to investors. At the same time, the legitimation of farmland as an “asset class” has been threatened by attacks of social forces such as NGOs, as accusations of immorality (i.e. “land grabbing”) have become major reputational risks for the supertankers of the industry – institutional investors. This notwithstanding, “capital” and its supporters have worked hard to overcome these internal and external barriers. Eventually, the case presented here allows us to problematize and repoliticize the often-invisiblized morality of finance, which is as much about “value” as it is about “values”.