Assembling export markets is hard work; this is the fundamental message of this book. Bringing together actors, balancing their different modes of working and ensuring that pineapples and mangoes leave the fields of Ghana and arrive on supermarket shelves in the EU is not a seamless linear path that can be managed by a single actor from a Global ‘centre of calculation’ as promoters of value chains (practice and analysis) would have us think. People, machines and fruit all resist this particular way of organising themselves and it took years and a number of precise political and commercial opportunities to create a space for Ghanaian fruit in the global market.
However, to say that assembling export markets is hard work also refers to the practice of reading it. I find that the concepts developed in the economic sociology of ‘economisation’ mobilised by Ouma are spot-on in their ability to capture the complexity and tenuous nature of network relations, however the reliance on the vocabulary from this world makes this book inaccessible to those readers who have not mastered it. To master this vocabulary requires a rethinking of how one understands both society and the economy, but not in the classic economy sociology sense where it is argued that the economy is simply embedded (or contextualised) in society. No, the reader must be able to grasp that the economy and society itself is created only in those moments of encounter where actors meet market devices and economic theories and material elements that must leave this encounter as products that have been assigned specific qualities, prices and value. These encounters, filled with politics, do not always create markets, but often derail and result in missed exchanges, missed understandings and a lack of trade. These latter encounters deserve more attention and this book offers a number of insights into how a study of missed exchanges might be done in the future.
The structure of the book is well thought out as it weaves empirical material and theoretical analysis together throughout the narrative. The purpose of Chapter 2 is to provide the reader with the vocabulary and understanding needed to read the theoretical insights that are found at the end of each chapter – which it does – but the jargon remains difficult to follow at times. Chapter 4 is the type of chapter that every professor should use in a qualitative methods course; it provides insights about the difficulties of carrying out multi-sited ethnographies and should stimulate reflective discussion. Chapters 5–8 offer detailed explanations of the different practices required to turn farmers into contract farmers (or outgrowers) and to turn mango trees into commodities. There are important insights in these chapters for those development practitioners who find themselves struggling to make the very precarious linkages between farmers and markets. The description of the ‘just-in-time’ organisational model for pineapples in Chapter 5 would work well as a case study in a business administration course or an international development course, particularly as it emphasises the necessity of extreme levels of coordination and investment in a variety of organisational, logistical and industrial technologies. The entire book would fit well in a post-graduate seminar on economic sociology or institutional economics.
Overall, the book offers a vision of modern Africa that is increasingly spreading across the continent. Yet unlike those books that critique buyer-driven global value chains without offering many alternatives, the approach adopted here enables the reader to understand the interdependencies and decisions made in creating global value chains; which in turn illustrate that the markets could be constructed differently – it just takes a little more work.
