Small farms in global value chains: no social upgrading without collective action

The impetus for our project on small farms in global agricultural value chains is the controversy over their chances for economic and social upgrading by joining such chains. While major international organizations encourage farm households to become part of global agricultural value chains, critics point to the risks associated with following such advice. Together with an international team of researchers, we set out to explore, in particular, the opportunities for social upgrading for owners and tenants of smallholder farms, as well as for their employees. Our crop-country comparison is based on the assumption that crop characteristics, end markets, and supply chain governance (including product- and process-related standards), as well as national political, economic, and cultural contexts, influence the contours of respective value chains and, in turn, the social and economic conditions of small farms and their farm workers. Accordingly, we selected crops that are predominantly produced by family farms in the Global South, but that differ along the axes of domestic versus international end markets and short versus long shelf life. For a cash crop primarily destined for export, we chose coffee, and for a crop primarily consumed domestically, we chose the staple crop rice. While coffee and rice can be stored for quite a long time in processed form, fresh fruits are perishable quickly. Since this is particularly true of mangoes, we selected them as a product with a short shelf life.

Among the factors we examined that influence social upgrading in agricultural VC, perishability was found to weaken the bargaining power of producers and mechanization to have ambivalent effects. On the one hand, mechanization requires higher skills and is therefore associated with better employment conditions; on the other hand, it leads to an increase in precariously employed seasonal workers. The role of the state was identified in the case studies as a key factor in economic and social upgrading.

The state's support is especially necessary for the so-called weak interests, i.e., those social groups that are only weakly represented in civil and political society. Where the state does not support these groups, usually because of their political weakness, no social upgrading takes place. This is especially true for peasant people who cannot read or write, or can hardly read or write at all, and of course for landless agricultural workers. They generally face greater structural constraints than large producers or other powerful actors in asserting their interests at the state level.

For agricultural workers:in, social upgrading has only been noted in the case of Brazil, where the country's labor laws were more strictly enforced during the rule of the Workers' Party (PT) than those of previous governments. The ouster of Dilma Rousseff from the PT in 2016 and the conservative government that followed have led not only to less enforcement but also to a dilution of legal protections for rural workers:in.

This book is a product of the vibrant network of the International Center for Development and Decent Work (ICDD). It is the third volume on agriculture in the global South produced as part of ICDD's collaborative project on global agricultural value chains. The first volume documented decent work deficits in agriculture (2018); the second volume highlighted health and safety challenges in the agricultural workplace (2019).

For this study, ICDD brought together not only researchers:ing from Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Germany, Ghana, India, Pakistan, and Vietnam for a series of workshops, but also from a variety of disciplines including development studies, economics, management, political economy, political science, and sociology.

The ICDD is a global multidisciplinary network of nine partner universities on four continents based at the University of Kassel (Germany). ICDD contributes to the global fight against hunger and poverty through research and education on Sustainable Development Goal #8 "to promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment and decent work for all." It is part of the Centers of Excellence for Exchange and Development (exceed) program administered by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) with funding from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). This study was financially supported by ICDD and the Hans Böckler Foundation.

Karatepe and SCHERRER (eds.) 2021: The Phantom of Upgrading in Agricultural Supply Chains: A Cross-Country, Cross-Crop Comparison of Smallholders, Nomos.