Introduction

Economic and social downgrading and upgrading are complex processes in global retail value chains that source from agriculture. Production is embedded within traditional norms and institutions of rural society that shape commercial and social interaction in differing ways depending on product and local context. Chapter 5 examined the gendered complexities of embeddedness in relation to smallholder cocoa farming in Ghana. However, as this chapter will examine, the transition from smallholder to larger-scale commercial farming involving wage labour can also be fraught with downgrading and upgrading tensions that are gendered. Some groups experience significant challenges or total value chain exclusion, yet for others new opportunities for value chain inclusion arise. Who loses and benefits is a gendered process often overlooked in the literatures on agricultural smallholders and wage-workers. Smallholder exclusion from global value chains affects men as the recognized farmers, as well as their households, including women who have long played an unrecognized role as unpaid contributing family labour. In larger commercial farming, women play a more visible role as independent wage labour. Nevertheless, they are often concentrated in insecure temporary and seasonal work that also exposes them to downgrading pressures as suppliers manage risks and costs in supermarket value chains. Yet some women workers are able to benefit from economic upgrading involving higher quality production/processing to attain social upgrading with improved conditions and rights.

Fresh fruit and vegetables provide an important example of the gendered complexities of downgrading and upgrading. The expansion of global retail value chains (particularly cool chain innovation) has played an important role in generating the availability of fresh and processed horticultural produce all year round at affordable prices. Some southern hemisphere countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America have been well positioned to take advantage of increased global demand for horticultural exports, particularly during the winter season in the Global North. However, this also exposes them to supermarket requirements on cost, quality and delivery schedules that put pressure on smallholders and smaller or less-efficient farmers engaged in retail value chains. In some countries retail pressures have led to a decline in engagement by smallholders and smaller farmers, with expansion of larger-scale commercial production and processing, but in others smallholders retain a foothold in value chains (Dolan and Humphrey 2000; Vorley et al. 2007).