Assembling Export Markets - 9781118632611

`In transparently clear prose, Stefan Ouma has written a wonderfully rich empirical account of how global markets for tropical fruit are made both materially and institutionally at the intersection of very particular local sites. The book is another terrific example of the usefulness of the theory of economic performativity that German economic geographers have increasingly honed and made their own.'---Trevor Barnes, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia

`In this provocative book, Ouma challenges the conventional wisdom of both market enthusiasts and critics. Through insights from across the social sciences, he shows how both market institutions and the persons who perform them always emerge from particular messy historical circumstances, creating different formats and distributions of power in different locations. Ouma's `on the ground' study offers a new and important approach to understanding markets.'---Lawrence Busch, Department of Sociology, Michigan State University

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.