Extending the margins of marketization: Frontier regions and the making of agro-export markets in northern Ghana

This paper demonstrates how the global commodity chain approach has mutated from a critical tool for studying the production of inequality in the global economy to an instrument of development policy that extends the frontiers of marketization to so-called “peripheries” in the Global South. Taking an outgrower scheme for the global production of organic mangoes in northern Ghana as point of departure, and situating this case study within the broader context of market experiments in the Ghanaian agricultural sector, it develops an account of global capitalism as a diverse, heterogeneous and messy arrangement of local borderlands. As a zone of inclusive exclusion these borderlands are brought into being by an economic discourse which separates the inside of the capitalist world from its supposed outside. The so-called integration of smallholders into global markets relies on exclusionary representations and the forging of new associations. First, economic practices in northern Ghana are portrayed by economists as defective and in doing so determine what lies outside the market. Second, within this “outside” - on which the “inside” actually depends - global capitalism mediated through the market models and rhetoric of international development organizations now literally touches the ground in specific geographical settings. Hence Frontier regions as represented by our case study bear the paradoxical character of the work of economics and are an instructive example for the performative power of economic theories. Marketization is revealed as a complex and socio-technically entangled process full of hidden prerequisites and unforeseen consequences that open up new social spaces of multiple ontological reconfigurations.

► The global value chain (GVC) approach has become increasingly performative. ► It has become one of the most powerful tools for the active construction of markets. ► Development actors are chief in translating GVC models into practice in the south. ► Different bodies of economic knowledge play a crucial role in preforming value chains. ► We show how marketization works in practice in a Frontier region in Ghana.