| This study examines the effects of participation in transnational markets for agricultural products on small producers in the countries of the global south. Bringing to bear ideas from the literatures on global commodity chains, contract farming, cooperatives, organic agriculture, social capital and sustainable development, it examines how markets are socially and politically constructed and how social and cultural structures mediate both the evolution of markets themselves and their effects on producer communities. It concludes that communities of small producers can benefit from participation in transnational markets, but that the construction of both transnational market relations and local community ties that will enable such beneficial results is a difficult and uncertain process, whose success depends on a conjuncture of circumstances that is highly unusual in the contemporary world.; The analysis is based on research on seven communities of small-scale agricultural producers in Baja California, Mexico that are linked to markets for vegetables in the United States through a variety of transnational marketing arrangements. Drawing on in-depth interviews, participant observation and archival research, I generate a number of hypotheses about the confluence of conditions needed for peasant communities to achieve sustainable development outcomes via participation in transnational commodity chains. Based on my examination of variation among these communities, both cross-sectionally and longitudinally, I argue that “sustainable livelihood security”—by which I mean ecologically sustainable production that neither exposes local producers to unacceptable levels of economic risk nor results in socially destructive increases in levels of local inequality—can be achieved through integration into “re-embedded” transnational commodity chains, which have two critical components—embeddedness between nodes of the commodity chain, what I call bufferedness, and embeddedness at the community level, what I call community-level social capital.{09}The analysis shows concretely both the possibilities and difficulties of constructing this combination of market and community structures. |
