The Governance of Global Value Chains, Upgrading Processes and Agricultural Producers in Sub-Saharan Africa

There have been significant structural changes in the way trade, production and marketing are organized in recent decades. There is now wide recognition that global trade increasingly involves spreading the production of a final good over firms in several countries with each one undertaking what is better described as a ‘task’ in the overall process rather than the production of a discrete good or service (WTO-IDE, 2011). These changes, which result from the internationalization of global production and the fragmentation of trade across countries, have occurred as capital has become increasingly mobile under the accelerated pace of financial globalization. The implications of these changes have been increasingly analyzed through the lens of global value chain (GVC) analysis. This literature, which became increasingly fashionable during the 1990s, and its use of a heuristic approach to analysis, was motivated by the need to understand better how firms and labourers located in developing countries engage with more recent processes of globalization.