In recent years, export horticulture for European markets has been promoted across sub-Saharan Africa as a rural development strategy. International donors and local governments argue that expanding fruit-and-vegetable exports can spur economic transformation and reduce poverty—by linking smallholders to exporters and European supermarkets through contract farming, and by creating wage employment in farms and packhouses. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Tanzania, this book challenges that narrative, revealing widespread exploitation within supermarket-driven supply chains, alongside deepening rural inequalities and forms of resistance. Foregrounding the dynamics of unequal incorporation, it advances the concept of global exploitation chains: vertically coordinated systems that systematically shift risks and costs downward—from supermarkets in the Global North to exporters, to farmers, and ultimately onto the most vulnerable in the Global South, namely (female) workers impoverished by decades of failed development policies. Ultimately, the book offers fresh insights into agrarian transformation and uneven development trajectories in sub-Saharan Africa under globalisation.
Fabio De Blasis is a researcher with a PhD in Global and International Studies (University of Bologna). He has held postdoctoral positions at the Universities of Urbino and Milan. His work spans labour in global production networks, development and poverty-reduction policies and trajectories, and international migration, with extensive field research across sub-Saharan Africa.