636 Book Reviews

authors emphasize that movements of Maa-speaking people into the area have been taking
place for over a hundred years, and that the ‘vast majority’ of rural households combine
livestock keeping and farming, with few following a truly ‘pastoralist’ mode. However,
increasing pressure on land derived from changes in production patterns, including
commoditization, alienation of land by the state, in-migration, natural population
growth, and rising demand for rental and sale land by urban residents has led to increased
competition. Disputes between cultivators and livestock owners regularly occur, and
villages identified as those of livestock herders and those of farmers both encroach on each
other’s land. Despite these overlapping categories making it difficult, according to the
authors, to identify a ‘pastoralist’ group, still less a ‘Maasai pastoralist’ group from ‘local
farmers’, the intensification of disputes along with a definite discrimination against those
identified as livestock keepers for positions in local government seem to be the main way
in which the simple dichotomy is maintained. The authors note that those responsible for
the exclusion of livestock herders from local government were not people at village or
district levels but those at regional level. Further discussion of this might have helped
explain the situation more fully.
Overall, the collection provides useful documentation of the situations generating
‘conflicts over land and water’, especially competing use and competing authority, rising
commoditization, the intersection of ‘land issues’ with local and national politics, and
reveals the need for detailed ethnographies of the diverse contexts of conflict across Africa.

HENRY BERNSTEIN
Favored Flowers: Culture and Economy in a Global System, by Catherine Ziegler. Durham,
NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007. Pp. 306. US$79.95 (hb); $22.95 (pb).
ISBN 978-08223-4026-3 and 978-0-8223-4007-2

In 2003, Catherine Ziegler tells us, the value of global trade in fresh-cut flowers was about
US$4.6 billion. The ‘fresh-cut flower global commodity chain’ makes for a somewhat
clumsy acronym, namely FCFGCC, but Ziegler’s study of it is anything but clumsy. She
provides an admirable contribution to the literature on global commodity chains in
horticultural products and indeed a charming one. Its charm derives not just from the
commodity in question and its uses but from the qualities of her empirical research and
the deftness with which she draws on and connects a wide range of literature, as well as
from the lightness and sureness of touch with which she presents her findings and analysis.
Her ‘ethnography of a dynamic system’ centres on the purchase and consumption of
fresh-cut flowers in a particular place of major demand, from which she traces back the
supply of flowers ‘upstream’ through retail and wholesale distribution, importers and
producers:

This multi-sited research began with supermarkets, florist shops, designer studios,
and other retailing sites in neighborhoods and communities in the New York
Metropolitan Area. It extended to growers and traders in southern New Jersey,
Connecticut, upstate New York, Florida, and California. Following the global flow

Henry Bernstein, Department of Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG, UK. e-mail: hb4@soas.ac.uk

© 2008 The Authors

Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 8 No. 4, October 2008, pp. 618–646.
 Book Reviews 637

of New Yorkers’ flowers finally took me to Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and
the Netherlands. (p. 10)

The first two chapters on ‘tastes, traditions and trades’ and growers and traders, over the
period 1870–1970, are of considerable intrinsic interest and also serve to frame the more
detailed investigation conducted between 1998 and 2005. Popular flower types that were
sourced locally for the New York Metropolitan Area (NYMA) in the nineteenth century
were replaced to a large degree by sturdier blooms from the 1920s, grown on a mass scale
in parts of the southern and western USA, and power in their supply chains shifted from
consumers to growers. From the 1970s – that signal decade in the mutations of contem-
porary capitalism across its various scales and sites – production and consumption
changed dramatically, as a global trade in fresh-cut flowers took off.
This is the main focus of Ziegler’s book, in a sequence of chapters that take us along
the chain by the more conventional route from ‘upstream’ to ‘downstream’. Chapter
three presents an overview that demonstrates the rapid emergence of the FCFGCC from
the 1970s and its main flows from sites of production to centres of consumption. The
four growing regions that supply most US flowers are in Colombia, California, Ecuador
and the Netherlands, each of which has distinct conditions, forms and scales of production
in its highly specialized enterprises. There is also some discussion of international trade
regulations, and a review of the forms of innovation that stimulate and support the
FCFGCC, including air transport of this highly perishable commodity; new techniques
in cultivation (including hybridization), handling, grading and packaging; new com-
munications technologies that connect growers, traders/importers/wholesalers and
retail distributors; and US investment in Central and South America, as well as the
key international presence of Dutch expertise and capital.
Some important conditions of this globalization are examined in the next two
chapters, with a focus on ‘state and structure’ highlighted by a contrast between the
Netherlands and Ecuador. The former has a longstanding, ramified and effective system
of regulation, connecting and supporting highly capital-intensive, mainly family-owned
and operated enterprises, prompting Ziegler to invoke Peter Evans’ notion of the devel-
opmental state to characterize Dutch institutions and policies (p. 79). Capitalist farmers
engaged in cut flower production in Ecuador, on the other hand, do so without any
significant state support and co-ordination, and confront much more difficult conditions
than their Dutch counterparts, including their total dependence on exports. International
flower markets are commonly volatile and highly sensitive to exchange rate fluctuations.
(Dutch growers also supply a large domestic market including, in effect, neighbouring
countries in northern Europe to which flowers can be trucked over relatively short
distances across the ‘open’ frontiers of the European Union and, since the advent of the
Euro, traded through a common currency too.) Nonetheless, there are environmental,
including climatic, advantages that favour investment in export flower production in
some countries of the ‘South’, encapsulated in Fernando Coronil’s notion of ‘nature
exporting nations’ – as well as their advantages of low cost labour, of course. Here is one
example that highlights the mind-boggling interconnections of contemporary globalization:
‘When the Russian market for roses collapsed in 1998 . . . Ecuadorian roses flooded the
US market. Prices for all flowers from all regions of the globe plummeted in the United
States’ (p. 96).
Chapters six and seven identify various categories of ‘middlemen’ and follow the trails
and modalities of their activities in two particular branches of the chain: the specialty
branch in higher-value (‘favored’) flowers and the ‘abundance’ branch in a few key types

© 2008 The Authors

Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 8 No. 4, October 2008, pp. 618–646.
638 Book Reviews

of flowers retailed by mainstream traditional florists, street vendors, convenience stores

in the NYMA, and by supermarkets (in suburban areas). Two key points here are, first,
the importance of highly specialized knowledge and personalized trust in relations
between intermediaries and growers, on one hand, intermediaries and the distributors
they supply, on the other, in what remains, for most of its actors, a highly risky business.
Second is that intermediaries are the predominant power in the FCFGCC, and in this
context notably importer-wholesalers in Miami and some larger regional wholesalers in
the USA.
Chapter eight examines patterns of, and shifts in, flower consumption in the NYMA
in terms of cultural constructions of ‘self ’ and the ‘signs’ they create, incorporate and
promote – what might be called, more simply, the political economy of consumerism
and, moreover, in one of its global trend-setting centres, New York City. This draws on
extracts from interviews, and vignettes of interviewees who represent different kinds of
flower buyers. While Ziegler is properly respectful of the views of those she interviewed,
several do evoke the style-obsessed narcissism of the characters in the successful US TV
series (and now film) ‘Sex and the City’ that is set in Manhattan. These interviewees are
alarmingly articulate about why they buy particular kinds of flowers for particular
occasions, lovers or friends, as in: what do these flowers say about ME?! A final
concluding chapter provides a neat summary of the book and highlights some of its main
themes and issues.
Any short overview can not do justice to the many delights (or charms) of Ziegler’s
book. These include its sheer range, drawing widely and effectively on a range of
literatures to locate and connect, elucidate and analyze its observation and arguments –
from structuralist GCC models to trade theory, from agrarian change to the changing
ethnic and other demographic patterns of the NYMA and their socioeconomic effects,
from labour standards to the gendering of consumption, from the nature of contemporary
corporate retail chains to the content and readership of American life-style magazines.
They also include many fascinating glimpses of the byways, as well as the main avenues,
of the FCFGCC and the NYMA as one of its key destinations.
How does Ziegler’s study fit in with the concerns and findings of the wider literature
on GCCs for horticultural (and other) commodities? First, while fresh-cut flowers are not
a ‘luxury’ for many people in the ‘North’ – and indeed the advent of the FCFGCC, and
its ‘abundance’ chain in particular, has spread the consumption of flowers more widely –
neither are they a necessity (or staple wage good). Buying flowers is not a high priority
in domestic budgeting for the vast majority, even in the NYMA. It remains highly
income-elastic, hence shaped by class as well as culture.
Second, there is something specific to the massive product differentiation in fresh-cut
flowers, which Ziegler demonstrates so well although she doesn’t put it like this, namely
that differentiation is mostly determined at the point of production: which varieties are
grown from the ever proliferating number available, and how well the desired qualities
they exhibit in the field (or greenhouse or glasshouse) survive the typically long journeys
to point of sale. In short, apart from some minor ‘value adding’ activity that might take
place between production and sale (arrangement in bouquets, special packaging and pres-
entation), flowers are not subject to product differentiation through processing like many
agricultural commodities in ‘Northern’ markets, nor can they withstand longer periods
of transport and storage like many other agricultural and horticultural commodities,
including (ostensibly) ‘fresh’ fruit and vegetables (FFVs).
Third, large corporate capital – whether in production, in vertical integration of key
stages in the FCFGCC, or in supermarket chains – has had relatively little impact on the

© 2008 The Authors

Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 8 No. 4, October 2008, pp. 618–646.
 Book Reviews 639

global fresh-cut flower industry, at least so far, despite several attempts that Ziegler
describes. This accounts for the power of intermediaries in the FCFGCC, by contrast
with the ‘producer-driven’ and ‘buyer-driven’ models prevalent in the wider literature
on commodity/value chain governance. It is also interesting that, compared with the
keen interest in much recent research on FFVs (as well as coffee and tea commodity
chains), the ‘branding’ of flowers by country, let alone specific site, of origin is virtually
non-existent. What matters above all at the point of sale is the combination of appearance
(aesthetic quality) and price.
Finally, as the list of main sources of supply of fresh-cut flowers to the NYMA shows
(above), this is not a commodity of necessarily tropical or sub-tropical provenance like
many others featured in studies of horticultural global commodity chains. Flower
growers and exporters in Central and South America, as in sub-Saharan Africa (predom-
inantly Kenya, also Zimbabwe), compete in the US market with producers in California
(and other US states) and in the US and European markets with the Dutch system and
its uniquely formidable co-ordination of plant breeding, significantly automated produc-
tion, marketing and promotion.

MICHAEL JENNINGS
Cultivating Success in Uganda: Kigezi Farmers and Colonial Policies, by Grace Carswell.
Oxford: British Institute in East Africa and James Currey, 2007. Pp. xii+258. £50.00 (hb);
£16.95 (pb). ISBN 978-1-84701-600-3 and 978-1-84701-601-0

‘Development’ as a process inherently tends to look forwards – planning for and predict-
ing the outcome of interventions two, five, ten years into the future. In as much as the
‘past’ is important to development discourse, it has generally been as the benchmark against
which policies and programmes are judged. The past, in short, is to be escaped from, not
turned to as a source for answers. Yet increasingly ‘histories’ of rural development are
providing new ways of examining current processes of rural change and agricultural
development. Through detailed, focused studies of how colonial rural development policies
have impacted on African communities, and been changed themselves through that contact
and interaction, the history of rural development has much to contribute to current debates.
Grace Carswell’s eminently readable and interesting book is a history of rural devel-
opment policy and social change in southwest Uganda. Its study of a century of rural
development in Kigezi, and reaction to such interventions, examines shifts in rural devel-
opment policy, and efforts to impose particular agricultural practices upon farmers. In
doing so, it raises important questions about the construction of rural development pol-
icy: how ‘development problems’ were manufactured in the analysis of administrators
and planners (both colonial and independent era); how these fed into policy creation and
implementation; how outcomes were interpreted and assessed; and how those being
developed reacted and interacted with the interventions of the state. By considering both
colonial and post-colonial periods it emphasizes the significant continuity that has
informed policy as implemented in Kigezi. It shows through detailed and careful analysis
how development myths have been manufactured and sustained. Carswell challenges
assumptions about land-use, and questions how ‘evidence’ of environmental collapse is

Michael Jennings, Department of Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies,
Thornhaugh St, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG, UK. e-mail: mj10@soas.ac.uk

© 2008 The Authors

Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 8 No. 4, October 2008, pp. 618–646.