Paper short abstract:

A sector of the South African Cape Flora industry is successfully engaging with export opportunities requiring product upgrading and associated social and environmental upgrading. However, upgrading potential is not being maximised due to Northern corporate behaviours and local regulatory weakness.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will explore how efforts to instigate upgrading are playing out within South Africa's indigenous Cape Flora sector, which has been exporting local flowers since the 19th Century. The Cape Flora industry has historically been associated with racially defined inequalities, poor working conditions and negative environmental impacts. However, In the last decade there have been marked shifts in the industry which are consistent with upgrading. Product upgrading has been particularly noticeable, whilst there have also been trends towards environmental and social upgrading. As a result the industry is bifurcating, with more capitalised export oriented companies, exhibiting upgrading characteristics, focusing upon high quality products. Whilst, other parts of the industry continue to serve less demanding markets and exhibit less progressive social and environmental behaviours. However, even within the more professionalised sector there are barriers, created by market dynamics and retailer behaviours, which generate uncertainties for producers, which in turn reduce upgrading outcomes. Examples, of these barriers include purchasing practices exhibited by retailers and their agents which are increasingly rigid and favour very large suppliers. In this sense, whilst the possibilities for upgrading are very real there remains an element of precarity, which is indicative of the ongoing power of operators in the Global North to influence livelihoods and practices in the Global South. In the case of the Cape Flora industry these power asymmetries are reinforced by weaknesses in local regulatory regimes and institutions, which are largely unable to ensure that social and environmental laws are complied with.