Sustainable Production and the Performance of South African Entrepreneurs in a Global Supply Chain. The Case of South African Table Grape Producers

Global trade is strongly growing and becoming connected to the issue of sustainable development in business practices. In recent years this has resulted in businesses on the demand side formulating sets of requirements for suppliers on their performance on corporate social responsibility and sustainable production. In doing this, value systems of the industrialized world are forwarded towards developing countries. It is seen as a way to complement poor sustainability policies on practices in these countries. This relatively new phenomenon of promoting sustainable development through market interactions is quite remarkable. Why would economic actors take up such public interests (abating environmental degradation and social injustice)? From the perspective of developing countries on the supply side of global value chains, being able to commit to such business-to-business standards requires developing world producers to possess certain qualities and capacities. This article reflects on this issue, identifying essential capacities, drawn from literature on (sustainable) entrepreneurship. It develops a model explaining business performance with characteristics of entrepreneurship. The model is tested in practice using data on exporters of table grapes in South Africa. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.