Global Good Agricultural Practices (GLOBALGAP) are a set of guidelines on food safety and quality, environmental practices, farm workers safety and health-care practices that farmers who produce fruits and vegetables for export to western countries are supposed to comply with. Studies have not been conducted to investigate how these guidelines resonate with the socioeconomic characteristics of smallholder farmers yet these farmers continue to encounter enormous challenges in attempts to comply with the GAPs. This paper interrogates the relationship between socioeconomic characteristics of smallholder farmers and adoption of the GLOBALGAPs innovations. The paper largely uses primary data scientifically collected using questionnaires and face to face interviews from a representative sample of French beans farmers in the agriculturally rich County of Murang’a in Kenya. The inferential statistics of Pearson’s correlation and Chi-square has been used to analyze farmers level of adoption of GAPs and type of standards in relation to gender, marital status, income, education, position at household, size of household, occupation and wealth status. The paper shows differentials in farmers’ adoption of GAPs depended on the various socio-economic characteristics such as gender, occupation, level of income, wealth status and size of household had significant relationship with overall compliance with GLOBALGAP standards, The type of standards with significant relationship with farmers social status were adoption of toilets near French bean farm for enhancing hygiene, protecting French beans from pests and keeping farm records The paper suggests the need for proponents of similar innovations to support of agri-business through training of smallholder farmers and the need to address gender inequalities in horticultural production of high value crops.

Keywords: Compliance, Adoption, socioeconomic characteristics, Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs), Innovations, smallholder farmers, French beans (FB)