1 research outputs found
Cultivating compliance: governance of North Indian organic basmati smallholders in a global value chain
Focusing on a global value chain (GVC) for organic basmati rice, we study how farmersâ practices are governed through product and process standards, organic certification protocols, and contracts with buyer firms. We analyze how farmersâ entry into the GVC reconfigures their agencements (defined as heterogeneous arrangements of human and nonhuman agencies which are associated with each other). These reconfigurations entail the severance of some associations among procedural and material elements of the agencements and the formation of new associations, in order to produce cultivation practices that are accurately described by the GVCâs standards and protocols. Based on ethnography of two farmers in Uttarakhand, North India, we find that the same standards were enacted differently on the two farmersâ fields, producing variable degrees of (selective) compliance with the âofficialâ GVC standards. We argue that the disjuncture between the âofficialâ scripts of the standards and actual cultivation practices must be nurtured to allow farmersâ agencements to align their practices with local sociotechnical relations and farm ecology. Furthermore, we find that compliance and disjuncture were facilitated by many practices and associations that were officially ungoverned by the GVC