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Based on more than a decade of ethnographic research in Darjeeling’s non-plantation tea producing areas, this chapter highlights the gendered effects of Fair Trade certification of organic non-plantation tea on rural tea cooperatives. Through a focus on rural women’s everyday entrepreneurialism and their run-ins with the transnational Fair Trade bureaucracy, the chapter underscores how Fair Trade interventions can inadvertently strengthen patriarchal/gendered power relations in Fair Trade certified tea cooperatives in Darjeeling. It highlights how women tea farmers also creatively use specific Fair Trade interventions to defend their own entrepreneurial priorities and rupture Fair Trade’s imbrications with local patriarchies. Women tea farmers creatively juxtapose Fair Trade and swaccha vyāpār, a local translation of Fair Trade, to defend their own entrepreneurial ambitions and enact new modalities of women’s collective self-governance. This chapter brings much needed attention to women’s contemporary economic lives and their role in tea production in non-plantation rural locations of Darjeeling.

Microcredit has come under severe academic criticism in recent years, but the diversity of local practices and discourses that respond to and critique microcredit is still underexamined. By exploring emergent entrepreneurial practices and strategic loan avoidance in Darjeeling, India, expressed locally in narratives of ''risk,'' this article emphasizes the counter-hegemonic aspects of local engagements with microcredit. We contend that women are neither passive victims of nor willing participants in microcredit. They selectively appropriate the global discourse of microcredit to formulate a skeptical subject position that criticizes the practice. Simultaneously, they contest microcredit's complicity with local patriarchies that exploit their labor and entrepreneurial activity. While critical of the indebtedness microcredit causes them, women value the entrepreneurial possibilities it opens up. We acknowledge the importance of the predominant Foucauldian-Marxist critiques of microcredit that posit it as another instance of ''accumulation through dispossession,'' but move beyond this view to focus on women's creative engagement with microcredit.

In this article I underscore how women organic tea farmers build economic resilience through dual enactments as "organic farmers" and as "entrepreneurs." In substantiating both, women question the limited optics through which Fair Trade type sustainability ventures measure their work for a tea cooperative, as well poorly recognizing their entrepreneurial work in their households and community. Women are deeply aware of the politics of Fair Trade where their productive and reproductive labor is appropriated through the labor of organics, where women not only produce the organic green leaf tea but also produce narratives of Fair Trade's success in its certification and gender audits. Thus, to understand what sustains the new wave of "sustainable agriculture" in the global South, we must explore the intersections of organic farming practices with emerging discourses and practices of gendered entrepreneurialism in organic farming communities. In Darjeeling, India, women provide the labor necessary to sustain organics that should ideally come from the Indian state or international trading partners. They fill the gap through their labor, time, creativity and risk-taking. I contend that the success of organic farming depends on critical maneuvers that entail economic and cultural entrepreneurialism, and demonstrate forms of resilience expressed through which women farmers identify and navigate the inadequacies of alternative agriculture and related Fair Trade practices.Keywords: Women organic tea farmers, women entrepreneurs, Fair Trade, rural Darjeeling, risk-taking, resilience

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