Cultivating Compliance: Governance of North Indian Organic Basmati Smallholders in a Global Value Chain

Abstract

Tommaso (2013) Cultivating compliance: governance of North Indian organic basmati smallholders in a global value chain. Environment and Planning A, 45 (8). pp. 1912-1928. ISSN 0308-518X This version is available from Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/48173/ This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version. Copyright and reuse:Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University.Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. Smallholders in a Global Value Chain AbstractWe study (re)arrangements of a local socio-technical setting entailed in the making of a globalized commodity. Focussing on a global value chain (GVC) for organic basmati rice, we study how farmers' practices are governed through product and process standards, organic certification protocols, and contracts with buyer firms. We analyse how farmers' entry into the GVC reconfigures their agencements (defined as heterogeneous arrangements of human and non-human agencies that 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 GVC's 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 farmers' fields, producing variable degrees of (selective) compliance with the 'official' GVC standards. We argue that the disjuncture between the standards' 'official' scripts and actual cultivation practices must be nurtured for allowing farmers' agencements to align their practices with local socio-technical relations and farm-ecology. Furthermore, we find that compliance and disjuncture was facilitated by many practices and associations that were officially 'ungoverned' by the GCC. Abstract word count: 198 wordsArticle word count: 9780 (including references) 3

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