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

• DOI: 10.1068/a45421
• Publication Date: 2013-07-31T14:55:45Z
• Authors: Saurabh Arora; Naomi Baan Hofman; Vinod Koshti; Tommaso Ciarli
• Keywords: Global value chain; Sociotechnical system; Value (mathematics)

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