Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
keeping the welfare of the whole world in mind, not just that of people in
Kerala. The government should be supportive, they believe, but it should
not dictate what and how to grow, particularly given allegations of offi-
cials' dishonesty and ineptitude.
This division in Kerala's organic farming movement is a typical en-
vironmental conlict
—a disagreement between two groups of people
over how to manage natural resources. For years, many environmental-
ists blamed such conflicts on population pressures or some peoples' sup-
posed inherent qualities. For example, utilizing Malthusian logic, much
mainstream environmental sentiment contended that overpopulation
led to batles over limited natural resources, resulting in environmental
destruction. Another line of analysis, called “environmental determin-
ism,” located the source of environmental struggles in the climatic and
geographic characteristics of a place. This kind of thinking suggested that
people in hot places like the tropics were “lazy” or “dirty” for climatic
reasons, leading to inefficient resource use.
In the 1980s, activists and scholars began to criticize these traditional
analyses of environmental conlicts, arguing for greater atention to his-
torical, social, and political factors.16 For instance, in his analysis of en-
vironmental struggles over conservation and national parkland in Zim-
babwe, Donald Moore found that “differing cultural understandings of
the meanings of land were central to these resource conflicts.”17 Contem-
porary disputes over land use in eastern Zimbabwe did not demonstrate
a lack of concern by native communities toward the environment, as
some environmentalists had argued. Instead, skirmishes over parks and
conservation were just one front in decades of antagonistic land relations
between white setlers (who arrived during the period when Britain con-
trolled the country) and native communities, many of which were dispos-
sessed from their ancestral land under colonialism.18
In the Indian context, scholars have used this kind of analysis to (1)
question notions that certain groups of people have “essential” qualities
that predispose them to waste natural resources or abuse the environ-
ment and (2) illuminate the importance of the cultural politics at work in
