Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
India's environmental movements.19 The relationship certain groups have
with the environment is shaped by complex factors, from environmental
histories of their regions to their historical and contemporary interactions
with other communities. Human beings and environmental movements
are situated within social relations, from the local to global scales. As I
have shown in this topic, the statewide adoption of organic farming in
Kerala resulted from its very particular history of radical economic and
political reform, and for this reason its emerging organic agriculture in-
dustry looks very different from organic movements elsewhere.
Analyzing Kerala's organic farming movement in this way helps shed
light on why it is bifurcating, notwithstanding its proponents' common
goal of eliminating chemical use in agriculture. Despite claims by both
sides that the other is corrupt and unsustainable, an analysis of the state's
political economic and environmental history illustrates that the relation-
ship between development and land use for agriculture in Kerala is far
more complex than the political rhetoric admits.
Fundamentally, Kerala's organic countermovement is situated within
a broad, global movement to reform industrial agriculture, by making
it both less chemical intensive and localized. From the United States to
India, there has been an observable trend toward favoring local food pro-
duction. This trend represents a major shift in thinking for the contem-
porary globalized agro-food system.
Our contemporary food system took shape just a few centuries earlier.
W hile human populations have been trading spices and other foodstuffs
for a long period of time, Columbus's first encounter with the Americas in
1492 accelerated the movement of people, plants, animals, and other or-
ganisms around the world in unprecedented ways. Pioneers and explorers
introduced large domesticated animals into the Americas, for example,
and brought back to Europe American crops such as corn.20 Colonial-
ism and postcolonial arrangements further rearranged the distribution of
biological organisms globally. Products formerly known only in specific
regions, from sugar to bananas, became commonplace in households and
markets around the world.21
In the past fifty to one hundred years, another set of major transfor-
