Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
geared toward export markets, because of the types of crops they have
chosen to specialize in—a decision influenced by a variety of economic,
cultural, and historic factors. Farmers have grown these cash crops in the
area for hundreds of years; colonialism and then later the postcolonial
Kerala government encouraged their expansion. Ironically, the Left's
successful campaigns to demolish feudalism, open up land markets, and
promote cash crops created the conditions in which specialized agricul-
ture for export could continue to flourish. Organic certification has rep-
resented a way of maintaining this way of farming, while also bolstering
the competitiveness of Kerala's spices and other foodstuffs in a globalized
and liberalizing marketplace.
The organic farming policy, however, disapproves of the trend toward
cash crops and exports that has benefited many Syrian Christian farm-
ers in districts like Wayanad. This condemnation relies in part upon the
image of Kerala as biodiverse—as a place that should be kept
as is
, pro-
tected from certain forms of human agricultural activity
.
The imaginary
helps to make the organic farming policy conservative in some respects,
and it shapes the policy's vision of an ideal and static human-environment
relationship in Kerala—one that pivots around a localized food shed as
the ultimate solution for protecting the animal and plant biodiversity of
the Western Ghats. This localized vision of agriculture is widely shared
around the world by advocates of an alternative to the industrial food
system.
Yet local does not always mean sustainable, just, and appropriate. The
organic farming policy asserts that “modern” practices (such as the Green
Revolution), supported by the newly independent nation state of India,
fueled Kerala's land use change. The emphasis on “tradition” in the pol-
icy encourages a sort of “defensive localism” in Kerala's environmental
circles—a reactive insistence that the local sourcing of foodstuffs is the
ultimate solution to the negative economic changes that are affecting
farming and rural countrysides.51
As persuasive and atractive as such arguments can be, they also raise
serious problems. As many scholars have pointed out, romanticizing
“local” as a bounded, static, and homogenous place is “a recrudescence of
some very problematical senses of place, from reactionary nationalisms,