Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
sell out to the larger enterprises. Instead, they tapped into a network of
informal markets and personal ties—legacies from the country's social-
ist era—to create informal, unregulated pork markets inside Poland and
remain afloat.19 On another continent, in the San Francisco Bay region
of California, a “food industrial district” emerged as a result of the area's
agrarian history, progressive politics, and the state's regulatory history
around parks and planning. Although large-
scale agribusiness dominates
the state, because of San Francisco's particular urban and cultural his-
tory, it is today one of the hubs of the alternative agricultural movement
in the United States.20 Farther south and east, the nation of Cuba turned
to organic agriculture in the 1990s out of necessity. After the collapse of
trade with the Soviet Socialist block in the 1990s and the American trade
embargo, the country found itself facing shortages of fertilizer and other
inputs. The government and farmers soon turned to organic agriculture,
ensuring the food security of the region as well as economic and environ-
mental benefits to rural communities.21 These three distinct examples
illustrate that responses to globalization and industrial agriculture are
taking different courses and timelines, depending on cultural and creative
differences, as well as local and global histories.
The diversity of responses to globalized industrial agriculture,
as well as the bifurcation of Kerala's own organic farming movement,
trouble the narrow geographic focus of the buy-local movement. From the
United States to India, the local food movement has grown in popularity
in recent years, heralding the environmental superiority of commodities
grown from within a small geographic radius. I saw this in my research in
England as consumers and the government exalted local food because it
was lower in food miles. In Kerala, the state's organic farming policy up-
holds a similar idea: that local production for local markets will make the
state self-suicient. As I have shown, however, the state's agrarian econ-
omy has been tied to international markets for centuries. This connection
was solidified under colonialism, as Indian markets as a whole became en-
meshed in international trade. As a result, generations of farming families
and cultural groups have produced foodstuffs for world markets. Calls by
groups from both within Kerala and outside of the Indian subcontinent
