Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
July 2010. In total, 60 semi-structured interviews were conducted with organic oper-
ators, processors, traders, buyers, certifiers, standards developers, non-governmental
organization (NGO) officers, and government officials. Four semi-structured focus
groups were conducted in Tanzania with farmers, farm workers and farm/factory
managers in Swahili by the first author. Interviews and focus groups were audio
recorded and transcribed. 2 Observations were recorded in field notes and memos.
Individuals participated in the research by informed consent and the names of some
organizations have been changed to protect anonymity. Together, these data were
analyzed to infer common themes around the performances of organic.
4.4
The Singular UK Market for Organic
Through the practices of producing a concept of organic in consumer and policy
contexts we see a case for singularity emerging whereby organic is a cohesive
concept that can frame consumer and political action. Didier ( 2007 ) has illustrated
how statistics characterize and transform the objects that they describe. This is
helpful to our case, particularly in the way that some expressions 3 of statistics appear
singular. This is the case with the use of statistics at the aggregate level to assemble
a singular market for organic food. Let us explain with examples of aggregated
statistics. The World Watch Institute's publication “Vital Signs” ran the headline
“Organic Agriculture Sustained Through Economic Crisis”, yet the byline qualifies:
The global organics market is recovering gradually from the economic recession, although
trends vary widely by country. Growth in the European Union's organics market slowed
overall in 2009, declining nearly 13 percent in the United Kingdom and remaining stagnant
in Germany. Yet sales of organics continued to grow by double digits in France, Switzerland,
and Sweden (Beck 2011 ).
This shows a global trend that is demarcated by country and indeed the UK market
for organic declined. It is this aggregation of statistics at specific scales that carve
out a singular market for organic. In the aggregate, organic becomes singular. It is
no longer organic tea, or cereals or milk but organic sales and an organic market.
Much of the singularization of an organic market in the UK has been accom-
plished through efforts made by the Soil Association through marketing and public
awareness campaigns. This holistic notion of organic is expressed in the Soil
Association's framing of organic farming as the solution to a multitude of social
and environmental problems as part of their policy work. For example, in their 2009
Organic Market Report, the Soil Association's policy director asks: “The question
2 The Swahili was transcribed and translated into English by the first author together with a
Tanzanian research assistant.
3 Didier suggests that the term expression is more suited to describe the theory of performativity
as he claims that performativity remains linguistic in its ability to explain the assembly of subjects
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