Differentiating Organics: Performing Multiple Objects to Organize Singular Markets for Organic Tea and Biscuits in the UK - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 65

defined catchment areas of a processing factory, as 'quality' tea must reach the
factory in less than 12 h from the time it is plucked. In Tanzania tea is grown on
estates ( 200 ha) and on outgrower farms (smallholder, average 0.37 ha; medium-

scale, average 16 ha) (Simbua and Loconto 2010 ).
The distinction between estate and outgrower is based on the ownership of the
farms. If owned by the tea processing company, they are estates, while outgrowers
are individual farmers who sell their tea to the factory. The tea industry maintains
the traditional practice of tracing tea from individual fields to single estate lines that
are traded in a non-blind auction, which lends itself to the transparency requirements
that are part of the standardized notion of organic. In Tanzania, there are only two
estates and factories that are certified organic.
The move to organic was made in the late 1980s as the organic certified
companies claimed that they first joined the system because they had acquired
overgrown fields and the costs for conventional rehabilitation were much higher
compared to the Organic certification. In other words, an economic calculation was
the basis for joining the organic system, and similar justifications have kept these
two estates in this system for the past 20 years. However, the economic calculation
is only a part of the multiple enactments of the organic standard in Tanzania, which
are best illustrated by three examples: organic by default , parallel organics , and
cross-certified .

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4.5.1 Organic by Default

In describing the organic sector in Tanzania, the International Trade Center notes:
“a number of other crops continue to be grown organically “by default” without
being certified” (International Trade Center (ITC) 2011 ). Every research participant
interviewed in the Tanzanian organic system discussed the current farming practices
in Tanzania as organic by default . While this notion is a highly contested claim
within the organic movement (Scialabba 2000 ; Mansfield 2004 ; Vogl et al. 2005 ),
it has been categorized as a type of farming system in Africa (cf. Hillocks 2002 ;
Bolwig et al. 2009 ). We argue that the performance of organic by default has more
to do with the relative poverty of Tanzanian farmers and the discourses surrounding
'green revolution' technologies than as a reflection of the organic movement.
One inspector claimed that “we cannot discuss organic by default because
tea consumes so much nutrients, mostly Nitrogen (N), you must use synthetic
fertilizers - everyone does.” Indeed, in conventional tea farming, the estates are
applying about 300 kg of N per hectare of tea and smallholders have access to
between 30 and 100 kg of N per hectare of tea through their contracts with the
estate factories. Respondents claimed that this synthetic fertilizer was often shared
among all of the smallholders' crops; therefore the actual amount used on tea
by a smallholder was difficult to determine. The low tea yield of smallholders
compared to the estates was indicated as an example of the lack of synthetic