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 67

The tension that remains within the organic sector in Tanzania is the difficultly of
introducing the western organic practices within a system that has spent the past
30 years convincing farmers that their traditional practices were inferior. A member
of the organic movement elaborates:
You even find some farmers who make a little more money and they decide even to shift
back to spraying because of the mentality which has been there. That if you do this
spraying, if you do the chemical fertilization, you are modern, you are really advanced.
You are farming now like western people. So this other way of farming is primitive.
And then the middle class people now they are translating as primitive. [ ]Theyare

being told either your own primitive way and if you use fertilizers and pesticides then you
advance.

:::

In other words, organic by default is enacted as the inability of farmers to
effectively practice 'conventional' agriculture. While this is based on financial
resource constraints, it is not necessarily by default uncertified organic. The certified
estate managers justified their involvement in the certification systems on financial
grounds. It was claimed that the costs of conventional rehabilitation of the tea estates
was more expensive than organic certification. It is thus this failure to conform to
the science-based notions of conventional and organic farming that enacts the notion
of organic by default in Tanzania.

4.5.2 Parallel Organics

The way in which organic by default is further diversified in the Tanzanian context
is what we term parallel organics . Mutersbaugh ( 2005 ) claims that certifications
represent parallel production ; whereby large corporations certify a small portion of
their production and use this as a way to produce an image of 'sustainability' to
their customers. What we propose as parallel organic refers to the nature of the
regulation of organic practices in Tanzania and the discourses that accompany it.
What we find is an externally funded, nationally supported, policy environment
for organic and a parallel international commercial system for organic. These
two systems are both focused on the construction of a notion of organic in
Tanzania: the policy environment is constructing an institutional infrastructure
for organic standards, while the commercial systems are responding to market
information communicated to them through their value chains. Different European
certifiers certify the two Tanzanian estates. The decisions to use a specific certi-
fication body are made by factory management based on the instructions given
by their international buyers who inform them of the certifier that must be used.
For example, one buyer specifically requests IMO (Institute of Marketecology)
certified organic, rather than only certification against the EU regulation for
organic.
While this commercial system has been in practice in Tanzania since the
1980s, a policy environment for organic was created in the 2000s by European