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Paper short abstract:

Investigating organic business failiures forces us to reconceptualize the term conventionalization to include actors and processes beyond the market that limit organic farmers' autonomies of practice and push them toward conventionalization, as well as responses that may help reinvent food futures.

Paper long abstract:

Conventionalization of organic agriculture results in small organic businesses beginning to resemble conventional ones they once sought to counter, and is largely a function of the success of organic food as a growing market sector. To understand the many ways organic ideals may be abandoned in favor of conventional practices, however, it is also instructive to look at the causes and consequences of organic market failures, particularly in regional peripheries where markets may not work as prescribed.

The BAOP coffee cooperative in Costa Rica and the Pienzeme milk cooperative in Latvia both sought to take control of the entire supply chain and sell value-added organic products locally before export, creating sovereign organic spaces in the face of uncertainties brought about by systems of free trade, as a type of "exception to neoliberalism" (Ong 2006). In both cases, funding mechanisms purportedly aimed at developing organic cooperatives simultaneously facilitated and limited development, creating a glass ceiling. These tensions combined to instigate competition between cooperatives and their own farmers, rather than larger agro-businesses, creating a neoliberal patchwork of what Aihwa Ong (2006) calls "graduated" or "variegated sovereignties" both within the nation-state and at the transnational level.

Investigating failures of organic businesses forces us to reconceptualize the term conventionalization to include a wider spectrum of actors and processes beyond the market that limit organic farmers' autonomies of practice and push them toward conventionalization, as well as the responses to such failures that may help to reinvent food futures beyond conventionalization.