Paper short abstract:

Oro Verde is a collective of vegetable farmers whose produce is consumed at the campsite of a nearby goldmine. This paper discusses the producers’ precarious position in-between employees and independent farmers, and their strategic ways to employ various self-descriptions to gain negotiating power.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on Oro Verde (Green Gold), a recently formed collective of vegetable producers in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The collective consists of families and individuals who grow small amounts of various fruits and vegetables. Through a local catering company, their produce ends up consumed at the campsite of Fruta del Norte, a nearby large-scale gold mine. Many of the members of Oro Verde are former miners themselves who, for various reasons, are no longer employed by the company, nor engage in artisanal gold mining. Becoming full-time vegetable producers has shifted their professional identities and placed them in a position where their work is guided by the needs of a single company, yet they do not enjoy the benefits of an employee status. Instead, they work in a highly precarious situation where their produce is regularly discarded, under-priced, and undervalued by the “experts” of the companies. Meanwhile, the mining company presents the producers as grateful local families producing organic vegetables, which distorts the truth but remains a useful tool for constructing a more “sustainable” corporate image.

In my paper, I focus on the ways the producers have attempted to renegotiate their position through forming a collective, Oro Verde, since 2022. In different contexts, the collective members strategically position themselves as producer-entrepreneurs, as small-scale farmers, or even as the mining company’s employees. I discuss how such strategies are used by the producers to reconceptualise their rights and, ultimately, to improve their precarious position.