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Paper short abstract

This paper follows an organic farmers cooperative’s experiences as its innovative low-cost, trust-based method of organic certification was adapted into a national certification regime in India. It analyzes the impact of digitization and centralization to regulate a growing domestic organic market.

Paper long abstract

This presentation follows the creation and implementation of state regulations impacting India’s expanding domestic market for organic food, and their effects on small-scale farmers and local organic food networks. Based on immersive ethnographic fieldwork with the Timbaktu Collective—a non-profit based in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh—I follow how some of this organization’s experiments with making organic farming viable were adopted by the Indian state that has been actively promoting organic and natural farming through its recent policies. In 2005, the Timbaktu Collective introduced the use of a low-cost, trust-based, peer-review method of organic certification called Participatory Guarantee System or “PGS” for its two thousand-plus membership. Seeing the success of this method of certification, the Indian state created and mandated its own “PGS-India” certificate for all Indian organic producers catering to the domestic market, formalizing many such local practices and innovations which sustained India’s alternative food movement.

I build on participant observation during 2022 and 2023 when I visited Timbaktu as a researcher and volunteer facilitating this organization’s migration from their own PGS-Organic Council certificate to the national “PGS-India” certification regime. I document the effects of “scaling up” this “technology of trust” (in farmers, cooperatives, and the organic-ness of food) from the local to the national-level. The paper delves into debates over regulation and its efficacy by critically analyzing the ongoing effects of the digitization, centralization, and formalization of what were previously small-scale, locally engendered pockets of alternatives to the dominant food system.