Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on how the strategic coaxing of plants and people has been oriented towards growth to theorize ‘training’ as a new locus for recuperating value. By examining the conditions under which growth is encouraged, I argue that ‘training’ as both noun and verb demands closer attention.

Paper long abstract:

Amidst depreciating global sugar prices and rising climate concerns, agronomists in Mauritius are figuring out new uses for colonial crops. The pivot from sugar-as-food to biofuel, as one maneuver, has transformed conditions in the agricultural classroom and cropland in unexpected ways. In this paper, I reflect on how the strategic coaxing of plants and people has been oriented towards growth in multiple registers to theorize ‘training’ as a new locus for recuperating value out of discards. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I focus on the ways that sugar sector retraining programs aim to reskill redundant agricultural workers in the wake of the local industry’s near collapse and downsizing. Labourers are taught how to propagate plants in nurseries to maximize yields and, in the process, reinscribe toxic models of forced productivity. Like agricultural workers, energy crops like sugarcane and Arundo Donax are also persuaded to grow well, refiguring ideal planting conditions in order to stimulate plants’ ‘natural’ abilities to propagate. Despite efforts to encourage greater yields, crops in local field trials have stubbornly refused to grow at the insistence of human interventions. In this paper, I question the premise that all growth is good growth. By examining the conditions under which agricultural workers learn to encourage growth, while plants strategically opt out their efforts to improve yields, I contend that ‘training’ as both noun and verb demands closer attention. This paper thus contributes to anthropological understandings of neocolonial growth-centred logics, while questioning the sustainability of certain forms of training and agricultural know-how.