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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the intersections of state imaginaries and material realities among quinoa producers in Southern Peru, as they attempt to certify their organic quinoa for export.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on PhD fieldwork with the Quinua del Sur (QS) cooperative, a group of quinoa producers in Southern Peru, this paper provides an ethnographic account of the process of organic certification within the cooperative. QS is required to undergo a time-consuming - and expensive - annual certification process to maintain organic status, including extensive documentation of producers' activities and field visits by an external inspector. Although the Peruvian state is significantly involved in the promotion of organic quinoa, often in conjunction with NGO organizations, the practice of certification is outsourced to private third-party entities who conduct standardized independent investigations - a classic example of roll-out neoliberalism (Hatanaka and Busch 2008).

This distribution of labour across state and non-state entities makes for a disconnect between policy and practice. As my account shows, the grounded practice of certification engenders a set of performances and explicit staging by cooperative members and agricultural technicians aimed at highlighting their ideal practice, as they attempt to secure the organic certification so valued by state and NGO authorities. Heeding Krupka and Nugent's (2015: 4) call to pay attention to "materially grounded political imaginaries" in citizen-state relations, the paper demonstrates: 1) how state and state-like actors' geo-cultural imaginaries of a 'traditional' rural citizenry fall short of the complex material realities of producers' lives; and 2) how local conceptions and enactments of appropriate regulatory performance may undermine, even as they seek to uphold, attempts at universalising mechanisms of verification and control.