Organic Sovereignties

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Strug­gles over Farming in

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an Age of ­Free Trade

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Guntra A. Aistara
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University of Washington Press

Seattle
Copyright © 2018 by the University of Washington Press
Printed and bound in the United States of Amer­i­ca
Composed in Warnock Pro, typeface designed by Robert Slimbach
22 21 20 19 18  5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publisher.
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University of Washington Press

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www.washington​.­edu​/­uwpress
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Library of Congress Cataloging-­i n-­P ublication Data on file

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isbn (hardcover): 978-0-295-74310-3

isbn (paperback): 978-0-295-74311-0
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isbn (ebook): 978-0-295-74312-7

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Portions of the ethnographic materials and analy­sis have appeared in earlier

versions in the following publications, which have granted permission to reuse
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­these materials:
“Maps from Space: Latvian Organic Farmers Negotiate Their Place in the Eu­ropean
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Union.” 2009. Sociologia Ruralis 49 (2): 132–50.

in

“Seeds of Kin, Kin of Seeds: The Commodification of Organic Seeds and Social
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Relations in Costa Rica and Latvia.” 2011. Ethnography 12 (4): 490–517.

“Privately Public Seeds: Competing Visions of Property, Personhood, and
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Democracy in Costa Rica’s Entry into CAFTA and the Union for the Protection
of Plant Va­ri­e­ties (UPOV).” 2012. Journal of Po­liti­cal Ecol­ogy 19: 127–44.
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“Weeds or Wisdom? Permaculture in the Eye of the Beholder on Latvian

Eco-­health Farms,” in J. Lockyer and J. Veteto, eds. Environmental Anthropology
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Engaging Ecotopia: Bioregionalism, Permaculture, and Ecovillages. 2013.

New York: Berghahn Press. 113–29.
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“Latvia’s Tomato Rebellion: Nested Environmental Justice and Returning

Eco-­sociality in the Post-­socialist EU Countryside.” 2014. Journal of Baltic
Studies 45 (1): 105–30.

Cover photograph by Paul Morris, unsplash.com.

All interior photos by the author.
All maps by Pease Press Cartography. Maps of EU and CAFTA regions created
using IndieMapper and with Mercator projection.
To my parents and my ­sister, Māra, Jānis, and Sandra
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 Contents
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Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan  ix
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Acknowl­edgments  xi
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List of Abbreviations  xv
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Introduction
Organics in Between  3
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chapter one
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Normal and Exceptional Sovereignties  30

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chapter two
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“We ­Will Simply Count the Votes”  57

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chapter three
Placing the Landscape  82
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chapter four
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Networking Diversities  108

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chapter five
Cacophonous Harmonies  135

chapter six
Between Conventionalizations  160
 chapter seven
Nested (In)Justices  185

Conclusion
Interstitial Organic Sovereignties  212

Notes 219
Bibliography 227
Index 251
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 foreword
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In what is arguably the first sustained ethnographic study of organic farm-

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ing outside the United States, Organic Sovereignties builds its compelling
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narrative around two case studies from two continents. One is from Costa
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Rica and the other from Latvia, both identified despite their other­wise
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divergent histories as “regional peripheries” in this work, to pres­ent power­

ful cases about small farmers and their strug­gle to fashion meaningful
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agrarian livelihoods through their involvement in organic agriculture. By

thus situating the quest for autonomy and dignity among farmers in both
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regions within national policies and pro­cesses of globalization, this study

as

effectively operates on several levels of analy­sis. Organic agriculture, then,

emerges in ­these countries as a product of both farmer mobilization and
h

market forces, informed by the aspiration to achieve a ­viable ­future in

in

small-­scale farming but constantly responding to the wider pressures of

gt

markets, regulations, and international agreements.

­There is a growing body of work by geographers, sociologists, and devel-
on

opment studies scholars on organic farming, often focused on certification,

marketing, and community-­supported agriculture. ­There is also considerable
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interest in the pursuit of food sovereignty and vari­ous small-­farmer

responses to the vice-­l ike grip industrial agriculture has on many of their
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lives. Guntra Aistara offers a creative amalgamation of t­ hese kinds of studies,

s

made pos­si­ble by her long-­term ethnographic fieldwork in both countries.

The farmers in both locations are depicted in the midst of vari­ous strug­
gles, not least to establish the viability of organic farming in view of
enhancing their own control over their lives, even as they work to make
food healthy and environmentally sustainable. Along the way, Aistara not
only shows the parallels between Central Amer­i­ca and eastern Eu­rope but
also undermines easy dichotomies between first and third worlds, new and

ix
traditional farming, or ideologies of the Left and the Right, as she depicts
the po­liti­cal commitments of organic farmers.
Organic Sovereignties is resolutely interested in the intersecting history
of organic agriculture as a social movement of farmers striving to find their
place in regions and nations reshaped by world events. In the Latvian case
the rural turbulence generated by the end of the Soviet Union created the
opportunity for farmers to reconnect in the 1990s with land and home, and
this created the space for organic farming to emerge as a pos­si­ble pathway
into in­de­pen­dent small farming in the 2000s. In Costa Rica the harsh reali-
ties of economic reform and agribusiness created a milieu, also in the 1990s,
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where peasants rallied for their farming ­futures but also for local democracy
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and to protect their ability to lead a rural life of dignity,1 and food sovereignty
activists combined with some of them to support and nurture interest in
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organic farming. Aistara vividly portrays the specific historical trajectories

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in each case, as farmers in both of her sites negotiate the fallout of indus-
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trial agriculture promoted during the Cold War and the expansion of com-
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modity agriculture ­after the end of that war.

Aistara’s astute treatment of the ecological consequences of organic
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farming and the l­ egal disputes over land are informed by her command over
debates in agrarian studies and environmental anthropology. Comparison
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of the social movements over seed collection and storage that emerged in both
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countries leads into a nuanced reassessment of the issue of graduated sov-

ereignty, which receives its most sophisticated analy­sis since anthropolo-
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gist Aihwa Ong wrote about the concept in very dif­fer­ent contexts in Asia.2
in

In her innovative comparison of organic agriculture across continents,

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focus on cases outside western Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca, fine-­grained

and multiscalar ethnography, and elegant prose evoking the positive vision
on

and loving ­labor of many farmers and their advocates, Aistara uncovers
entirely new ground across a number of fields.
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k. sivaramakrishnan
es

Yale University
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May 2017

x foreword
 acknowl­e dgments
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The pro­cess of research and writing for this book has been a personal jour-
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ney intertwined with countless farmers, activists, scholars, students, friends,

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and ­family. While the writing and revising has kept me indoors at my com-
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puter for many more hours than I would have liked, the skills I learned
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from organic farmers along the way have also kept me sane, as pulling
weeds and planting tomatoes in my own small garden allowed my thoughts
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about their journeys to slowly germinate, grow, and take root in this book.
I am grateful for financial support for field research and writing for this
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proj­ect from a Fulbright-­Hays fellowship for the bulk of the field research;
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grants for preliminary and follow-up research trips from the University of
Michigan’s Rackham Gradu­ate School, School of Natu­ral Resources and
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Environment, Center for Eu­ro­pean Studies, Advanced Study Center Semi-

in

nar on Global Transformations, EU Center Handler Foundation, Center for

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Eu­ro­pean Studies, International Institute, and Center for Rus­sian and East
Eu­ro­pean Studies; writing support from the University of Michigan Rack-
on

ham Gradu­ate School, a University for Peace Faculty Professional Develop-

ment Grant, the Central Eu­ro­pean University Research Support Scheme
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and a Central Eu­ro­pean University Faculty Research Grant, the Eu­ro­pean

Social Fund Proj­ect “Development Strategies and Changing Cultural Spaces
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in Rural Latvia,” and a Yale University Agrarian Studies Fellowship.

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More p ­ eople than I can mention have helped this book come to fruition.
First, I cannot express my gratitude enough to the farmers and other mem-
bers of the LBLA, the Eco-­Health Farm Network (EHFN), MAOCO, and
IFOAM, from whom I gained inspiration and learned perseverance. I have
used pseudonyms for all in­for­mants and, except for the LBLA, the EHFN,
MAOCO, and a few other institutions, changed the names of places,
organ­izations, and groups to protect their anonymity. Therefore to all the
farmers and activists I cannot name ­here, I wish to thank you for the

xi
insights into your wisdom, ways of life, and connections with place. I wish
you continued creativity, perseverance, and success in your strug­gles for
organic sovereignties.
I am also infinitely grateful to my mentors at the University of Michi-
gan, who afforded me the liberty to undertake this multisited ethnographic
proj­ect and offered invaluable encouragement: Rebecca Hardin, Michael
Kennedy, Stuart Kirsch, Ivette Perfecto, and Maria Carmen Lemos. Addi-
tionally I am grateful for the many conversations with the New World
Agriculture and Ecol­ogy Group (NWAEG) in Ann Arbor. Mentors and col-
leagues at my vari­ous institutional homes along the way contributed to my
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thinking through our enriching discussions: Rolain Borel, Jan Breitling,

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Rob Fletcher, Ameena Al Rasheed, Mahmoud Hamid, and other colleagues

at the United Nations University for Peace in Costa Rica; all my colleagues at
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the Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy at Central Eu­ro­pean

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University, especially Tamara Steger, Pablo Prado and the ACT JUST team,
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and my gradu­ate students Noémi Gonda, Ariadne Collins, Kyle Piispanen,

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Renata Christen, June Brawner, and Logan Strenchock; members of the Yale
Agrarian Studies colloquium, including in par­tic­u­lar K. Sivaramakrishnan,
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James C. Scott, Julie Gibbings, Jennifer Lee Johnson, José Martinez-­Reyes,

Alba Diaz, Daniel Tubb, Aniket Aga, Karen Hébert, and Louisa Lombard.
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Many other colleagues have nourished me intellectually along the way,

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through collaborative proj­ects and discussions that helped develop my

thinking: Csilla Kiss and the Eu­ro­pean “Let’s Liberate Diversity” network;
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Rasma Kārkliņa, Dace Dzenovska, Agnese Cimdiņa, Ieva Raubiško, and

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­others in the Eu­ro­pean Social Fund Proj­ect “Development Strategies and

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Changing Cultural Spaces in Rural Latvia”; Doyle McKey, Sophie Caillon,

and the CESAB “Netseed” proj­ect group in France; Heather Paxson, Cris-
on

tina Grasseni, and participants at the “Reinventing Food” workshop at the

Radcliffe Advanced Study Institute at Harvard University; Birgit Müeller,
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Nancy Chen, and participants of the Wenner Gren “Soils, Seeds, and Poli-
tics” workshop at UC Santa Cruz; ­Virginia Nazarea, Susannah Chapman,
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Glenn Stone, and all members of the “Seeds of Re­sis­tance, Seeds of Hope”
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AAA panel; Karl Zimmerer, Stef de Haan, Stephen Brush, Bert Visser, and
other participants at the Ernst Strüngmann Forum on Agrobiodiversity
in the 21st ­Century; and Dana Graef and other participants of the “Sover-
eignty and Environment” AAA panel.
The writing would never have been accomplished without the collabora-
tion of members of two writing groups, who gave me tireless feedback on
evolving drafts and helped me formulate my arguments: Karen Hébert, Josh
Reno, and Diana Mincyte. In addition I am indebted to Andrea Ballestero,

xii acknowl­e dgments

 Dace Dzenovska, Rob Fletcher, Julie Gibbings, Zsuzsa Gille, Michael Hath-
away, Laura Sayre, Katrina Schwartz, and Hadley Renkin for generous feed-
back and advice on the book proj­ect at vari­ous stages over the years.
Fi­nally, I am extremely grateful to executive editor Lorri Hagman and
project editor Margaret Sullivan at the University of Washington Press and
Culture, Place, and Nature series editor K. Sivaramakrishnan (again), copy
editor Elizabeth Berg, and indexer Scott Smiley for their patience and sup-
port, as well as to two anonymous reviewers whose comments helped me in
the final revision stages. All ­mistakes remain my own.
To all my ­family, but especially Mamma, Tētis, Sandra, Anda, Anita,
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Imants, Zane, and Solvita, I have grown from your love and care over the
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years. To Hadley, Trīne, Pienene, Mellenis, and Steggie: thank you for endur-
ing this pro­cess, believing in me, laughing with me, and picking up the pieces
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when necessary. I could not have done this without you!

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acknowl­e dgmentsxiii
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 abbreviations
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alba Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América

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(Bolivarian Alliance for the ­Peoples of Our Amer­i­ca)

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anao Associación Nacional de Agricultura Orgánica (National

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Organic Agriculture Association)

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baop Buenatierra Association of Organic Producers

baps Buenatierra Association of Sustainable Producers
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cafta Central American ­Free Trade Agreement

cap Common Agricultural Policy
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cbd Convention on Biological Diversity

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cbi Ca­rib­bean Basin Initiative

ehfn Eco-­Health Farm Network
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em effective microorganisms
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eu Eu­ro­pean Union
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fao Food and Agriculture Organ­ization

fecon Costa Rican Federation for Environmental Conservation
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fta ­Free Trade Agreement

ftaa ­Free Trade Area of the Amer­i­cas
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gmo genet­ically modified organism

ha hectare
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ice Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (Costa Rican

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Electricity Institute)
ida Instituto de Desarrollo Agrario (Agrarian Development Institute)
ifoam International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements
imf International Monetary Fund
itpgr International Treaty on Plant Ge­ne­tic Resources for Food
and Agriculture
lbla Latvijas Bioloģiskās Lauksaimniecības Apvienība
(Latvian Organic Farming Association)

xv
maoco Movimiento para la Agricultura Orgánica Costarricense
(Costa Rican Organic Agriculture Movement)
ngo non-­governmental organ­ization
nis Newly In­de­pen­dent States
rss Rural Support Ser­vice
pes Payments for Environmental Ser­vices
pln Partido Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Party)
tlc Tratado de Libre Comercio (­Free Trade Agreement)
tse Tribunal Supremo de Elecciones (Supreme Election Tribunal)
upov International Union for the Protection of New Va­ri­e­ties of Plants
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usaid United States Agency for International Development

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wwf World Wide Fund for Nature

wto World Trade Organ­ization
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xvi abbreviations
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Organic Sovereignties

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 Introduction
Organics in Between
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n July 2006, I attended my first board meeting of the Movimiento para

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la Agricultura Orgánica Costarricense (Costa Rican Organic Agricul-

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ture Movement, henceforth MAOCO), held in a small tiled office with

an iron gate in a neighborhood outside the center of San José. As I listened
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to the discussion around me, I had a strange feeling of déjà vu. Only days
before, I had left b
­ ehind the flat open landscapes of grain fields, wildflower
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meadows, and rolling pastures surrounded by pine forests in Latvia, in the

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northeast corner of Eu­rope. I had traveled west across the Atlantic Ocean
and south nearly to the equator, to seek out the tiny organic farms perched
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among large banana and pineapple plantations, steep and eroding upland
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pastures, and the ever-­encroaching lush rain forests of the tropics of Costa
gt

Rica. And yet suddenly the conversation around me in San José made me
feel as if I had never left Rīga.
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Producers and movement organizers in Costa Rica ­were debating some

of the same issues that the Latvijas Bioloģiskās Lauksaimniecības Apvienība
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(Latvian Organic Farming Association, henceforth LBLA) had discussed

only a few weeks earlier: What would convince lawmakers and the public
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that organic food was an innovative and ecological wave of the f­ uture rather
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than a backward relic of the past? How could the organic movements help
small producers overcome barriers to increasing organic production and
entering markets with more value-­added products? And would it be pos­si­
ble to negotiate a place for organic farmers in new regional governance
structures, such as the Eu­ro­pean Union (EU) and the Central American F ­ ree
Trade Agreement (CAFTA)?
The Latvian organic movement emerged in opposition to Soviet col-
lective farming in the late 1980s, while the Costa Rican movement

3
emerged around the same time as a response to industrial plantations
owned by US and multinational corporations. The LBLA was or­ga­n ized
as a professional association, but MAOCO was determined to remain a
dynamic social movement. The two organ­izations had taken divergent
approaches to organ­i zing their markets, movements, and po­l iti­cal nego-
tiations over the past twenty-­five years and ­were situated in dif­fer­ent
cultural histories, po­liti­cal economies, and ecologies. Why, then, ­were
the two movements experiencing such similar prob­lems despite ­t hese
striking differences?
For consumers in industrialized socie­ties, the term organic conjures
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images of healthy, certified, and often exclusive products. Yet for organic
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farmers in much of the world it signifies practices and pro­cesses that must
coexist with contested histories, lived landscapes, and precarious liveli-
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hoods. Even as controversy over the role of organic agriculture in “feeding

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the world” has intensified (Badgley et al. 2007; Badgley and Perfecto 2007),
si

rural communities and organic farmers’ movements in many parts of the

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world remain far from ­these debates that so critically affect them, engaged
instead in everyday strug­gles to create v­ iable organic ­f utures for their com-
of

munities and environments amid ever-­changing certification standards and

legislation, which often make it nearly impossible to sell their products. That
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they persist suggests that more than economic motives drives their engage-
as

ment with organic agriculture.

Through multisited ethnographic work conducted over the past de­cade,
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this book traces the meanings, practices, and politics of organic agricul-
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ture in two field sites typically considered ecologically, historically, and

gt

culturally “worlds apart”: Latvia and Costa Rica. It shows how organic
farmers and their movements in ­t hese countries navigate contradictory
on

pressures associated with harmonization of legislation necessitated by

entry into the EU and CAFTA, respectively.1 Organic farmers create and
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maintain their diverse farms as culturally meaningful places by reinvent-

ing landscapes of the past to construct the ­f uture, as well as organ­izing
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their markets and movements in innovative ways. As farmers find their

s

possibilities and choices constrained by changing state and suprastate

regulations associated with entry into ­free trade regions, however, they
must negotiate the harmonization of legislation that overrides previous
national-­level agreements. Organic movements defend their rights to
define their own practices, ways of life, and visions of politics as nested
strug­g les for organic sovereignties.

4 Introduction
 why latvia and costa rica?
On some levels, Latvia and Costa Rica could not be more dif­fer­ent. Latvia is
a flat country with a cool, temperate climate, and Costa Rica is a mountain-
ous and volcanic tropical land. Costa Rica has enjoyed a long history of in­de­
pen­dence since 1821, when it emerged from three hundred years of Spanish
rule, earning it the reputation of being a demo­cratic exception in conflict-­
ridden Central Amer­i­ca (Molina Jimenez 2005b). In contrast, Latvia has
been run by a succession of foreign rulers from the thirteenth to the twen-
tieth ­century, enjoying only two brief in­de­pen­dence periods: the first
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between the two world wars and the second since the dissolution of the
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Soviet Union in 1991. And while Costa Rica is well known as a tourist desti-
nation for sighting sloths, tree frogs, and scarlet macaws, as well as for its
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economic connections to the United States, Latvia only entered the Eu­ro­
r

pean Union in 2004 and is still constructing a market economy and inter-
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national presence. ­These divergent histories have resulted in markedly

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dif­fer­ent models of po­liti­cal engagement and subjectivities. Latvia and Costa

Rica would indeed be considered by most observers to be worlds apart.
of

Yet upon closer investigation, the Baltic states and Central Amer­i­ca
occupy parallel geopo­liti­cal positions at the fulcrum of the global east-­west
W

and north-­south axes, respectively (see the maps on the following pages).
as

­These locations have resulted in historically strong economic and po­liti­cal

influence by neighboring powers, including direct or indirect control over
h

natu­ral resources and agricultural production. At the time of my main field-

in

work in 2005–7, both of t­hese small countries, of roughly the same size,
gt

­were negotiating their places in the regional ­free trade blocs of the EU and
CAFTA, which, despite their other differences, ­were contentious ­because of
on

the profound influence they w ­ ere expected to have on agriculture.2 Further-

more, despite their historic associations with the “second” and “third” worlds,
Pr

which have segmented our imagination of the globe into eco­nom­ically and
po­liti­cally distinct regions, at the time I began my research, Latvia and Costa
es

Rica w ­ ere ranked side by side according to global development indicators.3

s

Latvia was for many years the poorest and lowest ranked of the EU-25 mem-
ber states,4 and Costa Rica was the highest ranked in Central Amer­i­ca.
Countries such as Latvia and Costa Rica thus trou­ble ­simple symbolic
and po­liti­cal cartographies, representing the geopo­liti­cally in-­between cat-
egories of the Global North-­yet-­East and South-­but-­West, neither devel-
oping nor developed. Considered by most international donors as having
graduated from needing development aid but still lacking substantial

Introduction5
 Iceland

Sweden
Finland
Norway

Atlantic Ocean
Baltic Estonia
Sea
Russia

Latvia
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Denmark
Lithuania
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North Sea
Russia
ve

Ireland
United Netherlands Belarus
Kingdom
Poland
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Germany
si

Belgium
Czechia
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Ukraine
Luxembourg Slovakia
Austria
Moldova
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France Hungary
0 200 Km CH
SI HR Romania
0 100 Mi
W

BA
Ad Serbia
Italy ria Bulgaria Black Sea
as

tic ME
Se MK
a
AL
Portugal
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Spain
Turkey
in
gt

Malta Greece
on

Mediterranean Sea Cyprus

AFRICA
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European Union States with Dates of Membership Abbreviations

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1958: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands AL Albania

1973: Denmark, Ireland, United Kingdom* BA Bosnia & Herzegovina
1981: Greece CH Switzerland
s

1986: Portugal, Spain HR Croatia

1995: Austria, Finland, Sweden ME Montenegro
2004: Czechia, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, MK Macedonia
Malta, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia SI Slovenia
2007: Bulgaria, Romania
2013: Croatia

Latvia and new EU member states on the east-­west axis between western Eu­rope
Map by Pease Press Cartography
and Rus­Created
Map 1 Europe sia. using IndieMapper rev 12/6/17 v7g 15% gray fill (on top, multiply mode), no water stipple

*Voted in June 2016 to leave the EU

6
 N O R T H A M E R I C A
United States

Atlantic Ocean

Gulf of Mexico The Bahamas

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Cuba Dominican
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Haiti Republic
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Mexico Belize Jamaica Puerto

Rico
Honduras
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Caribbean Sea (US)

si

Guatemala
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Nicaragua
El Salvador
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Costa Rica Panama

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Venezuela
Pacific Ocean
as
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Colombia
in
gt

Ecuador Brazil
on

0 400 Km
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0 200 Mi S O U T H A M E R I C A
es
s

CAFTA States with Dates of Membership

2006: El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, United States
2007: Dominican Republic
2009: Costa Rica

Costa Rica and Central Amer­i­ca on the north-­south axis between North Amer­i­ca
and South Amer­i­ca.
Map by Pease Press Cartography
rev 11/25/17 v6g 15% gray CAFTA fill
Map 2 Latin America Created using IndieMapper on top (multiply mode), no stippled shoreline

Map by Pease Press Cartography. Created using IndieMapper

7
 E S T O N I A

Baltic Sea
Gulf of Riga R U S S I A

Vidzeme Region

Riga
L A T V I A
Kurzeme
Region Riga Region
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ni

Zemgale Region
Latgale Region
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L I T H U A N I A
r si

0 40 80 Km
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0 20 40 Mi B E L A R U S
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Map 3Latvia with

Latvia with socio­economic
socioeconomic regionsregions

Map by Pease Press Cartography

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rev 11/7/17 v6g

domestic capital or infrastructure to develop initiatives domestically, t­ hese
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“middle-­class” countries are often excluded from development debates alto-

gether. Thus, in this book I consciously juxtapose the Global Northeast to
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the Southwest in order to level out the conceptual playing field between the
in

industrialized North and the underdeveloped South, the orientalized East

gt

and the ever-­modern West. Instead, I focus on the diverse areas in between.
Latvia and Costa Rica offer a unique win­dow for analyzing the micropro­
on

cesses of globalization at the regional level. ­These countries inhabit the

frontiers of the regional powers of the Eu­ro­pean Union and the United
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States, respectively, where globalization is promoted through the creation

of asymmetrical trade pacts that implicitly push “regional modernization”
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(Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal 2003), yet uncomfortably intersect with

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historically sedimented national and regional identities, local priorities, and

previous experiences of empire. ­These small countries on the margins of
global powers can be seen as “regional peripheries,” with an in-­between sta-
tus that makes them po­liti­cally insignificant in their own right but strategi-
cally impor­tant areas for larger powers to assert influence on the world
stage.5
Understanding both discursive debates and material effects of region-
alization through the formation of ­free trade regions is particularly impor­tant

8 Introduction
 N I C A R A G U A

Chorotega
(Guanacaste) Caribbean Sea
Region
Northern Region

C O S T A R I C A
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San José
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Central Valley Atlantic/

Region Caribbean
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Region
(including
Talamanca)
Central Pacific
r

Region
si
ty

P A N A M A
Brunca/
of

Southern Region

Pacific Ocean
W
as
h

0 40 80 Km
in

0 20 40 Mi
gt

Costa Rica with socio­economic regions Map by Pease Press Cartography

Map 4 Costa Rica with socioeconomic regions
on

rev 11/7/17 v5

in the post–­Cold War era, as regional alliances and imaginaries are

Pr

reconfigured on the basis of postsocialist and postcolonial experiences

(Chari and Verdery 2009; Fraser 1997; Gille 2010). In this re­spect, Latvia and
es

Costa Rica are quite dif­fer­ent, as regionalization, in the form of entering the
s

EU and CAFTA, respectively, carried very dif­fer­ent symbolic meanings in

the two countries. For Latvia, the “return to Eu­rope,” from which many felt it
had been severed through the Soviet occupation of 1945–91, was a long-­
awaited and heavi­ly romanticized dream (Eglitis 2002). EU accession was
considered a foregone conclusion and contested by few in the years leading
up to the EU referendum in 2003 but has fostered increasing resentment in
the years since entry. In Costa Rica, CAFTA represented a promised global
development ­future for some and a form of neoliberal neo­co­lo­nial­ism for

Introduction9
­ thers. The historic referendum on joining CAFTA was narrowly approved
o
in 2007, but debates about it, and the ­imagined ­futures it represents, still
divide the country (Aistara 2012). ­These ­battles concern not just po­liti­cal
governance systems but regional imaginaries and the right to direct the
course of globalization at vari­ous scales.
Indeed, one of the ongoing controversies of our times concerns how glo-
balization affects very dif­fer­ent places. Multisited and global ethnographies
allow us to study differentiated impacts by juxtaposing regions that are con-
sidered to be worlds apart, exploring how the global is an integral part of
the local in each site, and tracing the unexpected ways they are connected
U

(Burawoy 2000; Marcus 1998). Unlike typical controlled comparisons that

ni

hold variables constant, multisited studies follow p ­ eople or ideas to vari­ous

sites where they occur (Hannerz 2003; Marcus 1998). Recent debates about
ve

multisited ethnography tease out how ethnographers collaborate with the

r

subjects of their studies, who themselves experience their world as in part

si

produced elsewhere, to cocreate new fields of inquiry about distributed

ty

knowledge systems, networks, or global assemblages (Falzon 2012; Marcus

2011; Ong and Collier 2008). Similarly, global ethnographies attempt to
of

denaturalize global forces by considering how they are negotiated as the

result of social pro­cesses and connections, and investigating how they are
W

constituted imaginatively (Burawoy 2000; Gille 2001; Gille and Ó Riain

as

2002). This creates each site as a “global place,” or as geographer Doreen

Massey (1994, 154) defined it, “articulated moments in networks of social
h

relations and understandings, but where a large proportion of t­ hose rela-

in

tions, experiences, and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale

gt

than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself.”
Multisited ethnographies, however, have focused more on issues such as
on

urban areas and mi­grants, possibly with the assumption that the rural is
inherently local and that rural communities are the most rooted and thus
Pr

the least mobile or global. Yet it is precisely rural areas that are the principal
sites of contestation between international development trends and local his-
es

tories. As farmers stay put, national and global development trends come
s

and go, leaving their traces on the landscapes, communities, and practices
of the farmers. This book, then, follows organic agriculture to the geopo­liti­
cal bridges of Latvia and Costa Rica, to explore how it is ­imagined and con-
structed as a way of life, a set of practices, and a social movement in t­ hese very
dif­fer­ent places. It explores what contests over organic agriculture in ­these
regional peripheries of the Northeast and Southwest can show us about the
intersection of global agricultural policies and contested food sovereignties
in the crosshairs of regionalization and globalization.

10 Introduction
 following organics
Organic agriculture has multiple genealogies and has historically appealed
to diverse po­liti­cal affiliations (Conford 2001; Staudenmaier 2011; Vogt
2007), making it difficult to generalize about universal meanings or politics.6
Beginning with Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy and biodynamic agriculture
in Austria in the 1920s, Sir Albert Howard’s treatises on soil and health in
the United Kingdom in the 1940s, and Rodale’s experiments in the United
States soon a­ fter, pockets of farmers have attempted to differentiate them-
selves from the increasing chemicalization of agriculture throughout the
U

world (Conford 2001).7

ni

Organic agriculture became a global phenomenon in 1972, when move-

ments from France, Britain, the United States, Sweden, and South Africa
ve

together founded the International Federation of Organic Agriculture

r

Movements (IFOAM) to develop joint proj­ects and international organic

si

standards and protect organic farmers’ interests. ­Today IFOAM is the

ty

world’s largest organic association, representing eight hundred organ­

izations from over one hundred countries, and has taken upon itself the
of

daunting task of “uniting the organic world in all its diversity” (Luttikholt
2007). Nevertheless, multiple divisions persist between North and South,
W

East and West, producers and retailers, certifiers and con­sul­tants, and small
as

farms and large businesses. In 2004 and 2005, IFOAM went through a par-
ticipatory pro­cess to elaborate a set of princi­ples and a definition of organic
h

agriculture, driven by concerns that the “true meanings” of organic agricul-

in

ture ­were being diluted “by the pressures of globalization” (Luttikholt

gt

2007). The definition upon which they agreed reads, “Organic Agriculture
is a production system that sustains the health of soils, ecosystems and
on

­people. It relies on ecological pro­cesses, biodiversity and cycles adapted to

local conditions, rather than the use of inputs with adverse effects. Organic
Pr

Agriculture combines tradition, innovation and science to benefit the shared

environment and promote fair relationships and a good quality of life for
es

all involved” (IFOAM 2008). This open definition and princi­ples, which
s

apply to both certified and noncertified producers, stand in contrast to more

narrowly defined certification standards required for selling organic prod-
ucts (see Lockie et al. 2006), marking the internal tensions in the organic
world between multiple identities as social movements and market sectors.

Between Movements and Markets

Organic agriculture has long been somewhat precariously perched between
a productive sector of the economy and a social movement advocating for

Introduction11
transformative change. This duality is one of the main ­causes for debates in
the organic world (Allen and Kovach 2000; Alroe and Noe 2008). Lady Eve
Balfour, one of the found­ers of the organic movement in ­England in the
1940s, noted that early organic “pioneers had one t­ hing in common—­ . . . ​
They all succeeded in breaking away from the narrow confines of the pre-
conceived ideas that dominated the scientific thinking of their day. They
looked at the living world from a new perspective—­t hey also asked new
questions” (Balfour 1977).
While thinking differently is still impor­tant for many organic farmers,
­today the organic sector is an $82 billion industry (Willer and Lernoud
U

2017). Revenues from organic products more than qua­dru­pled from 2000 to
ni

2015 (Willer and Lernoud 2017), and organic foods w ­ ere identified as the
fastest-­growing sector of the global food industry in the early 2000s (Rayn-
ve

olds 2004). Despite the rapid growth of organic agriculture, it remains

r

highly marginal on a global scale. Just one ­percent of agricultural land

si

worldwide is certified as organic, covering 51 million hectares of agricul-

ty

tural land farmed by over 2.4 million farmers in 179 countries (Willer and
Lernoud 2017). To put this in perspective, in 2016 GMO (genet­ically modi-
of

fied organism) crops w ­ ere grown on more than three times greater land
area globally (185 million hectares) by more than seven times the number
W

of farmers (18 million), but in fewer than a fifth the countries (twenty-­six;
as

ISAAA 2016).
Due to this marginality, organic agriculture is still seen by many in terms
h

of re­sis­tance to the industrialization and globalization of mainstream agri-

in

culture, in individual instances ideologically challenging the status quo (Egri

gt

1997); changing human-­nature relationships (Michelsen 2001; Tovey 2002);

fighting GMOs (Reed 2002); challenging the temporal logics of capitalism
on

and defending community (Reed 2008); and affirming a way of life and
indigenous identity (Hernandez Castillo, Rosalva, and Nigh 1998). The trans-
Pr

formative potential of the movement has been questioned, however, on the

grounds that it is more a “not in my body” consumer movement than one
es

based on solidarity and social change (DuPuis 2000), and on its inability
s

to defetishize the commodity form of food in the long run due to its contin-
ued dependence on global trade (Allen and Kovach 2000).
The image of a global organic social movement is indeed further compli-
cated by a closer inspection of how organic markets have developed (Guth-
man 2004; Raynolds 2004). Ninety p ­ ercent of global revenues in organic
sales come from North Amer­i­ca and western Eu­rope, while 89 ­percent of
producers are in developing countries (Willer and Lernoud 2017), replicat-
ing unjust trade patterns of conventional export markets (Raynolds 2004)

12 Introduction
and raising key questions about differences between the development of
organic agriculture in the Global North and South.
In the Global North, while movements originated out of opposition to
the status quo, organic agriculture is now dominated by concerns over
the dilution of its meaning due to market expansion. As farm sizes have
increased, crop diversity has decreased, and more farmers follow an “input
substitution” approach, simply replacing synthetic chemicals with organic
ones rather than moving ­toward agroecological princi­ples (Rosset and Altieri
1997). Thus, scholars and consumers alike are increasingly concerned about
the universality and inevitability of the conventionalization of organic agri-
U

culture, whereby organic farms begin to reproduce the conventional agricul-

ni

ture practices and business structures they once opposed (De Wit and
Verhoog 2007; Guthman 2004; Lockie and Halpin 2005). Julie Guthman
ve

(2004) concluded over a de­cade ago that in California a small minority of

r

large farms received the bulk of revenue, and stiff competition was nega-
si

tively affecting small growers committed to more rigorous standards. She

ty

observed, “The threat that agribusiness would dilute the meanings and prac-
tices of organic agriculture has in some re­spects already been borne out”
of

(312). In Eu­rope, government support for organic agriculture has tempered

structural pressures, but some trends of conventionalization and a bifurca-
W

tion of organic producers into smaller, more committed old-­timers and the
as

larger profit-­d riven organic industry have also been observed (Darnhofer
et al. 2010; Flaten et al. 2006).
h

In contrast, the management of organic agriculture in the Global South

in

highlights the burdens that certification places on developing country pro-

gt

ducers, at times mirroring colonial patterns of domination.8 NGOs teach-

ing agroecol­ogy compete with multinationals and supermarkets promoting
on

organic contract farming and with large-­scale development foundations

promising productivity through GMOs and improved seeds.9 Africa in par­
Pr

tic­u­lar has become a battleground pitting a “New Green Revolution” against

agroecol­ogy in the “sustainable intensification” debate, echoing Cold War
es

­battles fought in the territories of developing countries.10 While the conver-

s

sion from “organic by default” (resulting from a lack of financial resources

for agrochemicals) to the production of certified organic goods for markets
may increase yields and improve livelihoods in the short term, the longer-­
term sustainability of such organic proj­ects in the Global South is in jeop-
ardy once funding is withdrawn (Bacon 2005; Eyhorn, Ramakrishnan, and
Mäder 2007).11
Within both t­ hese debates, certification is at once one of the great-
est  achievements of organic movements and the central contradiction

Introduction13
undergirding the tension between organic markets and movements. Organic
movements in the Global North w ­ ere originally b
­ ehind the push for stan-
dards as a form of protection from unfair competition and a way to ensure
the ability to trade across borders (Luttikholt 2007). Certification has
increased organic markets, resulting in mainstreaming and democ­ratization
of organic food and a lowering of its prices, in some mea­sure countering the
trend of organic products becoming luxury goods (Alkon 2008; Goodman
2004). On the other hand, standards necessarily reduce the holistic ideals
of organic agriculture to lists of acceptable inputs or practices (Allen and
Kovach 2000), causing a loss of other meanings of organic agriculture, and
U

place undue burdens on producers in the South (Raynolds 2004).

ni

Furthermore, as export of organic products has increased globally, ­there

has been growing pressure to harmonize organic standards to facilitate
ve

trade and prevent producers interested in export from having to satisfy over-
r

lapping sets of regulations. Movements feel that certification has been

si

appropriated by government agencies and private entities and that it now

ty

pushes international trade at the expense of local markets (Allen and Kovach
2000). Farmers feel this as a loss of autonomy and the imposition of a bureau-
of

cratic monster beyond their control (Vos 2000). Movements throughout

the world have tried to influence certification standards (Gibbon 2008; Vos
W

2000), and a host of “postorganic” initiatives, including fair trade and local,
as

have cropped up in the alternative food sector to fill in the gaps of what
organic certification leaves out in terms of social norms (Goodman and
h

Goodman 2007; Moore 2006).

in

Yet studies of organic agriculture that focus on certification standards,

gt

allowed inputs, or markets often pres­ent an ahistorical, decontextualized,

and apo­liti­cal picture of organic movements. This gives the impression that
on

organic agriculture starts and ends with certification rather than being
an outgrowth of locally situated agricultural trends over the course of de­cades
Pr

or centuries, resulting in variations in organic agricultural practices and

meanings in dif­fer­ent contexts. For organic farmers in Latvia and Costa
es

Rica, organic agriculture involves a constant renegotiation of historic iden-

s

tities, traditional landscapes and farming practices, ecological conditions,

and po­liti­cal ­f utures.

Organics in the Global Northeast and Southwest

What, then, has been the trajectory of organic movements and markets in
regional peripheries like Latvia and Costa Rica? On the eve of the fall of the
Berlin Wall, in 1989, the late Latvian agricultural scientist Imants Heinackis

14 Introduction
 and a few colleagues ­were allowed to attend a seminar in Germany where
they first learned about biodynamic agriculture. A group of about thirty
farmers began experimenting in combining ancestral knowledge with biody-
namic princi­ples, making biodynamic soil amendments using cow hooves,
horns, and medicinal plants fermented in the stomach lining of animals, and
planting according to cycles of the moon, assisted ­later by recurring visits
from their German colleague Wolfgang Jorge (Hānbergs 2009). ­These
rituals caused their neighbors to view them as “a ­l ittle bit crazy,” yet the
first years of the movement are now described nostalgically by old-­timers as
characterized by camaraderie, a sense of common purpose, and the finding
U

of like-­minded ­people, or savējie.

ni

The advent of organic farming coincided with im­mense changes as a

result of in­de­pen­dence and the decollectivization of Soviet agriculture. In
ve

the early 1990s, families w ­ ere eligible to claim land their ancestors had lost
r

during forced collectivization ­under the Soviet regime. Most farms started
si

small, with one cow and two pigs. While some of t­ hese new farmers had
ty

experience working on collective farms, many had never worked on a farm

at all. Rather, ­these post-­Soviet “back-­to-­the-­landers” felt called to return to
of

the land their ­family members had lost as a way of connecting to place and
­were organic by default due to lack of resources. The first organic farmers
W

received biodynamic certification through Demeter in Germany, but in 1995

as

the LBLA was officially founded, and by 1998 it had developed its own
national organic certification system.12 By 2005 the LBLA described itself
h

as a professional organ­ization with approximately 850 members.

in

In Costa Rica, by contrast, rather than sliding into organic agriculture

gt

by default, as many Latvian farmers had, many farmers w ­ ere spurred on by

negative experiences with the agrochemicals that dominate Costa Rica’s
on

agricultural landscapes (Galt 2014). A Japa­nese agronomist, Shogo Sasaki,

arrived in the late 1980s as part of a volunteer technical assistance proj­ect
Pr

to teach a group of farmers in the Zarcero region to make fermented organic

fertilizers such as bokashi using effective microorganisms, known as EM, a
es

­recipe that has spread through the country and is still taught in organic agri-
s

culture courses ­today.

The emergence of the organic movement in Costa Rica coincided with
the advent of neoliberal reforms in the late 1980s, which reduced state sup-
port for agriculture and social ser­v ices (Edelman 1999). Organic farmers
hoped to instigate changes in the farming system dominated by foreign-­
owned monoculture plantations. Yet rather than reclaiming the land of
their ancestors and reinventing it half a ­century ­later, as in Latvia, ­t hese

Introduction15
farmers had often left their families’ land de­cades earlier due to population
growth and land scarcity, and resettled in newly colonized areas or in set-
tlements created through agrarian reform.
The Asociación Nacional de Agricultura Orgánica (National Organic
Agriculture Association, or ANAO) was formed in Costa Rica in 1992.
ANAO applied for numerous grants, but the only successful ones ­were
for the creation of the first certification agency, Eco-­Logica. By 1999 ANAO
had become less active, and in 2000, the organic movement MAOCO was
founded as a broad co­ali­tion of approximately 180 organ­izations of produc-
ers, consumers, educators, NGOs, and other agencies interested in pro-
U

moting organic agriculture. MAOCO defined itself in 2006 as a “space for

ni

consensus, exchange, and meeting” of vari­ous actors dedicated to organic

agriculture. Thus, in both countries, while certification is a bureaucratic
ve

burden that preoccupies many organic farmers, it is only one part of what
r

defines organic agriculture, which they experience as embedded within

si

much longer-­term historical pro­cesses and broader social and cultural

ty

landscapes.
of

Organic Paradoxes
In 2004, Latvia had almost 17,000 hectares of certified organic arable land
W

cultivated by 350 farmers, while Costa Rica had slightly less land area,
as

approximately14,000 hectares, cultivated by more than ten times as many,

or 3,900 farmers (Willer and Yussefi 2004).13 This represented less than
h

1 ­percent of arable land in Latvia, but over 3 ­percent of Costa Rican arable
in

land (Willer and Yussefi 2004). The notable difference in farm size reflected
gt

the predominance of extensive pastures and grasslands in Latvia as com-

pared to small-­scale intensive production due to competing land uses in
on

Costa Rica. Yet organic agriculture was growing steadily in both countries,
and movement leaders looked ­toward the ­f uture with cautious optimism.
Pr

A de­cade ­later, the picture was dramatically dif­fer­ent. In Latvia, organic

land area had exploded to 195,000 hectares, cultivated by nearly 4,000 farm-
es

ers (Willer and Lernoud 2014). Latvia had 10.8  ­percent of its arable land
s

managed organically, the ninth highest percentage of certified organic land

area in the world (still predominantly extensively managed grasslands).
Meanwhile in Costa Rica, organic land area had plummeted to ­under 8,000
hectares, its lowest point since the year 2000 (MAOCO 2008), to a mere
0.5 ­percent of agricultural land (Willer and Lernoud 2014), and the number
of producers had also decreased by nearly half, to just over 2,000 (Barquero
2014).

16 Introduction
 This reversal of trends reflects a number of key changes in the two coun-
tries over the ensuing de­cade. Latvia’s entry into the EU in 2004 afforded it
access to EU agri-­environmental support payments for organic agriculture,
which brought about exponential growth in the number of farms u ­ ntil
2008, and continued expansion of certified organic land area even ­after the
number of farms began to decline again due to land consolidation. In Costa
Rica, however, in the absence of subsidies, the number of certified farms
fluctuated with booms and busts in conventional export markets. Some
coffee cooperatives converted to organic methods in the wake of crashes in
global coffee prices but switched back to conventional practices once prices
U

improved. In addition, foreign donors began to withdraw funding from

ni

Costa Rica around 2006, leaving many initiatives to find their own way and
contributing to a contraction of the organic sector.
ve

Judging from t­ hese statistics, Latvia and Costa Rica would appear to be
r

opposites in the development of their organic sectors. Yet several key con-
si

tradictions underlie this seemingly rosy picture of the Latvian sector and
ty

demise of the Costa Rican one. First, Latvian organic farmers received only
a fraction of the subsidies organic farmers in old EU member states receive,
of

and have had continuing prob­lems implementing the new bureaucratic

norms of the EU. Not only the farms where the food is grown, but all facili-
W

ties where food is pro­cessed or packaged ­a fter harvest, must undergo

as

certification for the product to land on a shelf with an organic label, even
domestically. This has resulted in a pro­cessing bottleneck, meaning that
h

despite rising numbers of certified farmers and land area, comparatively

in

­little labeled organic food has been e­ ither sold on the Latvian domestic mar-
gt

ket or exported. In 2005 t­ here ­were only eight small certified organic pro­
cessing facilities in the country; hence the majority of certified organic food
on

was ­either used for subsistence, sold as conventional, or fed to farm animals.
A small organic shop in Rīga owned by a farmer cooperative has struggled to
Pr

break even and keep its shelves stocked since 2005, as several shops in smaller
towns have come and gone. Small eco-­shops carrying imported food prolif-
es

erated in the capital but sometimes they have no direct link to the organic
s

movement. A sea change came after 2010 with new direct-buying clubs in
Rīga and other towns, organized by eco-minded consumers who place joint
orders and coordinate distribution. Nevertheless, while there were more than
one hundred processing facilities as of 2014, of the four main food categories
produced organically, 70 percent of milk, 79 percent of potatoes, 50 percent
of meat, and 75 percent of grains were still sold as conventional, earning no
price premiums (Latvian Ministry of Agriculture 2014).

Introduction17
 In Costa Rica, a consumer might initially get the opposite impression.
San José has hosted a small but steady organic market since 1999, and a
number of other towns started organic market stands that still cater to
a small group of loyal consumers, even if they have not expanded dramati-
cally. The first and main organic vegetable co-op has existed for over twenty
years and sells to local supermarket chains. Yet less than a third of Costa
Rica’s organic products are destined for local markets, while almost
70  ­percent are for export (Arias 2015). Costa Rican organic exports to
Eu­rope, primarily of the traditional commodities of coffee, bananas, sugar,
and pineapple, fell by nearly two-­thirds from 2010 to 2011 due to the global
U

financial crisis (Arias 2015). They have been growing again since 2012 (Arias
ni

2015), despite the contraction in certified land area and number of farmers
(Barquero 2014).
ve

­These contradictions show that the tensions between organic movements

r

and markets are heightened in regional peripheries, ­because new regulations

si

prevent markets in new EU member states from working as expected, yet

ty

the pull of conventional export markets for tropical commodities remains

strong. Furthermore, organic movements that have typically lobbied for
of

influence at the national level have become less effective due to increasing
suprastate governance. Entry into the EU and CAFTA has required chang-
W

ing numerous regulations, with effects even more profound than ­those occa-
as

sioned by certification norms. ­These conditions suggest that, rather than

stopping at ­either of the ­simple statistical snapshots above, we must inves-
h

tigate more deeply the lives, landscapes, practices, and politics of organic
in

farmers in ­these two countries.

gt
on

negotiating sovereignties
Despite differences in the number of organic hectares, farms, or markets in
Pr

each country, organic farmers in regional peripheries experience challenges

that differ from ­those experienced in ­either the Global North or the Global
es

South. Th
­ ese surround the entry into regional f­ ree trade agreements like the
s

EU and CAFTA that require the harmonization of legislation, creating con-

tradictory pressures for farmers.
Rather than mirroring the market-­driven trends of conventionalization
of the North, or the NGO-­and donor-­d riven efforts of the Global South,
organic farmers in t­ hese regional peripheries have largely strug­gled to shape
the par­ameters of organic systems and markets on their own, with isolated
funding for par­tic­u ­lar proj­ects. While initially this may have offered a
greater degree of autonomy, they are now increasingly both cash strapped

18 Introduction
and constrained by regulations designed to meet suprastate requirements.
As a result, organic farmers and movements in ­these regional peripheries
have negotiated new relationships with their land, other farmers, the mar-
ket, the state, and suprastate agencies. Th ­ ese relationships serve to carve out
“organic places” at the farm, movement, and national levels in response to
regionalization and the associated harmonization of regulations.14
The lens of po­liti­cal ecol­ogy allows us to analyze the nested place-­making
efforts of organic farmers and movements in Latvia and Costa Rica, in order
to combine attention to power dynamics in dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal economies
with the study of ecological systems and pro­cesses, and to trace the histori-
U

cal, geo­graph­i­cal, and po­liti­cal connections across time and space within
ni

which ­these relationships are embedded.15 This requires integration of mate-

rial and discursive approaches to analyze the links between ecological effects
ve

of organic farming models on the ground and the symbolic and socially
r

constructed meanings that circulate about them through po­liti­cal debates

si

(Escobar 1999). Yet in constructing their organic places, organic movements

ty

in ­these regional peripheries increasingly find themselves clashing with the

hegemonic politics of regionalization.
of

The Common Sense of Regionalization

W

Regional bilateral and multilateral ­free trade agreements have been a defin-
as

ing feature of our era since the push to manage ­free trade at the global level
through the World Trade Organ­ization (WTO) began to falter due to re­sis­
h

tance from the Global South (Clapp 2004). The creation of new trade regions
in

results in critical transformations of nature, space, and power relations (Neu-

gt

mann 2010; Pred 1984). ­Free trade regions are a new and power­ful form of
regionalization paralleling previous forms of imperial or colonial domina-
on

tion (Walsh 2011), with profound implications for reimagining geopo­liti­

cal spaces in a post–­Cold War era. Recent developments, such as Britain’s
Pr

“Brexit” from the EU and Donald Trump’s discussion of withdrawal from

several ­f ree trade agreements, based largely on nationalist rhe­toric and
es

neoprotectionist stances, detract attention from more nuanced debates

s

about how ­free trade regions transform practices and social relations across
scales. Rather than promoting overzealous boosterism for, or knee-­jerk reac-
tions against, such agreements, investigating lived changes on the ground
allows us to explore how farmers and other groups negotiate the particulari-
ties of imposed realities that w
­ ere not adequately debated beforehand.
New ­f ree trade regions, such as an expanded EU or the newly created
CAFTA, mark a new and notably asymmetrical form of regionalization.
EU expansion added a huge territory of less developed countries in eastern

Introduction19
Eu­rope to an existing trade region composed of more developed countries
in western Eu­rope, while trade agreements like CAFTA included the United
States as the dominant power in a new region made up primarily of eco­nom­
ically less developed countries. ­These new ­free trade regions thus differ
from the original creation of the EU, Mercosur, or other regions that can be
seen as attempts to merge forces of more equal countries to compete against
larger global powers. Rather, if the United States remained ­after the collapse
of the Soviet Union an almost uncontested po­liti­cal and economic super-
power, the nearly contemporaneous expansion of the EU and the creation
of a range of bilateral and multilateral trade agreements by the United States
U

in Latin Amer­i­ca, including CAFTA, can be seen as a global competition

ni

to extend respective po­liti­cal dominance and economic hegemonies in

the Western Hemi­sphere (Barahona 2004; Böröcz and Kovács 2001). The
ve

rise of such markedly asymmetrical ­f ree trade regions makes it urgent to

r

explore the power relations through which they become institutionalized

si

as geopo­liti­cal entities, and through which they are contested. As Sivara-

ty

makrishnan and Agrawal (2003, 14) point out, regions, as the spaces between
the typically juxtaposed local and global, are “the social and discursive sites
of

where the production of modernity occurs.” ­Free trade agreements push

“regional modernization” (Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal 2003) through
W

uneven negotiations, where more power­ful countries dictate the terms of

as

regional cooperation and the details of agreements are deci­ded mostly in

secret among the elites of the respective countries, to be approved after-
h

ward in purportedly demo­cratic pro­cesses (Florez-­Estrada and Hernan-

in

dez 2004; Walsh 2011).

gt

Furthermore, ­Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) are more than economic

instruments ­because they require extensive changes in domestic legisla-
on

tion to facilitate the production of ever more tradable goods and protected
property rights. As such, FTAs have become the tools through which po­liti­
Pr

cal, ­legal, and social relations are remade in the image of neoliberal econo-
mies, so as to transform products, ser­vices, and demo­cratic pro­cesses into
es

objects able to freely circulate in the interest of augmenting trade and rev-
s

enue. F ­ ree trade regions delimit central features of domestic agricultural

policy, directly influencing levels of subsidies, prices of products, rates of
imports, and pressures to export. Th ­ ese pro­cesses also have subtle indirect
effects on farmer livelihoods, however, by prescribing best agricultural
practices and reconfiguring property regimes, biodiversity policies, and
farmers’ rights to save, exchange, and reproduce seeds or to sell their goods
through cooperatives.

20 Introduction
 This makes the creation of ­free trade regions a profoundly social exer-
cise, requiring negotiations over fundamental values in order to agree to
varying degrees of standardization across countries, enforced through ­legal
mechanisms (Duina 2006). Sociologist Francesco Duina (2006) has argued
that through the creation of ­free trade regions, the relationship between the
nation-­state and the region comes to ­matter more than the nation-­state
itself. Yet ­because the nation-­state has traditionally been the locus of nego-
tiations for social movement politics, the delineation of new relationships
between Latvia and the EU, between Costa Rica and CAFTA, and of organic
farmers in relation to each, become a crucial frame for farmers’ and move-
U

ments’ negotiation of organic sovereignties.

ni

Hierarchical Harmonies
ve

­ ree trade is accomplished through the seemingly benign concept of har-

F
r

monization. Harmonization of legislation is meant to simplify trade among

si

states by making laws and standards equivalent, yet it produces a range

ty

of other effects as well. Th­ ere seems to be an assumption that equivalent

laws, such as patents, “can be transported with ­little effort and to universal
of

effect” (de Laet 2000, 152) to very dif­fer­ent contexts ­under the rubric of har-
monization. Yet harmonization of legislation, required of Latvia to join
W

the EU, and of Costa Rica to implement CAFTA, has been one of the more
as

contentious aspects of ­these ­free trade regions.

Although the EU is a po­liti­cal ­union and thus involves far more than
h

merely economic relations, CAFTA is also not just about trade. Many organic
in

farmers in Latvia experienced “Eu­rope” primarily as a foreign regulatory

gt

proj­ect, and opponents to CAFTA in Costa Rica emphasized in their cam-

paigns that the agreement “va mucho más allá que el comercio” (goes much
on

beyond trade). Both the EU Accession Agreement and CAFTA included

numerous non-­trade-­related issues, such as environment, agriculture, invest-
Pr

ments, telecommunications, finance, and intellectual property rights. It was

exactly ­these non-­trade-­related aspects of the agreements that ­were the most
es

controversial and consequential.

s

Harmonization of legislation to meet international agreements necessar-

ily involves key concessions in terms of national sovereignty in decision
making. All relevant laws must be remade to fit mandates of regional or
international treaties, disregarding previous debates and accords at the
national level. Harmonization of national legislation thus creates hierar-
chies, from international treaties down to national and local laws, despite
variations in local histories, cultures, and l­egal pro­cesses (Drahos 2002a).

Introduction21
Harmonization creates its own geopo­liti­cal “power geometries” (Massey
2005), as more power­f ul states are more able to dictate the terms of inter-
national agreements, which determine how laws must be changed in imple-
menting states. This is particularly true in the asymmetrical trade pacts
negotiated in regional peripheries.
Though harmonization is often unidirectional, it is not entirely prede-
termined. National governments remake national laws to fit the require-
ments of international bodies, at times making laws even stricter than
­those at the international level (Drahos 2002b). Thus the term harmoniza-
tion not only masks the creation of new hierarchies but also covers up dis-
U

cord below the surface (Müeller 2013). Social movements contest t­hese
ni

pro­cesses and the national laws that result from them, erupting into cacoph-
onous harmonies.
ve

Both Latvia’s and Costa Rica’s entry into f­ree trade regions have funda-
r

mentally altered the legislative tenor and demo­cratic possibilities for organic
si

agriculture movements. In the case of Latvia, much legislation had already

ty

been changed to match EU requirements before the referendum on EU acces-

sion was held in 2003, while in Costa Rica, specific legislative changes had
of

to be approved by Parliament a­ fter the ratification of CAFTA in 2007, and

became known as the highly contested “implementation agenda.” In both
W

cases, organic farmers, together with other social movements, contested

as

harmonization at vari­ous levels by defending their own practices at the farm

level, negotiating the contours of implementation of new regulations at the
h

movement level, and protesting legislative changes at the national level.

in

Across ­t hese scales, organic farmers in both Latvia and Costa Rica w ­ ere
gt

caught between pressures to diversify and to conventionalize their farms,

movements, markets, and politics.
on

Conventionalized Diversities
Pr

Place making by organic farmers is composed of multiple diversifications,

representing not only biodiversity conservation but also the broader poli-
es

tics of diversifying livelihood strategies, movement structures, and social

s

networks through innovative practices and alliances with nonhumans

(Tsing 2012). In both countries, organic farming emerged in the face of a
retraction of state support and social guarantees, due to the transition to a
market economy with liberalized agricultural policies in Latvia and neolib-
eral restructuring of the economy in Costa Rica. In response, farmers carved
out their farms as places by transforming their landscapes and creating net-
works of diversity with other species to create diversified livelihoods. At
the movement level, they fought to maintain their autonomy of practice to

22 Introduction
govern land and seeds as the basis of their subsistence, as well as to trans-
form production and social relations surrounding iconic agricultural prod-
ucts, such as dairy in Latvia or coffee in Costa Rica.
The place-­making efforts by farmers, movements, and communities on
the ground often clash with the politics of region making through ­free trade
as enforced by governments, corporations, and supranational bodies. In
debates on conventionalization, defined as “the dynamics by which the
organic sector reproduces the most salient features of conventional agricul-
ture” (De Wit and Verhoog 2007, 450), the culprit is often presumed to be
the market. Yet entry into international conventions, such as regional FTAs,
U

­causes a range of other conventionalizations across scales. Pressure to

ni

harmonize laws to international treaties disallows innovative place-­and

diversity-­based practices. This in turn creates new economic pressures,
ve

pushing farmers and their organ­izations ­toward ever more conventional

r

business models and social and po­liti­cal networks. Organic farmers’ com-
si

plex and networked diversities are challenged by the harmonization of leg-

ty

islation on biodiversity conservation, good agricultural practices, and

intellectual property rights, as required by the EU and CAFTA. Th ­ ese reg-
of

ulations result in a quantification and simplification of diversity, or what can

be seen as a conventionalization of diversity. Thus organic farmers and
W

their movements in ­t hese regional peripheries feel trapped between con-

as

ventionalizations, but nevertheless continue in their strug­g les for organic

sovereignties.
h in

Certified Sovereignties
gt

The multilevel contestations of harmonization by organic farmers and

their movements are means of negotiating their sovereignty to manage
on

relationships to their land, the state, the market, the suprastate, and each
other. Recent scholarship building on the insights of Michel Foucault
Pr

(1980; Burchill, Gordon, and Miller 1991) has expanded the meaning of
the term sovereignty from referring to the power of the state to include other
es

realms and relationships. Robert Latham (2000, 2–3) has suggested that it is
s

necessary to consider how actors besides the state construct “social sover-
eignties,” or “the structures of relations that set the terms for—or are consti-
tutive of—­a domain of social existence.” Scholars of indigenous sovereignty
have explored sovereignty as an intermingled lived experience of mutual
interdependencies with the state and autonomy from it (Cattelino 2008) and
a pro­cess of making subjectivities and relations between p ­ eople and the state
(Erazo 2013). ­These examples allow us to question how other groups, such
as organic farmers, who are not necessarily unified by territorial claims or

Introduction23
ethnic identities, may also negotiate social sovereignties in relation to the
state and suprastate. By differentiating themselves from other farmers
through their certified status, organic farmers enter into a negotiated rela-
tionship with the state that alters their rights and responsibilities.
Sovereignty is also not absolute. Anthropologist Aihwa Ong (2006, 55)
has shown how smaller states in Southeast Asia on one hand create excep-
tions to neoliberalism and on the other introduce neoliberalism as an
exception to other modes of governance, resulting in uneven geographies
of “graduated sovereignties.” ­Free trade regions create such areas of gradu-
ated sovereignties at the international level, and organic farmers and their
U

movements strug­gle to negotiate interstitial spaces of organic sovereignties

ni

within them.
Through ­these strug­gles, both the Latvian and Costa Rican organic agri-
ve

culture movements are also promoting food sovereignty, defined as “the

r

right of nations and ­peoples to control their own food systems, including
si

their own markets, production modes, food cultures and environments”

ty

(Wittman, Desmarais, and Wiebe 2010, 2). Yet organic agriculture and food
sovereignty movements are often presumed to be opposites. Food sover-
of

eignty has been lauded as a means of retaking peasant identity (Desmarais

2008), facilitating direct democracy and citizens’ participation (Pimbert
W

2009), an attack on corporate industrial food systems (Bern­stein 2013), and

as

one of the most impor­tant social movements of our time (Edelman 2005;
Martinez-­Torres and Rosset 2008). Meanwhile, organic agriculture and
h

other alternative food labels have been criticized for their lack of revolution-
in

ary identity and for conforming to neoliberalism by shifting the focus from
gt

government to governance, adding numerous additional layers of bureau-

cracy, and creating new forms of property rights and enclosure (Guthman
on

2007). In short, the transformative potential of organic movements is seen

as necessarily tempered by their ties to state regulatory powers and neolib-
Pr

eral markets, as mediated by certification.16

While such critiques of organic agriculture hold true in par­tic­u­lar cir-
es

cumstances, universalizing ­these discourses creates a false dichotomy

s

between food sovereignty as a revolutionary social movement for recogni-

tion and justice, and organic agriculture as a wholly co-­opted market sector
fighting only for the distribution of economic benefits in the form of price
premiums. In real­ity both movements are what Nancy Fraser (1995; 2009)
would call bivalent, that is, combining calls for justice through both recog-
nition and re­distribution at multiple scales. ­A fter all, recognizing peasant
rights is meaningless without transforming socioeconomic structures to
ensure they can make a living, and organic agriculture w ­ ill not be able to

24 Introduction
in­def­initely continue cashing in price premiums if t­ here is no broader societal
support for the values it represents. ­There are also indications of convergence
between organic agriculture and food sovereignty movements. Agroecol­ogy,
the noncertified and more politicized cousin of organic agriculture, is taken
to be an ever more impor­tant partner to food sovereignty movements (Altieri
2009), while organic movements at both local and global levels have been try-
ing to incorporate more social concerns into their princi­ples and create alter-
native participatory organic certifications that are aimed more at local
markets than at global trade (Nelson et al. 2009).
Furthermore, recent critiques of food sovereignty raise pertinent insti-
U

tutional dilemmas of how food sovereignty might be achieved in practice

ni

and what obstacles stand in the way, such as the nature of the territorial state
and the neoliberal market (Trauger 2014); tensions inherent in advocating
ve

for food sovereignty on local, national, and global levels at once (Patel 2009);
r

and thus far insufficient efforts to identify regulatory mechanisms to enforce

si

food sovereignty, particularly in regard to controversial issues such as the

ty

role of international trade and farm size (Edelman 2014).

This book explores how in certain conditions organic agriculture, with
of

its multiple meanings and layers of contestation, functions as an attempt

to resolve such institutional dilemmas surrounding the administration of
W

food sovereignty in practice. Organic certification is the central paradox in

as

organic farmers’ claims to sovereignty, as it places farmers ­under the direct

hierarchical control of ­either public or private entities. Yet in both Latvia
h

and Costa Rica, we see that organic farmers use their certified status to rene-
in

gotiate relationships to the state and the market. Organic movements in

gt

both countries si­mul­ta­neously push the bound­aries of what is considered

part of organic agriculture and try to use ­these regulatory mechanisms to
on

negotiate spaces of sovereignty within state and suprastate governance bod-

ies. Yet the more ­these pro­cesses become regulated at the suprastate level,
Pr

through regional trade blocs like the EU and CAFTA, the less individual
farmers and their movements are able to mediate ­these relationships at the
es

local and state levels.

s

Rather than assuming that organic certification functions everywhere as

a neoliberal tool, it is necessary to investigate what work it does in dif­fer­ent
places, particularly in regional peripheries in the Global Northeast and
Southwest, where markets do not work as prescribed in neoliberal theories
and historically sedimented geopo­liti­cal power dynamics influence the
negotiating power of farmers, movements, and states. Combining concep-
tions of justice as bivalent strug­g les for recognition and re­d istribution at
vari­ous scales (Fraser 1995, 2009) and understandings of sovereignty as a set

Introduction25
of relations and pro­cesses (Cattelino 2008; Erazo 2013; Latham 2000), I
argue that ­these organic movements use their certified status as a means to
mediate their relations to the landscape, other farmers, the state, and the
suprastate, negotiating interstitial spaces of sovereignty. This book, then, is
a po­liti­cal ecol­ogy of nested strug­gles for organic sovereignties, composed
of farmers’ freedom to design their own farmscapes, practices, and markets
as places; movements’ autonomy to or­ga­nize within the state; and states’ lib-
erty to craft appropriate laws within the disciplinary confines of suprana-
tional harmonization.17
U

an ethnography of frustration
ni

I invite readers now to travel with me through a de­cade of cyclical ups and
ve

downs experienced by ­t hese two movements. I have been pres­ent at both

r

unequivocal victories and crushing defeats in both countries, and shed tears
si

of joy and sadness with the farmers and activists fighting for organic sover-
ty

eignties. Even as ups slide into downs, and vice versa, each is only a snapshot
from a longer journey. More than a story of victory or collapse, then, this is an
of

ethnography of frustration, of hard-­fought wins followed by stubbornly

encroaching losses, and the lessons learned from each.
W

This book is based on research in Latvia and Costa Rica, as well as a brief
as

stay at the headquarters of the International Federation of Organic Agricul-

ture Movements (IFOAM) in Bonn, Germany. The bulk of the research was
h

done over nineteen months from May 2005 to December 2006. I had vis-

in

ited each field site for preliminary fieldwork of four to six weeks in the sum-
gt

mers of 2003 and 2004, and have returned for several follow-up visits of two
to six weeks and participated in a few collaborative proj­ects in both coun-
on

tries from 2007 ­until 2016.

I initially conducted interviews and site visits at organic farms in all geo­
Pr

graph­ i­
cally, climactically, or demographically distinct regions of both
countries to ensure breadth and variation in my data.18 I then chose several
es

farms in each country where I spent more time volunteering; t­ hese farmers
s

became my key in­for­mants and are featured throughout the book as in-­
depth examples.
My proj­ect was both multisited and multiscaled. I followed how the idea
of organic agriculture has developed in two such dif­fer­ent contexts—as a
philosophy, a po­liti­cal stance, and a set of concrete practices—­and how the
idea has been contested, renegotiated, and ­imagined by vari­ous groups in
each setting. I traveled back and forth between farms and meetings, much
like the farmers themselves frequently migrate between rural and urban

26 Introduction
settings, often still with relative unease. My days went from planting, weed-
ing, sorting seeds, observing debates and events, to occasionally leading
discussions and seminars or making pre­sen­ta­tions about my other field
site.19 A significant part of my research took place across vari­ous borders. I
attended regional and international meetings and conferences, sometimes
with farmers or organ­ization leaders and sometimes in their stead.20 Thus
my movements both mimicked and complemented ­those of the organic
farmers with whom I worked.
My strong ­family connection to Latvia, and opposite status as a complete
outsider in Costa Rica, have influenced my work in several ways. Having
U

been born in the United States to Latvian parents, growing up speaking

ni

Latvian at home and being socialized into an exile/immigrant Latvian

community during my childhood and adolescence, I was neither a native
ve

ethnographer in Latvia nor a typical fieldworker who has had ­little or no

r

prior experience in her field site.21 This hybrid identity influenced my recep-
si

tion during fieldwork, granting me privileged “kitchen access” at farms

ty

while foreign tourists ate in the dining room, but obliging me to share insider
information on life in the United States while sitting at the kitchen t­ able. In
of

Costa Rica, my obvious status as a gringa became more complex once my

dual nationality and multisited proj­ect placed me in a more ambiguous cat-
W

egory. Some interpreted me as someone who could share experiences from

as

another small country that seemed worlds away, and most hoped that I
would bring valuable information back and forth across borders rather than
h

just take it and leave.

in

Fi­nally, my position as a w
­ oman situated me differently in t­ hese two con-
gt

texts and greatly influenced my research. In Latvia in the organic sector, as in

the NGO sector in general, many of the most active participants in meetings
on

and organ­izations ­were ­women who had taken on an implicit role of leading
society at a time when many men collapsed u ­ nder the emotional strain of the
Pr

post-­Soviet transition. Staying in rural areas faced with high unemployment

and economic hardships, and correlated rates of alcoholism, I heard about
es

and witnessed multiple cases of alcohol abuse, sometimes accompanied by

s

domestic vio­lence. The strong role that w ­ omen have taken on in practice
is accompanied, however, by a conscious longing to have men play their part.
This came out in scenes such as a ­woman negotiating all aspects of a transac-
tion and then pushing the paper over to her husband for a signature or strong
female leaders of organ­izations expressing their conviction that a man could
manage and speak better on behalf of the organ­ization than they could.
In Costa Rica, the gendered narratives and practices w ­ ere almost
reversed. Many organ­izations and NGOs or­ga­nized courses and seminars

Introduction27
for the mostly male-­dominated farmers’ groups to c­ ounter “Latin machismo”
and encourage greater gender sensitivity. While some men ­were self-­
professed converts, telling me how much they had learned from ­these
seminars and how gender roles had changed in their own homes, ­others
smirked openly at the “so-­called feminists who had ruined more than one
good ­family or marriage through their careless provocations.” Many ­women,
for their part, felt that it was still difficult for them to become involved in
social organ­izations or even to play an active role in the management of the
­family farm. Several commented, however, that the conversion to organic
farming, ­because of its complexity, had given them many more opportuni-
U

ties to be involved or to manage certain aspects of farmwork. In both coun-

ni

tries, it ­will be clear that many of my examples and quotes come from ­these
­women, whom I came to greatly admire.
ve
r

• • •
si
ty

The remainder of this book thus follows farmers’ strug­gles for organic sov-
ereignties in Latvia and Costa Rica. Chapter 1 traces how each country’s
of

agrarian history influenced farmer subjectivities and expectations of entry

into ­free trade regions, while chapter 2 discusses how the discourses sur-
W

rounding the referenda on Latvia’s joining the EU and Costa Rica’s entry into
as

CAFTA countered some patterns of past oppression yet si­mul­ta­neously

reinforced and naturalized ­others. Chapter 3 explores how farmers in Lat-
h

via and Costa Rica engage their f­ amily past, cultural memories, economic
in

pres­ent, and social ­f utures in creating their organic farmscapes as places,

gt

and chapter 4 elaborates how biodiversity emerges in the two countries

as an effect of farmers’ efforts to create and maintain their landscapes and
on

seedscapes in cooperation with other species. Chapter  5 reflects on the

effects of harmonization of legislation on landed property in Latvia and
Pr

intellectual property rights over seeds in Costa Rica, ultimately limiting

organic farmers’ autonomy of practice and access to resources as the foun-
es

dation for their livelihoods. Chapter 6 zooms in on the bankruptcies of Lat-

s

via’s first organic milk cooperative and one of Costa Rica’s most successful
organic coffee cooperatives, where available financing facilitated develop-
ment up to a point but ultimately disciplined dreams of more extensive
transformation of the sectors and social relations. Fi­nally, chapter 7 analyzes
how organic movements in the two countries manage the tensions sur-
rounding their multiple identities as social movements, NGOs, and market
sectors, struggling for nested environmental justice, collective autonomy,
and strategic interdependence with other movements and the state.

28 Introduction
 Strug­gles for organic sovereignties include juggling this entanglement of
memories of place, networks of diversity, autonomies of practice, transfor-
mative values, and nested environmental and social justices. ­Because lim-
iting any of ­these vari­ous ele­ments of organic sovereignties may result in
conventionalization of organic practices and dreams, all ­these ele­ments are
critical for resolving both the internal contradictions of organic certifica-
tion and the institutional dilemmas of implementing food sovereignty in
practice.
U
ni
ve
r si
ty
of
W
as
h in
gt
on
Pr
es
s

Introduction29