Creating Alternate Channels for Circulation: The Hidden Labour of Farmer-Environmentalists in South India

The academic discourse on health/ natural foods often centres around the friction in beliefs and practices between those involved in the agroecological campaign and the profit-seeking enterprises engaging in organic food production. Even the works that attempt to emphasise the significance and embeddedness of commercial endeavours within the agroecological campaign predominantly characterise social movements to be of oppositional nature, thus foreclosing the possibilities of studying the constructive practices that are essential to some of the campaigns. Coming out of a year-long ethnography in Tiruvannamalai district in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, this paper presents the practices of small-scale farmers who engage in the production, conservation and selling of native rice and vegetable varieties. Creating new networks, finding appropriate processing methods and ‘translating’ their principles to their buyers - the paper particularly explores these hidden labours that those farmers perform as they are made to find their own channels for processing and marketing their farm outputs both within and outside their district. The farmers’ meetings, seed campaigns, and the food festivals that they conduct also help them expand their consumer base and gain legitimacy – thus blurring the distinction between the campaign and their commercial interests. Drawing from works that contrast farmer collectives, territorial markets and household livelihood strategies with organic food companies, global capital and expansionist logic, this study adds a new critique to ‘the conventionalisation framework’ that marks the literature on sustainable food production practices. The farmers engaging in sustainable food production in India actively create pathways to circulate their commodities outside those offered by the corporates and aggregators. Thus, an attempt has also been made to challenge the theoretical limiting of farmers to the production aspect of the agroecological discourse that, in actuality, encompasses a broad range of entities spanning the production-distribution-consumption spectrum.