Degrowing alternative agriculture: institutions and aspirations as sustainability metrics for small farmers in Bosnia and India

Abstract

Much sustainable development in agri-food systems is predicated upon increasing the production of agricultural commodities amid changing climates, political organization, and markets. While this growth in exports is critical for the expansion of alternative production supply chains like certified organic commodities markets, the long-term success of alternative agriculture development programs in helping farmers achieve a range of rural aspirations depends not on sociotechnical fixes for specific ecological problems, but on the creative and performative reorganizations of labor and value in farm spaces. Degrowth, a political-economic theory of reorganizing production to achieve socio-ecological sustainability over the long term, provides a framework to evaluate the lasting impact of alternative agricultural development or persistent smallholder farming beyond the production or sale of agricultural commodities. This paper draws on research with organic cotton and coffee farmers in India, as well as a brief case study with small-scale heritage farmers in Bosnia, to argue that sustainability, broadly conceived, must account for factors beyond resource-efficiency or yields. Small-scale organic farming in India and household allotments in Bosnia will never outperform agri-food commodities producers with respect to profits, yields, or sustained growth. However, a degrowth perspective suggests that these are the wrong metrics for sustainability. Efforts that keep farmers in place and with local autonomy are best positioned to ensure that small-scale farmers can continue to manage agricultural landscapes over the long term.

Full text

Vol.:(0123456789)
1 3
Sustainability Science
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-022-01160-9
SPECIAL FEATURE: ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Degrowing alternative agriculture: institutions andaspirations
assustainability metrics forsmall farmers inBosnia andIndia
AndrewFlachs1
Received: 24 July 2021 / Accepted: 13 April 2022
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Japan KK, part of Springer Nature 2022
Abstract
Much sustainable development in agri-food systems is predicated upon increasing the production of agricultural commodi-
ties amid changing climates, political organization, and markets. While this growth in exports is critical for the expansion
of alternative production supply chains like certified organic commodities markets, the long-term success of alternative
agriculture development programs in helping farmers achieve a range of rural aspirations depends not on sociotechnical
fixes for specific ecological problems, but on the creative and performative reorganizations of labor and value in farm spaces.
Degrowth, a political-economic theory of reorganizing production to achieve socio-ecological sustainability over the long
term, provides a framework to evaluate the lasting impact of alternative agricultural development or persistent smallholder
farming beyond the production or sale of agricultural commodities. This paper draws on research with organic cotton and
coffee farmers in India, as well as a brief case study with small-scale heritage farmers in Bosnia, to argue that sustainability,
broadly conceived, must account for factors beyond resource-efficiency or yields. Small-scale organic farming in India and
household allotments in Bosnia will never outperform agri-food commodities producers with respect to profits, yields, or
sustained growth. However, a degrowth perspective suggests that these are the wrong metrics for sustainability. Efforts that
keep farmers in place and with local autonomy are best positioned to ensure that small-scale farmers can continue to manage
agricultural landscapes over the long term.
Keywords Organic agriculture· Political ecology· Degrowth· India· Bosnia
Introduction
Certified organic agriculture is a $100 billion USD global
industry spanning 70 million hectares and 2.8 million pro-
ducers (Willer etal. 2020). This growth transformed global
agricultural governance, providing new ways for farmers,
distributors, and intermediaries to organize land, sales,
labor, and production (Aistara 2018; Conford 2011; Flachs
and Panuganti 2020; Galvin 2021; Guthman 2004a). Organic
production’s entry into mainstream capitalist agrifood mar-
kets has buoyed a rise in related alternative agricultures,
promoting growth through diverse labels and regulatory
structures (Asioli etal. 2020). Guthman (2004a, b), among
other analysts of large-scale alternative agricultural produc-
tion and corporate distribution (Gabriel etal. 2010; Jaffee
2012; Raynolds 2004, 2014), argues that many organic, fair
trade, and other formalized alternative agriculture networks
reproduce the systemic problems of conventional commodity
farming. To scale up, these programs centralize agricultural
decision-making and added-value accumulation among pro-
cessors and distributors rather than farmers (Flachs 2019a;
Sen 2017; West 2012); they rely on carbon-intensive global
transportation (Holt and Watson 2008); and they promote
monocultures (Guthman 2004a) where surveillance and
enforcement contradict fair labor practices and exacerbate
difficult working conditions for female workers without due
compensation (Besky 2008; Lyon etal. 2018; Jegathesan
2019; Sen 2017). These tensions between environmental
Sustainability inAgri-Food Systems: Transformative Trajectories
towardthePost-Anthropocene
Handled by Markus Keck, University of Augsburg, Germany.
* Andrew Flachs
aflachs@purdue.edu
1 Department ofAnthropology, Purdue University, 700 West
State Street, WestLafayette, IN47907, USA

Sustainability Science
1 3
justice values and global market demands are largely driven
by the pressures of growth.
Labels avoiding central governance like Via Campesina
and agroecology emphasize the plural benefits of diversified
agriculture and cooperative social organization for agricul-
tural belonging (Anderson etal. 2021; Martínez-Torres and
Rosset 2010; van der Ploeg 2020). In the absence of central
governance, production methods vary considerably. It is
beyond the scope of this paper to analyze the wider constel-
lation of alternative agriculture production systems, in part
because the specific arrangements of rural heterogeneity,
class, nonhuman life, gender, and political opportunity make
it impossible to generalize about the impacts of any particu-
lar smallholder movement (Edelman etal. 2014). As Bern-
stein (2014) observes in his overview of food sovereignty,
it is critical to understand how small farmers differentiated
by class and status do things differently, especially when
short-term studies can misinterpret long-term trends (Stone
and Flachs 2014) or misrepresent the range of economic
activity that farmers participate in (Kantor 2020). Less
widely discussed is the assumption that growth is a good
indicator for success or that alternative agricultures should
seek to increase production of agricultural commodities
amid changing climates, political organization, and markets.
This is not to be critical of alternative agriculture per se, but
rather to be critical of tying its success to growth metrics.
This caution is well founded in agrarian studies scholarship,
and suggests a re-envisioning of sustainability defined by
solidarity and heterogeneity.
Assumptions ofgood growth inalternative
agriculture
In this paper, I argue that degrowth scholarship provides
a useful set of metrics for understanding sustainability in
alternative agriculture that avoids traps of yield growth and
monetary valuation. Below, I discussongoing debates in
degrowth and agrarian studies before delving into three case
studies that illuminate how degrowth ideas offer a view of
agricultural sustainability that centers neo-Chayanovian
and neo-rural (Robbins etal. 2020; van der Ploeg 2018)
metrics of farmer aspiration, rural wellbeing, and local con-
trol. Degrowth, a political-economic theory of reorganizing
production to achieve socio-ecological sustainability over
the long term (Gerber 2020; D’Alisa etal. 2015), provides
an alternative accounting for the metrics of production effi-
ciency, externalized costs, investments, or yield growth in
small farmer economies. This allows me to ask instead how
alternative rural development programs enable a range of
possible futures on farms beyond models that demand con-
tinual expansion.
In many organic or fair trade cases, socioeconomic uplift-
ing and ecological restoration occur when farmer groups
mobilize solidarity made possible through alternative agri-
culture supply chains. Cooperative local institutions provide
a forum through which to advance their own interests, and
thereby make alternative agriculture continually attractive
to practitioners (Brown 2018; Flachs and Richards 2018;
Janssen 2017; Sen 2018). This labor solidarity is a criti-
cal sustaining metric missed in the valuations of alternative
agriculture that privilege yield and participant expansion
as the purpose of farming. Centering growth in alternative
agriculture systems pegs their value to market production,
thereby compromising their transformative potential in at
least four ways.
First, even as alternative agriculture exists counter to pro-
ductivist agriculture, an emphasis on growth and adoption
repeats productivist logic (Buttel 1993) where the assumed
goal of agriculture is to continually produce agrifood com-
modities cheaply and accrue net benefits to consumers, pro-
ducers, industry, and the state. In producing value-added
goods and pledging to pay environmental and social exter-
nalities, organic, fair trade, and other regulated alternative
agricultures are already disadvantaged by metrics that value
yield or capital growth above a longer term socioecologi-
cal stability. Organic cotton researchers, for example, have
shown that organic cotton can produce yields as high as
genetically modified (GM) cotton in test trials (Angidi and
Bogati 2020; Forster etal. 2013), but those results are not
seen by farmers recruited for theorganic cotton develop-
ment projects that I discuss below. They lack infrastructure,
input, and soil resources that make those higher yields pos-
sible. Global agri-food commodity production during the
twentieth century relied on reorganizations of labor, water,
plant genetic resources, and agrichemicals that externalized
significant costs to small farmer communities and com-
mon environmental resources (Holt-Gimenez 2019; Mag-
doff etal. 2000; McMichael 2007). Productivist agriculture
depresses prices for consumers, but in doing so, it cheapens
the value of farm labor, nutrition, and ecological commons.
Alternative agriculture is not and should not be designed to
produce the same products in the same way.
Second, growth in organic agriculture has been accom-
panied by an explosion of labelling for distinction within
global agri-food commodities. While such labels can
quickly inform consumers and build trust in regulatory
governance, the diversity in labelling and differences in
regulation also confuses buyers (Asioli etal. 2020). More
critically, the diversification of labelling places the onus
of transformative change on individual consumer decisions
that do not require restructuring networks of food produc-
tion and consumption. Individual consumer choices divert
attention away from collective action focused on environ-
mental justice. Instead, labels become a commodity to

Sustainability Science
1 3
be consumed (Guthman 2009) and create an imaginary
agrarian other divorced from the political and ecological
struggles of actual farmer producers (Besky 2014; Bryant
and Goodman 2004).
Third, academic or policy attention to growth through
programs like organic or fair trade depoliticizes the spe-
cific environmental, social, and economic struggles that
farmers experience. Farming communities are heterog-
enous spaces with class, ethnic, gender, and other histori-
cal inequalities (Agrawal and Sivaramakrishnan 2000).
Alternative farming programs must consider the differen-
tial impacts of technological change and how local power
dynamics drive environmental and sociodemographic
risks (Taylor 2018). By contrast, Taylor (2018) discusses
climate-smart policies ranging from chemical-managed
monocultures to agroecology that provide blanket tech-
nological fixes: solutions to particular aspects of complex
problems that provide short-term remedies, such as plant-
ing trees to offset carbon emissions, without reconsider-
ing the structural causes of those problems, an economy
that requires carbon emissions, or the particular political
ecological context in which people live. This reductive
approach is particularly fraught in the analysis of socioec-
ological systems like farms, because it divorces interlinked
social and ecological forces. Even the term “farmer” only
represents one aspect of a rural livelihood (Kantor 2020).
Against the disproportionate threats of climate change to
smallholder producers experiencing historical inequities,
such technological or policy fixes promote free trade and
pursue capital growth as a limited set of possible responses
to environmental injustice (Nightingale etal. 2020). Peg-
ging success to production or technology adoption fails to
address inequalities related to land, access to resources,
economic return, or environmental change.
Most importantly, an emphasis on growth sidesteps the
key transformative value that alternative agricultural pro-
grams can offer. Growth in production, farmers enrolled,
land converted, and sales may provide important remu-
nerative benefits to particular farmers without transforming
socioecological relationships in agrarian spaces. Scholars
of global agri-food systems have described this as a mani-
festation of hegemonic power, in which alternative or pro-
gressive food production systems provide concessions to
producers without challenging the growth mission of pro-
ductivist agriculture (Brown 2020; Dale 2020; Jakobsen
2019). The true benefit of alternative agriculture programs
lies not in a product competitive on a global market defined
by externalized social and ecological costs, but in new ways
to succeed in agriculture beyond growth: stability, sover-
eignty over land and seed, heritage tastes, and aspirations
for the future. Efforts that keep farmers in place and with
local autonomy are best positioned to ensure sustainable
landscape management.
Critical agrarian studies, degrowth,
andalternative agriculture
If not growth, what? Smallholding farming systems fol-
low different rules than other capitalist exchanges, in part
because agriculture requires specific social and biological
relationships. Smallholding farmers tend to work harder
and longer than would be profitable by any hired labor
force. They tend to value stability over profits, over returns
to labor, and over total production. They seek to main-
tain political and cultural rights to land, production, and
knowledge of diverse farming practices. Chayanov (1966)
described these conditions as self-exploitation that pre-
serves household autonomy, while Netting (1993), Brook-
field (2001), and Boserup (1965) argue that they stem
from the peculiar demands of a household unit working to
maintain a diversified market production, usufruct rights,
long-term planning, and skilled labor. In poor and wealthy
nations, smallholders persist on comparatively marginal
lands (Blaikie 1985; Flachs and Abel 2019; Reese 2019),
where they receive marginal returns from labor and some-
times face special production risks including lead-contam-
inated earth, land speculation, or soil erosion.
Models stressing growth and devaluing labor can
threaten smallholding farmers in that they consolidate
landholdings and pull farmers into industrial work (Kaut-
sky 1988), accumulate capital in the coffers of a global
corporate agrifood class (McMichael 2007), or transform
agrarian labor into a new rural class system dominated by
market exchanges (Bernstein 2006). Asking why small-
holding farmers persist despite land, demographic, and
technological change, van der Pleog (2018) argues that
they optimize not production or profits but a core set of
agrarian values: maintaining family land in perpetuity,
maintaining autonomy over agricultural decision-making,
and minimizing the drudgery of agricultural work (Chay-
anov 1966; Netting 1993; Robbins etal. 2020). This cal-
culus can, but does not always diversify farm economies
and ecologies. In a counter example, Robbins etal. (2020)
show how labor scarcities lead small coffee farmers to
simplify agrobiodiverse holdings more than larger farm-
ers by growing hardier species that required less-intensive
management—a trade-off between biodiversity and labor
that allowed small farmers to continue farming on their
land. More than growth or diversity, easing the workload
and maintaining autonomy over land drive agricultural
decision-making.
Growth skepticism in agriculture is a diverse discus-
sion (Eversberg and Schmelzer 2018), ranging from
neo-Malthusian calls to curb population (Ehrlich 1971;
Wilson 2016) to critiques of romantic depictions of pov-
erty and hard work that risk ignoring political histories of

Sustainability Science
1 3
imperialism, labor scarcity, desires for technological inno-
vation, or gender inequality (Correia 2012; Foster 2011;
Mehta and Harcourt 2021; Robbins 2020). Drawing from
political ecology and environmental justice to emphasize
small-scale, collective, social, and cooperative alternatives
to capitalist accumulation (D’Alisa etal. 2015; Latouche
2018; Kallis 2019; Kallis and March 2015), degrowth
writers suggest a range of roles for states and governance
in the economy (Boillat etal. 2012; D’Alisa and Kallis
2020; Huber 2021; Mocca 2020).
Agrarian degrowth writers celebrate democratic institu-
tions for providing a space for communities to cope, adapt,
and transform in their search for resilience (Etzold etal.
2012; Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013). Back-to-the-landers
(Calvário and Otero 2015) and urban gardeners (Angue-
lovski 2015) can forge new networks of solidarity through
negotiations around land rights and commons, while food
sovereignty movements force participants to create a space
for democratic governance over markets, land, and seed
(Chappell 2018; Meek 2020; Roman-Alcalá 2017). Simi-
larly, Boillat etal. (2012) argue that Cuban agroecology sur-
vived the collapse of the Soviet Union through decades-old
socialist policies that prevented consolidation and gave small
farmers access to credit and services cooperatives, even as
central planning and productivist logic informed the state
distribution system.
Beyond supporting local solidarity, agrarian degrowth
scholarship is skeptical of technological fixes even as farm-
ers pursue labor-saving technologies to ease difficult farm
work. Gomiero (2018) considers GM and organic crops as
case studies in appropriate technologies to degrowth. Both
have flaws for a degrowth economy: organic farming pro-
duces crops less efficiently than conventional agriculture,
while GM crops, represented by data on maize, represent a
radical monopoly over key inputs. In arguing that US agri-
culture is efficient because 1% of the population feeds the
rest, Gomiero ironically pegs efficiency to maize yields—a
productivist argument—despite externalities like fertilizer
runoff or exploited migrant labor. Furthermore, the ~ 1% of
the American population employed in farmwork does not
necessarily feed the US population, because the crops in
question, particularly GM maize, are destined for chemical
refinement or animal feed, not human consumption (Flachs
2020; Wise 2019). However, this larger point is an important
and difficult one for agrarian degrowth, because it asks how
farmers should consider technological developments that
can promote growth or ease the burdens of farmwork. How,
for instance, to optimize utopian visions of limited work,
localized production, and fair distribution of resources in a
profession that depends on difficult human labor and local
ecological constraints?
Linking degrowth and critical agrarian studies discus-
sions, Gerber (2020) asks how growth and degrowth affect
key agrarian concerns of autonomy, ecology, labor, and col-
lective organization. Growth in agrarian spaces exacerbates
externalized costs, because it diffuses the demands of labor,
hinders local democratic control, and continues capital accu-
mulation by dispossession or extraction. Often, farmers are
left to hope for a technological fix to heal the metabolic rift
between agricultural commodity production and sustainable
farming communities (Foster 1999; Schneider and McMi-
chael 2010). As an anthropologist, I think that it is important
to pay attention to the ethnographic particulars of alternative
agricultures to understand their potential for transformative
change. Inequalities in a political economy (Jaffee 2012;
Raynolds 2004; West 2012) as well as localized inequali-
ties of race, class, and gender (Lyon 2010; Sen 2017, 2018;
Vasavi 2020) all complicate radical change insitu. In the
remainder of this paper, I accept Gerber’s invitation for more
“on the ground” studies of agrarian change to argue that sta-
bility and institutionalized solidarity should be the direct and
intended consequences of alternative agriculture projects.
Ethnographic agrarian degrowth studies are rare, because
agrarian degrowth communities are rare. Scholars have used
cases in food sovereignty (Roman-Alcalá 2017), organic
farming and biotechnology (Gomiero 2018), urban agri-
culture (Anguelovski 2015), back-to-the-land neoruralism
(Calvário and Otero 2015), and Cuban agroecology (Boillat
etal. 2012) to investigate the reimagined social, economic,
political, and ecological conditions of a degrowth agrarian
space. This scholarship highlights benefits beyond produc-
tion, often because agrarian movements spark local political
reorganizations like democratic cooperatives or negotiations
around commons. Organic and fair trade supply chains can,
but do not necessarily, give small farmers a platform for
securing land rights, production autonomy, or connecting
to global political and environmental movements (Aistara
2018; Fletcher etal. 2020; Flachs 2017b). Growth that would
scale these programs has faced major setbacks in India and
Costa Rica in spite of promising starts because of local vari-
abilities in ecology, labor, and supply chains (Galvin 2018,
2014; Doshi 2017; Fletcher etal. 2020).
There are many competing and fraught definitions of sus-
tainability, ranging from a classic and normative attempt to
meet the needs of the present while addressing the needs
of the future to an argument for intergenerational justice
based in natural capital and services (see Johnson etal. 2018
for a thorough discussion of sustainability as a paradigm
and analytical concept). When focusing on sustainability
in agriculture, the brief review of critical agrarian studies
above shows the importance of focusing on the socioeco-
logical conditions that allow farming households to persist.
This persistence is critical to measure. As Holt-Giménez
etal. (2021) contend, if farmers cannot make a viable living,
then they cannot practice resilient agriculture. This elegant
observation demands a vision of agricultural sustainability

Sustainability Science
1 3
centered around farmer labor, knowledge, and valuation. To
stay ethnographic and farmer-centric, I use sustainability
here to refer to a range of socioecological conditions that
allow agriculture to persist as a viable and attractive way of
life. This allows me to focus on metrics for sustainable agri-
culture that privilege a key condition: farmers must aspire
to practice it. Degrowth provides a useful intervention into
the value of alternative agriculture, not because degrowth
offers the existing solutions through concrete policies or
programs, but because degrowth offers an alternative set of
metrics in line with key smallholder goals: keeping people
in place, securing community land rights, providing alterna-
tive futures, diversifying production and labor, and investing
in local social institutions to redistribute risks and profits.
I draw from three short case studies with organic cot-
ton farmers in Telangana and Maharashtra, India, organic
coffee farmers in Andhra Pradesh, India, and small-scale
farmers not producing for markets in Bosnia, to argue that
sustainable alternative agriculture must account for factors
beyond resource-efficiency or yields. These three cases rep-
resent a range of alternative agricultures in commercial and
non-commercial settings, in places where alternative agri-
cultural work is entwined with agrarian crisis and suicide
(Indian cotton), land tenure (Indian coffee), and communal
survival in place (Bosnia). In spite of their geographic and
agricultural disparity, these cases illuminate how histori-
cal inequalities, alongside pressures from climate change in
semi-arid or montane environments, intersect with alterna-
tive agriculture and require sociopolitical work to sustain.
Research in India is based on 16months of ethnographic,
survey, and ethnobotanical fieldwork with cotton and cof-
fee farmers conducted between 2012 and 2018. These sites
represent communities who worked closely with different
kinds of alternative farming companies and NGOs to pro-
vide a perspective on different organizational demands that
farmers experience. My discussion of Bosnian gardens is
drawn from a 1-month study in 2017 with 18 households in
a village 1.5hours north of Sarajevo, selected for its links to
transnational migrants and its high rate of out-migration. In
all three cases, small farmers perform an alternative agricul-
ture that provides particular ways to imagine a future of con-
tinued, desirable agrarian life outside of a growth paradigm.
Even if and when they would not describe their activities as
degrowth, their decision-making suggests a range of rural
aspirations not to increased production or technological fixes
but through reorganizations of labor and value.
Valuing diversication inIndian organic
cotton production
“I've got my own methods,” explained Bhadra,1 an organic
cotton farmer in Vidarbha, Maharashtra. “These other farm-
ers are looking for the best yields, following each other and
whoever does best, but my yields are good enough. Why
go looking for something new?” I was speaking to Bhadra
as part of a larger survey of organic cotton farmers based
in northern Telangana. In a context where 95% of the cot-
ton seeds sown are genetically modified and thus cannot
be legally certified as organic regardless of how they are
grown, organic cotton farmers that I met worked closely with
sponsoring NGOs and cooperatives to gain access to seeds,
inputs, training, financing, and marketing. Often, develop-
ment NGOs will recruit whole villages, simplifying the
distribution of these resources and encouraging cooperative
solidarity. In five cotton seasons (2012–2018) ofinterview-
ing and surveying farmers in Telangana’s Warangal, Medak,
and Asifabad districts,2 I never saw non-GM seeds offered
for sale in the Telangana shops where farmers purchase
them. Overwhelmingly, GM-planting farmers justified years
of agricultural decision-making through a consistent logic,
expressed in Telugu as: “e samvacaram, manci digubadi
annukunthunnanu” (this year I’m hoping for a great yield).
This relentless and competitive pursuit of yields drives rapid
changes in seed choices as well as other investments in labor,
fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, and decisions about
field plant density. And so, it was disorienting to hear Bhadra
casually dismiss yield growth and new seeds.
Between 2012 and 2018, I surveyed 142 organic farm-
ers and 394 GM cotton planting farmers, recording 1,211
and 4,599 planting decisions and rationales. The farmers
planting organic cotton whom I spoke with reaped consider-
ably lower yields than farmers planting GM seeds (Table1).
Table 1 Average cotton yields reported by Telangana cotton farmers
(descriptive statistics)
N Mean yield per
acre (100 kgs)
Median yield
per acre
SD
2012 Bt 288 7.21 7.00 3.68
2013 Bt 216 6.96 6.67 2.79
2014 Bt 163 8.15 7.81 4.48
2012 Organic 97 2.77 2 2.33
2013 Organic 69 1.56 1.33 1.05
2017 Organic 68 3.19 2.78 1.81
1 All farmer, place, and NGO names have been anonymized.
2 In 2016, the newly bifurcated Telangana state began the process of
renaming districts. For consistency’s sake, I use the previous district
names here.

Sustainability Science
1 3
There are several reasons for this: NGOs recruit farmers for
organic cotton programs, because they experience genera-
tional poverty, farm marginal land, sow polycultures, benefit
less from state infrastructure, and plant commercial refugia
hybrid seeds designed to be sown on field edges to slow
evolutionary pest resistance to GM crops. Although these
seeds are not genetically modified, they are bred to respond
to synthetic fertilizer and water inputs and thus underper-
form on organic farms. “The ideal field is edged with okra
and surrounded by sorghum,” explained one farmer in 2014.
“It has cotton on the inside with a row or two of castor, as
a trap plant, and many interspersed vegetables along with a
strip or two of pigeon pea.” In making these farms signifi-
cantly more biodiverse (Flachs 2016), farmers also employ
non-pesticide management, use legumes to fix nitrogen, and
reduce the density of cotton in their fields. These design
elements are a stark contrast to the political ecology of GM
cotton, where fertilizer and pesticide sprays have increased
steadily since 2008 (Flachs 2017a; Kranthi and Stone 2020),
and short-duration, high-density fields are promoted as a
strategy against rising insect resistance (Mohan etal. 2015;
Najork etal. 2021; Venugopalan etal. 2014).
Organic cotton farmers know that they produce less cot-
ton than their GM cotton-planting neighbors. “Yes, [the
organic development program] gives us free seeds,” grum-
bled one Telangana organic cotton farmer in 2014. “But the
yields are bad and the profit margins are even worse, thanks
to [the program’s] small premium combined with the small
yield. Their rules are difficult because they are banning the
solution—chemical fertilizers. If we use them, they won't
take our cotton.” Another farmer, listening in, leaned into the
conversation to agree. “The yield is too small from organic.
The investment may be less but the profit is also less…who
wants to make mixtures and all, even the cows are fewer
now—so where can we get urine and manure [needed for
organic pesticides and fertilizers]?” A few days after these
complaints, a GM-planting farmer interrupted me during a
different interview to brag about the yields he was seeing
with Ajeet-155, a GM cotton seed. “My field is like a forest,”
he grinned. It is better to buy seeds and inputs from shops,
he continued, because when you have a problem “you can
just call up the shop and ask what to do. With this organic
production, you have to go to all these meetings and spend
all of your time in groups.” The farmer that I was inter-
viewing looked offended, and countered that “those with
money can afford to make big investments,” but he preferred
to grow with organic where low yields were balanced by
low investments. Shaking his head, the GM cotton-planting
farmer drove away.
These moments illustrate the tension that cotton farm-
ers face with growth. Return on investment is the normal,
expected reason to grow this cash crop. In a social life
where debts transcend agricultural investments to include
wedding costs or investments in home infrastructure, farm-
ers desire yields and profits as paths to a more comfortable
life. When the dominant narrative about Telangana cotton
farming follows the script (Vanclay and Enticott 2011;
Flachs 2019b) of chasing yield growth, it is difficult to
pursue a low-yield strategy. During a 2014 field visit from
Fairtrade UK, organic cotton farmers complained that the
positive impacts of Fairtrade premiums were countered by
low production volumes, and that the work required more
and more difficult labor. “Our neighbors laugh at us and
say ‘we're getting Rs 40,000 (~ $700) [from our cotton
sales] when you are only getting Rs 20,000 (~ $350)’”,
grumbled one farmer. “While we know that organic is bet-
ter for the soil and for our health, it still hurts. Besides,
we have so many meetings!” Degrowth literature notes the
transformative potential of cooperative social organization
in agrarian spaces, yet farmers hint that regular meetings
can also be a burden. Partnerships between key farmers
and organic field staff are necessary to develop hyper-local
management practices, save farmers time in meetings, and
trust that the regulation is fair. This collective organiz-
ing creates conditions where yield growth is secondary
to other negotiated benefits including work, subsidized
agricultural inputs, and collective institutions for buying,
selling, and decision-making.
Local cooperative institutions are critical for distrib-
uting resources and trainings, but also for helping small
groups solve problems ranging from pest attacks to gripes
about a seedling distribution. Some of these systems build
from Indian state institutions like self-help groups, organ-
ized around women’s financing and local problem solving
(Desai and Olofsgård 2019). In 2018, cooperative meet-
ings helped to facilitate labor exchanges and negotiate
labor costs for key moments when organic farmers needed
extra help in their fields, particularly plucking, weeding,
and planting. Importantly, these events regularly happen
and farmers voice their concerns. Organic groups who
ignore those concerns see farmers leave (Flachs 2018).
As with any institutionalized networks of power and
economic distribution, some people have turned program
resources to their advantage and secured loans, special
access to subsidized programs, and local prestige. Organic
farmers are not homogenous, and some ‘show farmers’
(Flachs 2017b; Stone 2014) have opportunistically seized
upon new social and economic rewards for publicly per-
forming organic agriculture. Yet that attention means that
the demands of village meetings, self-help groups, and
cooperative planning sessions also fall to these enthusiastic

Sustainability Science
1 3
farmers. Others are happy to avoid these duties. “I’m not
educated, how can I go,” complained one organic farmer.
“In group meetings, everyone else explains what to do,
especially the sarpanch3 and the educated farmers.” “We
don’t go to meetings, they’re far away—others go and
report back to us,” agreed his neighbor. Preferring to learn
from those who attend planning meetings and distribute
seeds, such farmers treat organic knowledge and inputs as
products brought to them at a discounted price.
While farmers have a range of opinions on the yields and
time commitments, they also see benefits beyond economic
growth that can be normalized through organic agriculture.
Jalapathi, an organic cotton ‘show farmer’ with a Bachelor
of Science shrugged aside concerns about yield. “There's a
risk for low yields at first,” he explains, “but after the first
three years you do as well as before. More important is the
larger benefit to your health and to this environment that you
get by not using any chemicals. There’s no risk of poisoning
yourself, or animals, or your neighbors, and the cow manure
gives many micronutrients and lasting strength. Its good sci-
ence,” he says with finality, appealing to me as an academic.
Another farmer who recently returned to organic agriculture
also emphasized the respite from chemical pesticides. “The
problem is that now we’re all eating chemicals. They’re
in our foods, everywhere. We don’t eat the cotton, but the
sprays get on the other vegetables. In organic the yields are
fine—not great but acceptable—and when we spray chemi-
cals you can smell them everywhere. They must be causing
all sorts of health problems.”
If productivist metrics are insufficient to explain farmer
decision-making and sustainability here, agrarian degrowth
metrics ask how organic cotton provides a path to keep
people in place, secure land, diversify socioecological rela-
tions, support alternative futures amid local institutions, and
reduce the most difficult and unremunerative labor. Organic
cotton farmers saw their work as a long-term investment in
children with deep ambivalence about working the land as
farmers but a firm commitment to maintaining the land as a
family asset. “I expect that they will want to come back to
the farm,” explained an organic cotton farmer in 2018 when
asked about his school-aged children. “What other work are
they going to do? They know about this. In the summer they
can do other kinds of work, but they should be here rather
than migrate to any other cities. When they’re not in school
they help with the weeding, they know how to speak to the
cows,” he continued with a smile. To prove his point, his
young son, listening in to our conversation, giggled, moo-
ing and clicking in imitation of the sounds farmers use to
direct cattle in the fields. Others in the village were more
ambivalent about who would do the work. “My children are
studying,” explained one organic farmer with finality when
I asked who would take over the farm. “This is the last work
they should do. Outside work is the first preference, and only
if they don’t get a job elsewhere should they farm.” Would
you sell the land then, I asked? “No, not that,” he answered
taken aback. “I have four sons, someone will take this work
on.” “Study first,” agreed a third organic cotton farmer in
2018, but someone must come back. “Otherwise, we won’t
have a village. Even if my children are not interested in farm-
ing, the grandchildren might be.” But do they know how to
do all this work, I asked? “Oh, everyone knows how to do it
all, even if they don’t like doing it—even if they’d prefer to
write and study rather than gather cow dung.”
Organic cotton agriculture does not offer an escape from
difficult work or exceptional yields, the key promises of pro-
ductivist farming and the key challenge to degrowth models
that demand more human labor. Instead, many of the more
difficult logistics in farming are directly subsidized through
financing or through the work of show farmers. The meet-
ings may be a tiresome burden for some, but that investment
in local social institutions keeps a path open for children to
return in spite of middling yields. Cooperative institutions
provide venues for discussions over labor and resource shar-
ing, and farmers disinterested in collective meetings can still
reap some of the benefits as long as they agree to follow
organic guidelines. In this way, organic agriculture offers
smallholding Telangana cotton farmers a degree of flexibil-
ity and autonomy absent in the free market capitalism of
productivist cotton farming where yield growth overshad-
ows other concerns. Organic cotton yields are comparatively
poor, but that reality alone does not dissuade farmers. In sub-
sidizing diversified social and ecological farm work, organic
agriculture provides a way for farmers tocontinue managing
land by decentering growth. When organic cotton develop-
ment groups sever relationships with partner farmers, try to
emphasize growth, or threaten that stability, farmers leave
(Flachs 2018).
Valuing land andcollective organization
inIndian organic coee production
In 2014, the Hudhud cyclone caused billions of US dol-
lars in damage, killed over 100 people, and relocated entire
communities as it swept across eastern India. In Andhra
Pradesh’s Araku Valley, the cyclone ripped through hillside
coffee gardens managed by historically marginalized Adivasi
smallholders. Organic coffee agroforestry depends on long-
term investments in perennial trees and bushes, creating a
biodiversity proscribed and intensified by the ecological
opportunities of a forest ecosystem where crops grow from
forest floor to canopy. In toppling tall trees and washing
out sloped fields, the Hudhud set farmers back years. When
3 The local elected village leader and liason to mandal authorities.

Sustainability Science
1 3
I spoke with Araku organic coffee farmers in 2018, they
were earning a fraction of the coffee yields they had received
earlier. Why continue with the program after the cyclone,
especially when it offered a chance to sell land or plant cof-
fee plantations that would see far quicker and more dramatic
returns on investment?
In Araku, building an agricultural supply chain developed
as a means to an end for a development agency focused pri-
marily on education and infrastructure. “We weren’t thinking
about coffee until we linked it to the household economy and
livelihoods,” recalls Vijay, the project manager. “Our direc-
tor saw that people were growing coffee and thought, why
not start coffee cooperatives and get a new kind of market-
ing structure” By 2018, the project was working with nearly
11,000 farmers in seven administrative districts in the Araku
area, transforming the surrounding landscape through diver-
sified farm work, stability, cooperative resource distribution,
and, most importantly, legal help against land dispossession.
Telangana organic cotton provides farmers with an alterna-
tive to aggressive free market individualism by limiting seed
choice in favor of cooperative distribution, promoting an
alternative future through local governance. More directly,
Araku organic coffee provides farmers with a legal anchor
for a future that includes farming.
In a 2018 survey of 36 organic coffee smallholders living
in a village near Araku, Andhra Pradesh, I spoke with farm-
ers who reported managing an average of 1800 trees (median
1600) on sloping land as a recovering agroforest, from which
they reaped an average of 426kg of coffee (median 350)
(Flachs and Panuganti2020). Given that brokers were pay-
ing between 50 and 60 (~ $1 USD) rupees per kilogram,
while the government and the organic program were paying
110 rupees (~ $2 USD), this harvest did not provide for all
household needs. Black pepper, a more lucrative crop that
climbs the silver oaks used to shade coffee gardens, was not
being sold as an organic product at the time, while farmers
reported that they continued to sell most (69% on average,
median 71%) of their coffee to government buyers or pri-
vate brokers who do not offer organic premiums. Clearly,
organic yields and price premiums were not convincing
farmers to partner with the organization—and yet, farmers
kept an aggressive foothold in the program by continuing
to sell and certify their land as organic. A combination of a
desire to keep autonomy over land within the family and the
program’s strategic subsidies for socioeconomic diversifica-
tion help to explain why farmers are not pursuing growth.
Araku coffee farmers face special difficulties in secur-
ing their rights to land and its use because of the ore that
lies below it. The state claims Araku land managed by
farmers for generations through the forest service and the
Integrated Tribal Development Agency, while extractive
industries are eager to log timber, lease deforested land to
herders, and mine Bauxite found throughout the Eastern
Ghats (Oskarsson 2017). The Forest Rights Act of 2006
strengthened Adivasi usufruct claims (Bandi 2014), but
an array of bureaucratic institutions stymie this process by
manipulating the flow of documents and meetings necessary
to vest authority over land and resources (Choudhury and
Aga 2020). “I had to fight for respect,” the organic coffee
cooperative president explained during a 2018 interview,
describing various negotiations with outside stakeholders:
registering land with forestry officers and district collectors
in urban Vishakhapatnam, securing financing from banks,
and arguing with prospectors and local law enforcement to
insist upon local land control. Organic agriculture provides
an institutional backing to Araku farmer land claims and
a bulwark against extractive industries, state officials, and
lawyers who threaten to take it.
Subsidized trees are an important component in keep-
ing this land in active production, and the NGO works with
Araku farmers to distribute coffee and shade trees. Where
the state distributes economic crops like coffee and silver
oak seedlings, the organic program also distributes fruit trees
as sources of food and diversified income. Organic farmers
manage multiple types of shade trees, including valuable
fruit trees like fig and wild mango, a greater diversity of
plant life than agroforests replanted on grazed lands. Farm-
ers who lease land to grazers see cattle deforest their hills,
making future investments in agroforestry expensive and dif-
ficult. When and if farmers wish to plant coffee agroforests,
they must replant with imported silver oaks, which are thin
and vulnerable to extreme weather like the 2014 cyclone.
“Only for the sake of coffee is this forest here,” sighed Vijay,
as we hiked through the forest with coffee farmers. “And
even in coffee we have mostly silver oak and coffee trees. In
other areas you won’t find forest like this. We’ve ruined our
nature.” I smiled appreciatively, but he stopped me. “Most
of these places really are gone.” Many of the coffee gardens
we pass are overgrown with weeds during late July. During
rice transplantation, labor is squeezed and there is no time
to weed coffee gardens. In simplifying procurement while
curbing investments in production, the NGO effects a range
of changes in how farmers calculate long-term success in
their farm management defined by economic and ecologi-
cal diversity.
Judged by its ability to keep farmers in place, build social
institutions, diversify economic and ecological activity, and
provide an alternative future, organic coffee has already
proven to be sustainable through a natural disaster. Produc-
tion growth, by contrast, is low. Like cotton farmers con-
cerned about the drudgery and difficulty of small-scale agri-
culture, coffee farmers also hope their children avoid hard
work (Telugu: kasta badi). While many children in Araku
do indeed use NGO and state development programs as a
springboard, not all are successful in finding high paying or
desirable work. Still, the goal is not to grow participation

Sustainability Science
1 3
in the program but rather to envision a future where agri-
culture is a secure and non-totalizing anchor to rural well-
being. Vikram, a manager who works with Vijay, explains
that many farming families see education as a ladder to bet-
ter paying jobs, especially with the reservation programs
designed to ease historically marginalized students into
schools. Yet, “most come back,” he continues, “as they can
usually only find unpleasant or unfulfilling work. They come
back saying that their coffee is the best, our village is great,
we have good mangoes here.” Security in and autonomy
over land provide a degree of flexibility for farming house-
holds even as children leave and return. “We had so many
obstacles in our own studying, I want the children to study
well,” explains an Araku coffee farmer during an interview.
Still, as with the coffee farmers above, selling land outright
or imagining a future without farmwork was not attractive.
“I have three children, one of them will farm—if not the old-
est son then one of the others surely will.” Another farmer
stressed how land ownership eased this pressure: “I’ll show
them how to do all this if I need to, but now [my children]
don’t need to know. If they study they can get jobs elsewhere
and we’ll rent the land to someone.”
Both farmers and the organic coffee managers come
to see agriculture as a means to an important end: sover-
eignty over their land and flexibility in its management.
Where some farmers saw coffee expansion as a way to fur-
ther secure their flexibility and claims to their land, the net
effect of coffee agriculture through this program has been
to preserve and improve livliehoods on farmers’ own terms
through a set of cooperative governing bodies, even through
a climate disaster and middling coffee production. Farm-
ers accepted program trainings, subsidized trees and ferti-
lizers, and rural infrastructure improvements, even as they
sold much of their coffee to others. But, when devastating
storms destroyed coffee gardens, farmers chose to rebuild
decades-long investment—not because they would provide
the greatest economic returns, but because they offered the
best chance for stability and autonomy.
Valuing comfort andheritage onBosnian
small farms
With the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the subsequent Bos-
nian genocide of the mid 1990s, Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak)
small farmers have endured the collapse and rebuilding
of socioeconomic order. Cooperative labor and land man-
agement in farming communities were strengthened first
by socialist governance and later by rural distress (Henig
2012; Marsh 1998), resulting in culturally bound knowledge
of forest resources and agrarian practices that sustain seed
breeding, wild resource management, and animal husbandry
(Jašarević 2018; Kurbanova etal. 2011; Malcolm 1996). In
June 2017, I took part in a short study with Bosniak small
farmers near Teslić, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), inves-
tigating the transnational links between traditional culinary
and agricultural practices in Bosnia and St. Louis, Missouri.
Increases in production were beside the point here, although
these farms provided food security through calories and cul-
turally meaningful foods.
In Cuba, economic collapse intensified the role of local,
cooperative, and informal markets, including agricultural
production (Altieri etal. 1999; Boillat etal. 2012; Koont
2008). Garth (2020) has shown how low-input urban agri-
culture provided many with the means for an adequate meal,
even as people are not always able to find meals that are
dignified or decent. This is a sociocultural rather than a
nutritional distinction. As elsewhere in post-socialist Europe
(Jehlička etal. 2019; Sovová and Veen 2020), Bosniak gar-
dening both supplements diets and maintains community
relationships through socioeconomic and ecological change.
Jehlička etal. (2019) do not explicitly describe Czech food
self-provisioning as agrarian degrowth, but they emphasize
that the benefits gardeners take from their allotments are
non-economic: fresh and healthy food, sharing with others,
pursuing particular tastes, and strengthening attachments to
family land. Such spaces, as Ančić etal. argue (2019), are
as important for nourishing identity and heritage as for eco-
nomic and nutritional benefit.
Amid mortar bombardments in the 1990s, home gardens
and rural allotments for residents near Teslić provided a
chance to spend time outdoors and work with others. Despite
this national trauma, Bosniak gardeners Dalila and Emir
insist that life went on during the war. Although houses and
barns in their village suffered mortar attacks, they married at
17 and 20, respectively, during the war. In one photo, Dalila
proudly shows off a thriving potato field and notes that she
has been saving potatoes and vegetables seeds since that
time. “We learned to be resourceful (Bosnian: snalažljiv),”
she explains. “We’re village people, so we make potatoes,
have cows, have chickens, make our food. We do every-
thing.” A significant part of “doing everything” is giving
food away in a perpetual cycle of debt and gifting. Open air
markets in the region re-sell food from aggregators based
in Mostar, BiH, and Italy, but also foraged foods including
flower teas, elderberry, and linden. “No, I don’t want [to sell
my excess],” Dalila said during an interview. “If I sell it, I’ll
get 10, 20 marks ($6–12 USD), what’s the point of that? It
doesn’t feel good. If I give it to my neighbors, to my rela-
tives, I can feel good. It’s better.”
Jašarević’s (2017) exploration of debt and health at Bos-
nian open-air markets shows how regular debts and overex-
tensions in giving make social life possible. Both physical
objects and conversation are critical terms of exchange, as
people experience life through a body that is not individ-
ual but bound to others in this depressed economy. Home

Sustainability Science
1 3
medicines or exchanged fermented foods (Jašarević 2018,
2015) are not simply paid for but exchanged in acts that
blur lines between giving, selling, healing, and obligating.
This localized community exchange (komšiluk) is both a
longstanding norm through which to perform community
identity (Bringa 1995) and an intimate exchange actively
maintained through neighborly acts (Henig 2012). These
include sharing food and labor, but also regular acts of
caregiving and sharing space—especially alongside cof-
fee and cigarettes. Sharing is also practical in a context of
high unemployment and informal goods and labor markets.
“We need to buy seeds every five years,” Dalila told me as
we looked through tins full of seeds saved and traded from
her garden. “These [seed exchanges] are not things that
people keep track of,” she responded when I asked who
was giving to whom. “If we have a lot we share it. If not,
others give it to us. If we have some really good seeds, we
save from those and share them.” Seeds and work are here
understood to be expected exchanges in a larger network of
debt, care, obligation, and giving (Nazarea 2014). Rather
than investments in a future growth, they are investments
in stasis. Gardeners protect patches of wild thyme in the
spaces between garden allotments and homes, while most
houses boast several varieties of fruit and nut trees, a net
effect that diversifies work, ecological knowledge, and
biology. In a cursory ethnobotanical survey of 18 Bosniak
households in one village, homegardens and attached rural
allotments featured an average of 14 (median 8, standard
deviation 12.27) actively managed and locally circulated
edible or medicinal plants.
Small-scale farming here is disinterested in agricul-
tural growth. Instead, working in gardens maintains a
baseline food security, taste, and community. Yield and
capital growth do not offer much for these small farms,
tucked amid houses left empty by outmigration and high
youth unemployment. As such, gardening provides a space
in which to cultivate a landscape of care amid tangible
reminders of war and scarcity. In producing familiar tastes,
holding community, and demarcating land, gardens prom-
ise a more stable future or at least a refuge that relatives
working abroad can invest in—not for some future growth
but as a place to return (Henig 2020; HadžiMuhamedović
2018). Cultivated Bosnian homegardens and allotments
secure land even as children and other relatives migrate
for work in cities or other countries, while the exchanges
of food, seed, work, and sociality facilitate komšiluk. As
in the Indian cases, the smaller scale of the garden helps
to facilitate social institutions that promote stability like
workshares while clearly demarcating land within the
community. More than in the above settings, growth would
hinder the kinds of sharing, gifting, and debts practiced
here.
Strengthening producer communities
bygrowing less
The communities above aspire to stability and autonomy
against larger changes to their agrarian political economy.
By metrics of participant growth, yields, and capital
investment returned, many of these farms are failures.
However, I have argued that these are the wrong tools by
which to measure the sustainability of alternative agri-
culture, because they decenter the needs and aspirations
of participating farmers. These programs do not provide
stability because they are growing. Rather, they provide
stability because they offer a way to imagine a viable
agrarian future through local social institutions, diversified
socioecological life, and local control. Telangana organic
cotton farmers, Araku organic coffee farmers, and Bosnian
allotment farmers each pursue agricultural work against
growth. Agriculture helps to strengthen community ties
and makes land claims explicit, whether that manifests as
a chance to preserve land as a home to return to or as a
definitive asset that cannot be threatened by state or pri-
vate interests. Institutions, including the formal organic
regulatory groups in south India as well as the informal
neighborhood links in Bosnia, are critical in subsidizing
risks and promoting solidarity against the larger systems
of extraction where people live.
Debt, tenure insecurity, and falling production drive
farmers off their land around the world. Shifting focus away
from growth has allowed Telangana cotton farmers to pursue
biodiverse agriculture without precarious investments lever-
aged against a hope for yields, helped Araku coffee farmers
protect their lands from dispossession, and helped Bosniak
farmers preserve a sense of home amid longstanding out-
migration. Small-scale, collective distributions of resources
insulate vulnerable farmers from market risks while encour-
aging agroecological practices that make future agricultural
production possible. Importantly, formal and informal insti-
tutions insulate growing communities from existential risk
as well: in guaranteeing land and markets, they ensure that
farming communities have homes to pass on and return to.
Ethnographic insights should always be closely tied to
live experiences of particular times and places. Importantly
for me as an ethnographer, no farmers claimed that they want
to produce less. Growth can be desired by households who
want to clear debts or build savings for a range of goals like
weddings, home constructions, education, or retirement. The
certified organic programs that manage supply chains for the
Indian farmers in particular are proud to see their produc-
tion and participation numbers grow, while India celebrates
the growth of organic farmers in the country as a national
marker of success. Many small farmers fear economic con-
traction and associate it with poverty and marginalization.

Sustainability Science
1 3
However, a degrowth perspective on agricultural sus-
tainability allows for expansions of particular kinds. I
argue against a particular model of short-term extraction
(D’Alisa etal. 2015; Gerber 2020) that imagines agricultural
resources, and the communities who produce them, as short-
term assets to be leveraged and then liquidated in the mode
of financial capitalism. A feminist political ecology per-
spective would similarly challenge any notions of degrowth
that require further disproportionate sacrifices on the part
of the global poor or place limits on the very commons,
care, and livelihoods discussed above (Mehta and Harcourt
2021). The growth that these alternative producers pursue
serves a long-term goal of land ownership and continued
production through local democratic institutions, one kind
of diverse economy existing alongside the larger political
economies of capitalism in which these farmers are embed-
ded (Gibson-Graham 2008). As such it looks quite differ-
ent from the limitless growth of productivist agriculture.
Domazet and Ančić (2019) find that Croatian environmental
justice activists express their goals in terms compatible with
degrowth even as they see degrowth as an insufficient path
to achieving those goals. Similarly, farmers often want to
expand their sales, group memberships, savings, and produc-
tion, because this growth helps them escape difficult work,
subsidize risks, and build a promising future in their own
terms. Yet, this growth is limited and localized. Alternative
agricultures provide institutions to achieve these goals with-
out pursuing growth at the expense of solidarity or common
ecological resources.
Degrowth offers a promising way to understand how
organic and allotment farming might be sustainable that
moves beyond what is produced to ask more fundamentally
how these systems keep small farming possible and even
desirable. Producing to keep a sense of home, or, more polit-
ically, to protect one’s home from state and private extrac-
tions of resources and labor, has a cascading positive effect
on the long-term ecological sustainability and resilience of
local agricultural systems. Recent reviews (Anderson etal.
2021; Campbell and Veteto 2015; Zimmerer and Haan 2019)
of agroecology and biodiversity are clear that small farmers
and agricultural systems in place play a key role in maintain-
ing food security and biodiversity through cataclysms like
climate change or global pandemics—and that they cannot
do so when facing scarcities of labor, when they can’t make a
living, or when they lack collective supports (Robbins etal.
2020; Holt-Giménez etal. 2021).
Growth in yields or participating farmers hint at the
reach of alternative agriculture, but these are ultimately the
wrong metrics to understand the value of these alternative
agriculture systems or capture the social depth of farmer
decision-making. Far more important is how institutions
keep farmers in place with the flexibility and autonomy
to pursue agrarian life on their terms. This persistence is
critical. We misunderstand the value created by these social
organizations when arguing that organic methods are just as
productive or that gardens are valuable only because they
preserve biodiversity. Thesmall-scale organic farming in
India and household allotments in Bosnia discussed above
will never outperform agri-food commodities producers with
respect to profits, yields, or sustained profits. I have argued
that these are the wrong metrics for sustainability, because
they do not fully consider the range of aspirations held by
producer communities and they are based within a model of
externalizing long-term social and ecological costs in the
pursuit of economic growth above stability. Persistent, low-
input farming in place is sustainable when it secures ongo-
ing land rights for rural communities, and promotes diverse
agricultural labor, aspiration, and production.
Acknowledgements This research was funded in part through the
Jacob K. Javits Fellowship program, the Volkswagen Foundation, and
the American Institute of Indian Studies. The author is grateful to Dr.
Markus Keck for encouraging this discussion, for comments by Paul
Robbins and two anonymous reviewers that improved the manuscript,
and to Sreenu Panuganti and Ashley Glenn for their collaboration in
conducting fieldwork.
References
Agrawal A, Sivaramakrishnan K (eds) (2000) Agrarian environ-
ments: resources, representations, and rule in India. Duke
University Press, Durham
Aistara GA (2018) Organic sovereignties: struggles over farming in
an age of free trade. University of Washington Press, Seattle
Altieri MA, Companioni N, Cañizares K, Murphy C, Rosset P,
Bourque M, Nicholls CI (1999) The greening of the ‘barrios’:
urban agriculture for food security in Cuba. Agric Hum Values
16(2):131–140. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1023/A: 10075 45304 561
Ančić B, Domazet M, Župarić-Iljić D (2019) ‘For my health and for
my friends’: exploring motivation, sharing, environmentalism,
resilience and class structure of food self-provisioning. Geo-
forum 106(November):68–77. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1016/j. geofo
rum. 2019. 07. 018
Anderson CR, Janneke Bruil M, Chappell J, Kiss C, Pimbert MP
(eds) (2021) Agroecology now! Transformations towards more
just and sustainable food systems. Springer International Pub-
lishing, Cham. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1007/ 978-3- 030- 61315-0_1
Angidi S, Bogati A (2020) A comparative assessment on production
cost and output yield of organic and Bt cotton farmers. Int J
Eng Sci Comput 10(7):26591–26595
Anguelovski I (2015) Urban gardening. In: D’Alisa G, Demaria F,
Kallis G (eds) Degrowth: a vocabulary for a new era. Rout-
ledge, New York, pp 196–198
Asioli D, Aschemann-Witzel J, Nayga RM (2020) Sustainability-
related food labels. Annu Rev Resour Econ 12(1):171–185.
https:// doi. org/ 10. 1146/ annur ev- resou rce- 100518- 094103
Bandi M (2014) Forest rights act: towards the end of struggle for
tribals? Soc Sci 42(1/2):63–81
Bernstein H (2006) Is there an agrarian question in the 21st century?
Can J Dev Stud/revue Canadienne D’études Du Développe-
ment 27(4):449–460. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 02255 189. 2006.
96691 66

Sustainability Science
1 3
Bernstein H (2014) food sovereignty via the ‘peasant way’: a scepti-
cal view. J Peasant Stud 41(6):1031–1063. https:// doi. org/ 10.
1080/ 03066 150. 2013. 852082
Besky S (2008) Can a plantation be fair? Paradoxes and possibilities
in fair trade darjeeling tea certification. Anthropol Work Rev
29(1):1–9. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1111/j. 1548- 1417. 2008. 00006.x
Besky S (2014) The darjeeling distinction. University of California
Press, Berkeley
Blaikie PM (1985) The political economy of soil erosion in devel-
oping countries. Longman Development Studies. Longman,
New York
Boillat S, Gerber J-F, Funes-Monzote FR (2012) What economic
democracy for degrowth? Some comments on the contribution
of socialist models and Cuban agroecology. Futures Spec Issue:
Politics Democr Degrowth 44(6):600–607. https:// doi. org/ 10.
1016/j. futur es. 2012. 03. 021
Boserup E (1965) The conditions of agricultural growth. Aldine Pub-
lishing Company, New York
Bringa T (1995) Being muslim the bosnian way: identity and com-
munity in a Central Bosnian village. Princeton University Press,
Princeton, N.J
Brookfield HC (2001) Exploring agrodiversity. Columbia University
Press, New York
Brown T (2018) Farmers, subalterns, and activists: social politics of
sustainable agriculture in India. Cambridge University Press,
New York
Brown T (2020) When food regimes become hegemonic: Agrarian
India through a Gramscian lens. J Agrar Chang 20(1):188–206.
https:// doi. org/ 10. 1111/ joac. 12344
Bryant RL, Goodman MK (2004) Consuming narratives: the politi-
cal ecology of ‘alternative’ consumption. Trans Inst Br Geogr
29(3):344–366. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1111/j. 0020- 2754. 2004.
00333.x
Buttel FH (1993) Ideology and agricultural technology in the late
twentieth century: biotechnology as symbol and substance. Agric
Hum Values 10(2):5–15. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1007/ BF022 17599
Calvário R, Otero I (2015) Back-to-the-landers. In: D’Alisa G, Demaria
F, Kallis G (eds) Degrowth: a vocabulary for a new era. Rout-
ledge, New York, pp 143–146
Campbell BC, Veteto JR (2015) Free seeds and food sovereignty:
anthropology and grassroots agrobiodiversity conservation strat-
egies in the US South. J Political Ecol 22(1):445–465. https:// doi.
org/ 10. 2458/ v22i1. 21118
Chappell MJ (2018) Beginning to end hunger: food and the environ-
ment in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Beyond. University of Cali-
fornia Press, Berkeley
Chayanov AV (1966) The theory of peasant economy. American Eco-
nomic Association Translation Series. Homewood, Ill: Published
for the American Economic Association, by R.D. Irwin
Choudhury C, Aga A (2020) Manufacturing consent: mining, bureau-
cratic sabotage and the forest rights act in India. Capital Nat
Social 31(2):70–90. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 10455 752. 2019.
15943 26
Conford P (2011) The development of the organic network: linking
people and themes, 1945–95. Floris Books, Edinburgh
Correia D (2012) Degrowth, American style: no impact man and bour-
geois primitivism. Capital Nat Social 23(1):105–118. https:// doi.
org/ 10. 1080/ 10455 752. 2011. 648847
D’Alisa G, Kallis G (2020) Degrowth and the state. Ecol Econ
169(March):106486. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1016/j. ecole con. 2019.
106486
D’Alisa G, Demaria F, Kallis G (2015) Degrowth: a vocabulary for a
new era. Routledge, New York
Dale B (2020) Alliances for agroecology: from climate change to food
system change. Agroecol Sustain Food Syst 44(5):629–652.
https:// doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 21683 565. 2019. 16977 87
Desai RM, Olofsgård A (2019) Can the poor organize? Public goods
and self-help groups in rural India. World Dev 121(Septem-
ber):33–52. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1016/j. world dev. 2019. 04. 009
Domazet M, Ančić B (2019) Complementarity between the EJ move-
ment and degrowth on the European semiperiphery: an empiri-
cal study. Ecol Econ 157(March):120–128. https:// doi. org/ 10.
1016/j. ecole con. 2018. 11. 006
Doshi V (2017) Sikkim’s Organic Revolution at Risk as Local Con-
sumers Fail to Buy into Project. The Guardian, January 31,
2017, sec. Global development. https:// www. thegu ardian. com/
global- devel opment/ 2017/ jan/ 31/ sikkim- india- organ ic- revol
ution- at- risk- as- local- consu mers- fail- to- buy- into- proje ct
Edelman M, Weis T, Baviskar A, Borras Jr SM, Holt-Giménez E,
Kandiyoti D, Wolford W (2014) Introduction: critical per-
spectives on food sovereignty. J Peasant Stud 41(6):911–931.
https:// doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 03066 150. 2014. 963568
Ehrlich PR (1971) The population bomb, Rev. Ballantine Books,
New York
Etzold B, Jülich S, Keck M, Sakdapolrak P, Schmitt T, Zimmer A
(2012) Doing institutions. A dialectic reading of institutions
and social practices and its relevance for development geogra-
phy. Erdkunde 66(3):185–195
Eversberg D, Schmelzer M (2018) The degrowth spectrum: conver-
gence and divergence within a diverse and conflictual alliance.
Environ Values 27(3):245–267. https:// doi. org/ 10. 3197/ 09632
7118X 15217 30930 0822
Flachs A (2016) The economic botany of organic cotton farms in
Telangana, India. J Ethnobiol 36(3):683–713. https:// doi. org/
10. 2993/ 0278- 0771- 36.3. 683
Flachs A (2017a) Transgenic cotton: high hopes and farming reality.
Nat Plants 3(January):16212. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1038/ nplan ts.
2016. 212
Flachs A (2017b) ‘Show farmers’: transformation and performance
in Telangana, India. Cult Agric Food Environ 39(1):25–34.
https:// doi. org/ 10. 1111/ cuag. 12085
Flachs A (2018) Development roles: contingency and performance
in alternative agriculture in Telangana, India. J Political Ecol
25(1):716–731
Flachs A (2019a) Cultivating knowledge: biotechnology, sustainabil-
ity, and the human cost of cotton capitalism in India. Global
Change/Global Health. University of Arizona Press, Tucson
Flachs A (2019b) Planting and performing: anxiety, aspiration,
and ‘scripts’ in Telangana cotton farming. Am Anthropol
121(1):48–61. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1111/ aman. 13175
Flachs A (2020) Political ecology and the industrial food system.
Physiol Behav 220(June):112872. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1016/j.
physb eh. 2020. 112872
Flachs A, Abel M (2019) An emerging geography of the Agrarian
question: spatial analysis as a tool for identifying the New
American Agrarianism. Rural Sociol 84(2):191–225. https://
doi. org/ 10. 1111/ ruso. 12250
Flachs A, Panuganti S (2020) Organic aspirations in South India.
Econ Anthropol 7(1):38–50. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1002/ sea2.
12158
Flachs A, Richards P (2018) Playing development roles: the political
ecology of performance in agricultural development. J Political
Ecol 25(1):638–646
Fletcher R, Dowd-Uribe B, Aistara GA (eds) (2020) The ecolabora-
tory: environmental governance and economic development in
Costa Rica. University of Arizona Press, Tucson
Forster D, Andres C, Verma R, Zundel C, Messmer MM, Mäder P
(2013) Yield and economic performance of organic and con-
ventional cotton-based farming systems—results from a field
trial in India. PLoS ONE 8(12):e81039. https:// doi. org/ 10.
1371/ journ al. pone. 00810 39

Sustainability Science
1 3
Foster JB (1999) Marx’s theory of metabolic rift: classical founda-
tions for environmental sociology. Am J Sociol 105(2):366–
405. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1086/ 210315
Foster JB (2011) Capitalism and degrowth: an impossibility theorem.
Mon Rev 62(8):26–33
Gabriel D, Sait SM, Hodgson JA, Schmutz U, Kunin WE, Benton
TG (2010) Scale matters: the impact of organic farming on bio-
diversity at different spatial scales. Ecol Lett 13(7):858–869.
https:// doi. org/ 10. 1111/j. 1461- 0248. 2010. 01481.x
Galvin SS (2014) Organic designs and agrarian practice in Uttara-
khand, India. Cult Agric Food Environ 36(2):118–128. https://
doi. org/ 10. 1111/ cuag. 12039
Galvin SS (2018) The farming of trust: organic certification and
the limits of transparency in Uttarakhand, India. Am Ethnol
45(4):495–507. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1111/ amet. 12704
Galvin SS (2021) Becoming organic: nature and agriculture in the
Indian Himalaya. Yale University Press, New Haven
Garth H (2020) Food in Cuba: the pursuit of a decent meal. Stanford
University Press, Redwood City
Gerber J-F (2020) Degrowth and critical Agrarian studies. J Peasant
Stud. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 03066 150. 2019. 16956 01
Gibson-Graham JK (2008) Diverse economies: performative prac-
tices for `other worlds’. Prog Hum Geogr 32(5):613–632.
https:// doi. org/ 10. 1177/ 03091 32508 090821
Gomiero T (2018) Agriculture and degrowth: state of the art and
assessment of organic and biotech-based agriculture from
a degrowth perspective. J Clean Prod Technol Degrowth
197(October):1823–1839. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1016/j. jclep ro.
2017. 03. 237
Guthman J (2004a) Agrarian dreams: the paradox of organic farming
in California. University of California Press, Berkeley
Guthman J (2004b) The trouble with ‘organic lite’ in California: a
rejoinder to the ‘conventionalisation’ debate. Sociol Rural
44(3):301–316. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1111/j. 1467- 9523. 2004.
00277.x
Guthman J (2009) Unveiling the unveiling: commodity chains, com-
modity fetishism, and ethical food labels. In: Bair J (ed) Frontiers
of commodity chain research. Stanford University Press, Stan-
ford, Calif, pp 190–206
HadžiMuhamedović S (2018) Waiting for Elijah: time and encounter
in a Bosnian landscape. Berghahn Books, New York
Henig D (2012) ‘Knocking on my neighbour’s door’: on metamor-
phoses of sociality in rural Bosnia. Crit Anthropol 32(1):3–19.
https:// doi. org/ 10. 1177/ 03082 75X11 430871
Henig D (2020) Remaking muslim lives: everyday islam in Postwar
Bosnia and Herzegovina. University of Illinois Press, Champaign
Holt D, Watson A (2008) Exploring the dilemma of local sourcing
versus international development—the case of the flower indus-
try. Bus Strateg Environ 17(5):318–329. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1002/
bse. 623
Holt-Gimenez E (2019) Can we feed the world without destroying it?,
1st edn. Polity, Cambridge, Medford
Holt-Giménez E, Shattuck A, Van Lammeren I (2021) Thresholds of
resistance: agroecology, resilience and the agrarian question. J
Peasant Stud. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 03066 150. 2020. 18470 90
Huber MT (2021) The case for socialist modernism. Polit Geogr
87(May):102352. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1016/j. polgeo. 2021. 102352
Jaffee D (2012) Weak coffee: certification and co-optation in the fair
trade movement. Soc Probl 59(1):94–116. https:// doi. org/ 10.
1525/ sp. 2012. 59.1. 94
Jakobsen J (2019) Neoliberalising the food regime ‘amongst its oth-
ers’: the right to food and the state in India. J Peasant Stud
46(6):1219–1239. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 03066 150. 2018. 14497
45
Janssen B (2017) Making local food work: the challenges and opportu-
nities of today’s small farmers. University of Iowa Press, Ames
Jašarević L (2015) The thing in a jar: mushrooms and ontological
speculations in post-Yugoslavia. Cult Anthropol 30(1):36–64.
https:// doi. org/ 10. 14506/ ca30.1. 04
Jašarević L (2017) Health and wealth on the Bosnian market: intimate
debt. Indiana University Press, Bloomington
Jašarević L (2018) ‘This much we know’: domestic remedies and
quotidian tricks since Tito’s Bosnia. In: Montgomery DW (ed)
Everyday life in the Balkans. Indiana University Press, Bloom-
ington, pp 76–85
Jegathesan M (2019) Tea and solidarity: tamil women and work in
postwar Sri Lanka. University of Washington Press, Seattle
Jehlička P, Daněk P, Vávra J (2019) Rethinking resilience: home gar-
dening, food sharing and everyday resistance. Can J Dev Stud/
revue Canadienne D’études Du Développement 40(4):511–527.
https:// doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 02255 189. 2018. 14983 25
Johnson JL, Zanotti L, Ma Z, Yu DJ, Johnson DR, Kirkham A, Caroth-
ers C (2018) Interplays of sustainability, resilience, adaptation
and transformation. In: Filho WL, Marans RW, Callewaert J (eds)
Handbook of sustainability and social science research, pp 3–25.
World sustainability series. Springer International Publishing,
Cham. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1007/ 978-3- 319- 67122-2_1.
Kallis G (2019) Limits: why malthus was wrong and why environmen-
talists should care, 1st edn. Stanford Briefs, Stanford
Kallis G, March H (2015) Imaginaries of hope: the utopianism of
degrowth. Ann Assoc Am Geogr 105(2):360–368. https:// doi.
org/ 10. 1080/ 00045 608. 2014. 973803
Kantor HS (2020) Locating the farmer: ideologies of agricultural labor
in Bihar, India. Anthropol Work Rev 41(2):97–107. https:// doi.
org/ 10. 1111/ awr. 12208
Kautsky K (1988) The agrarian question: in two volumes. Translated
by Pete Burgess. Zwan Publications, London, Winchester, Mass
Keck M, Sakdapolrak P (2013) What Is social resilience? Lessons
learned and ways forward. Erdkunde 67(1):5–19
Koont S (2008) A Cuban success story: urban agriculture. Rev Radic
Political Econ 40(3):285–291. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1177/ 04866
13408 320016
Kranthi KR, Stone GD (2020) Long-Term Impacts of Bt Cotton in
India. Nature Plants 6(3):188–196. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1038/
s41477- 020- 0615-5
Kurbanova J, Tomasz L, Gabor S (2011) Overview on vulnerability to
food security in Bosnia and Herzegovina. FAO REU
Latouche S (2018) The path to degrowth for a sustainable society. In:
Lehmann H (ed) Factor X: challenges, implementation strate-
gies and examples for a sustainable use of natural resources.
Eco-efficiency in industry and science. Springer International
Publishing, Cham, pp 277–84. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1007/ 978-3-
319- 50079-9_ 17
Lyon S (2010) Coffee and community: maya farmers and fair-trade
markets. University Press of Colorado, Boulder
Lyon S, Mutersbaugh T, Worthen H (2018) Constructing the female
coffee farmer: do corporate smart-economic initiatives promote
gender equity within agricultural value chains? Econ Anthropol.
https:// doi. org/ 10. 1002/ sea2. 12129
Magdoff F, Foster JB, Buttel FH (eds) (2000) Hungry for profit:
the agribusiness threat to farmers, food, and the environment.
Monthly Review Press, New York
Malcolm N (1996) Bosnia: a short history. New York University Press,
New York
Marsh R (1998) Building on Traditional Gardening to Improve House-
hold Food Security. Food Nutrition and Agriculture. FAO
Martínez-Torres ME, Rosset PM (2010) La Vía Campesina: the birth
and evolution of a transnational social movement. J Peasant Stud
37(1):149–175. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 03066 15090 34988 04
McMichael P (2007) Globalization and the agrarian world. In: Rit-
ter G (ed) The blackwell companion to globalization. Blackwell
Publishing, Malden, pp 216–238

Sustainability Science
1 3
Meek D (2020) The political ecology of education: Brazil’s landless
workers’ movement and the politics of knowledge. West Virginia
University Press, Morgantown
Mehta L, Harcourt W (2021) Beyond limits and scarcity: feminist and
decolonial contributions to degrowth. Political Geogr. https:// doi.
org/ 10. 1016/j. polgeo. 2021. 102411
Mocca E (2020) The local dimension in the degrowth literature. a criti-
cal discussion. J Political Ideol 25(1):78–93. https:// doi. org/ 10.
1080/ 13569 317. 2019. 16969 26
Mohan KS, Ravi KC, Suresh PJ, Smerford D, Head GP (2015)
Field resistance to the Bacillus Thuringiensis protein Cry1Ac
expressed in Bollgard® hybrid cotton in Pink Bollworm, Pectin-
ophora Gossypiella (Saunders), populations in India. Pest Manag
Sci 72(4):738–746. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1002/ ps. 4047
Najork K, Gadela S, Nadiminti P, Gosikonda S, Reddy R, Haribabu
E, Keck M (2021) The return of Pink Bollworm in India’s Bt
cotton fields: livelihood vulnerabilities of farming households
in Karimnagar District. Prog Dev Stud 21(1):68–85. https:// doi.
org/ 10. 1177/ 14649 93421 10034 57
Nazarea VD (2014) Heirloom seeds and their keepers: marginality and
memory in the conservation of biological diversity, Reprint. Uni-
versity of Arizona Press, Tucson
Netting RM (1993) Smallholders, householders: farm families and the
ecology of intensive, sustainable agriculture. Stanford University
Press, Stanford
Nightingale AJ, Eriksen S, Taylor M, Forsyth T, Pelling M, Newsham
A, Boyd E etal (2020) Beyond technical fixes: climate solutions
and the great derangement. Climate Dev 12(4):343–352. https://
doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 17565 529. 2019. 16244 95
Oskarsson P (2017) Diverging discourses on bauxite mining in Eastern
India: life-supporting hills for adivasis or national treasure chests
on barren lands? Soc Nat Resour 30(8):994–1008. https:// doi. org/
10. 1080/ 08941 920. 2017. 12954 96
Raynolds LT (2004) The globalization of organic agro-food networks.
World Dev 32(5):725–743. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1016/j. world dev.
2003. 11. 008
Raynolds LT (2014) Fairtrade, certification, and labor: global and
local tensions in improving conditions for agricultural work-
ers. Agric Hum Values 31(3):499–511. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1007/
s10460- 014- 9506-6
Reese AM (2019) Black food geographies: race, self-reliance, and food
access in Washington. UNC Press Books, Chapel Hill
Robbins P (2020) Is less more … or is more less? Scaling the political
ecologies of the future. Polit Geogr 76(January):102018. https://
doi. org/ 10. 1016/j. polgeo. 2019. 04. 010
Robbins P, Tripuraneni V, Karanth KK, Chhatre A (2020) Coffee, trees,
and labor: political economy of biodiversity in commodity agro-
forests. Ann Am Assoc Geogr. https:// doi. or g/ 10. 1080/ 24694 452.
2020. 18037 26
Roman-Alcalá A (2017) Looking to food sovereignty movements for
post-growth theory | ephemera. Ephemera 17(1):119–145
Schneider M, McMichael PD (2010) Deepening, and repairing, the
metabolic rift. J Peasant Stud 37(3):461–484. https:// doi. org/ 10.
1080/ 03066 150. 2010. 494371
Sen D (2017) Everyday sustainability: gender justice and fair trade
tea in Darjeeling. State University of New York Press, Albany
Sen D (2018) Fempreneurs or organic tea farmers? Entrepreneurial-
ism, resilience, and alternative agriculture in Darjeeling, India.
J Political Ecol 25(1):732–747
Sovová L, Veen EJ (2020) Neither poor nor cool: practising food
self-provisioning in allotment gardens in the Netherlands and
Czechia. Sustainability 12(12):5134. https:// doi. org/ 10. 3390/
su121 25134
Stone GD (2014) Theme Park Farming in Japan. Blog. Fieldquestions
(blog). June 5, 2014. http:// field quest ions. com/ 2014/ 06/ 05/
theme- park- farmi ng- in- japan/
Stone GD, Flachs A (2014) The problem with the farmer’s voice. Agric
Hum Values. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1007/ s10460- 014- 9535-1
Taylor M (2018) Climate-smart agriculture: what is it good for? J Peas-
ant Stud 45(1):89–107. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 03066 150. 2017.
13123 55
van der Ploeg JD (2018) The new peasantries: struggles for autonomy
and sustainability in an era of empire and globalization, 2nd edn.
Routledge, London
van der Ploeg JD (2020) The political economy of agroecology. J Peas-
ant Stud. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 03066 150. 2020. 17254 89
Vanclay F, Enticott G (2011) The role and functioning of cultural
scripts in farming and agriculture. Sociol Rural 51(3):256–271.
https:// doi. org/ 10. 1111/j. 1467- 9523. 2011. 00537.x
Vasavi AR (2020) The tiger and the tube well: malevolence in rural
India. Crit Asian Stud 52(3):429–445. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1080/
14672 715. 2020. 17648 55
Venugopalan MV, Kranthi KR, Blaise D, Lakde S, Sankaranarayana
K (2014) High density planting system in cotton—the Brazil
experience and Indian initaitves. Cotton Res J 5(2):172–185
West P (2012) From modern production to imagined primitive: the
social world of coffee from Papua New Guinea. Duke University
Press, Durham
Willer H, Schlatter B, Trávníček J, Kemper L, Lernoud J (2020) The
world of organic agriculture—statistics and emerging trends
2020. Bonn: Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL),
Frick, and IFOAM - Organics International
Wilson EO (2016) Half-earth: our planet’s fight for life. W. W. Norton
& Company, New York
Wise TA (2019) Eating tomorrow: agribusiness, family farmers, and
the battle for the future of food. The New Press, New York
Zimmerer KS, de Haan S (eds) (2019) Agrobiodiversity: integrating
knowledge for a sustainable future. MIT Press, Cambridge
Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to
jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.