CRPR Seminar - Corinna Howland - ethical contingency among Peruvian quinoa growers

Please note that this is a hybrid event - please contact CRPR@exeter.ac.uk to request the Teams joining instructions.

Drawing on research among cooperative quinoa growers in the rural Peruvian Andes, this paper provides an ethnographic account of organic certification. Each year, the cooperative is required to undergo a time-consuming – and expensive – certification process to achieve and/or maintain organic status, including extensive documentation of growers’ activities and field visits by an external inspector from a certification company. This engenders a set of performances and explicit staging by cooperative members and assisting agricultural technicians to highlight their ideal practice, as they attempt to secure a certification that will help them to generate higher prices and gain a competitive advantage over other producers. Throughout the process, certain ‘rules’ of organic certification were contingently suspended in pursuit of a successful sale to international exporters, which did not eventuate after revelations of pesticide contamination. I explore how the shifting status of lying and honesty as moral categories and practices for the cooperative was conditioned by the future possibilities cooperative members perceived at different moments in time, alongside structural and material conditions which made organic agriculture practically difficult to achieve. I argue that this shifting moral orientation indicatives a pragmatic or instrumental ethics of ‘opportunity’ available to people in a given present, where ethical considerations (what people ‘ought’ to do) are inflected by the relationship between what is and what could be.