Fair Trade vs. Swachcha Vyāpār
Ethical Counter-Politics of Women’s Empowerment in a Fair Trade−Certified Small Farmers’ Cooperative
During my ethnographic work among women organic tea producers in rural Darjeeling, India, I frequently faced difficult questions about the meaning and materiality of Fair Trade. Women smallholder tea farmers were gradually becoming conscious about the global popularity of the organic tea they produced. Whenever I showed Prema, one of the farmers, examples of Fair Trade publicity materials with smiling faces of women tea producers just like her, she always offered comments such as:
Another one! You know that smiling woman on that tea package is not us. It’s nice to know people around the world care about us so much, but why now? Where were these people when we had no roads, when no one gave us loans, when we ate only stale rice? What can they do for us if they do not care about what we women want?
Prema’s sarcastic response is a powerful critique of the moral basis of the Fair Trade movement’s empowerment directives—directives that govern tea cooperatives in producer communities and that have specific consequences for smallholder women tea farmers’ political lives. It is also a rebuke of the virtual environment in which Fair Trade maintains its legitimacy as described in chapter 4 (see also Moodie 2013, Gajjala 2014).
Similar pointed reflections on “Fair Trade” gradually revealed to me how intended beneficiaries of the global Fair Trade movement understood the value of Fair Trade in the context of their situated identity struggles and their everyday entrepreneurialism to gain social and economic justice. As a trade-based, transnational, social-justice movement, the key tenets of Fair Trade are to empower marginalized producers, in part by ensuring their participation in key decision-making institutions in their communities, and to promote social justice in general, with a core focus on women’s empowerment (Dolan 2010; Smith 2015).
Fair Trade is also an alternative economic system, distinguished from so-called free trade by its biopolitical imperative to measure and manage the global unfolding of social justice through its trading system (Sen and Majumder 2011; Mutersbaugh 2002). Fair Trade promoters and activist consumers believe that the ethical buying and selling of Fair Trade goods across nations can fulfill these overt goals by channeling new resources and governance mechanisms to producer communities. The Fair Trade product label stands as a proof and promise of trade-based justice work.
What remains unexplored within this abstract global discourse on Fair Trade is how subjects of transnational justice regimes understand, translate, and mobilize around the governance practices of the ostensibly ethical transnational justice regimes of Fair Trade. In this chapter, I examine how smallholder women tea farmers in rural Darjeeling, Sānu Krishak Sansthā, negotiate such regimes in the context of their specific identities (as housewives and savvy entrepreneurs) and histories of conflict over gendered access to resources in their own communities. Through long-term ethnography of Fair Trade operations and their effects on a smallholder tea farmers’ cooperative in rural Darjeeling, I contend that Fair Trade interventions can inadvertently strengthen gendered and patriarchal power relations in producer communities but that smallholder women tea farmers also make creative use of specific Fair Trade interventions to defend their own entrepreneurial ventures and rupture Fair Trade’s imbrications with local patriarchies.
As I will demonstrate ethnographically, the women farmers’ repeated juxtaposition in regular conversation of Fair Trade with swachcha vyāpār, a distinct Nepali iteration of Fair Trade that incorporates awareness of gender hierarchies, allowed them to articulate the shortcomings of Fair Trade. In particular, this rhetorical strategy highlighted Fair Trade’s inability to promote their specific economic pursuits through entrepreneurial ambitions, some of which were nurtured during previous participation in other transnational economic-justice regimes such as micro-lending. Strikingly, women’s situated reading of the “fair” in Fair Trade was filtered through a localized, gendered political and symbolic economy in which they had to struggle to gain respect and recognition for their daily labor and the entrepreneurial ventures that were critical for their families’ and communities’ survival in a context of shrinking economic opportunities for men in Darjeeling. In many of the households in Sānu Krishak Sansthā women are farmers and many conduct major household operations and local labor recruitment depending on the size of farms and financial stability (see also Lahiri Dutta 2014). As I detailed in chapter 3, women’s entrepreneurial ventures involve the illegal sale of tea and sale of alcohol, milk, and other produce from their farms, ventures they financed through microcredit loans. For them “Fair Trade” could become swachcha vyāpār only to the extent that it could assist them in meeting the needs of their families with dignity through their women-only business ventures. It was swachcha vyāpār when it could mitigate the domination of local middlemen who became virtual brokers of transnational market-based justice regimes in their communities while controlling women’s reputations.
In recent years feminist scholars have nurtured a healthy skepticism about liberal empowerment strategies (Naples and Desai 2002; Kabeer 1999; Rankin 2004; Spivak 1993; Karim 2011; Cornwall et al. 2007; Kudva and Mishra 2008). More worthy of critical feminist examination is how rural women who contest gendered resource inequities in their own communities strategically mobilize around transnational justice regimes such as Fair Trade. These women critique Fair Trade based on how it uses their images to sell tea in Western markets while their labor and struggles remain unrecognized internationally. Therefore, the images on tea packaging and posters that show women happily plucking tea obscure the male domination of the actual execution of Fair Trade practices. To challenge this opaqueness, women use the phrase swachcha vyāpār, which at least rhetorically foregrounds their work and challenges the male domination that devalues their labor and entrepreneurship. To contest how they are represented, they seek to represent themselves. The rhetoric of swachcha vyāpār connects the discursive contestation with the actual conflicts by linking women’s struggles for recognition and respect for their labor with competition over resources while articulating their gendered projects of value. These acts by which women seek to represent themselves in order to negotiate with Fair Trade’s hegemonic representations of them is an example of the kind of catachresis that Gayatri Spivak famously elaborated. Smallholder women tea farmers in Darjeeling are “reversing, displacing, and seizing” Fair Trade’s “apparatus of value coding” (1993, 228). Women’s skepticism around the meaning and material impact of Fair Trade directives is also an instance of catachresis, or creative abuse of the progressive ideals of consumer-based transnational justice initiatives to make such transnational regimes address the situated aspirations of subjects of justice.
At the time of this study, there were ninety-four smallholder women tea farmers in the Women’s Wing involved in microcredit loans, as evident from the cooperative records. After the formation of the cooperative in 1997 to trade in milk, the Women’s Wing was established so that collectively area women could access resources from government programs for maternal and reproductive health. Later with the arrival of microcredit loans, the Women’s Wing provided the structure for the formation of self-help groups through which microcredit loans could be accessed. When I began my research in 2004, Women’s Wing members were mostly involved in microcredit and assisting the cooperative. In the local power structure, the Women’s Wing worked below the male governance body of the co-op that became a point of major economic and symbolic contestations as I detail throughout this chapter. The interviews used in this particular chapter are from my core sample of thirty Women’s Wing members and also from women outside this core sample. I have followed the trajectory of these households since 2004 and the changes in women’s collective organizing in the cooperative area are discussed in the conclusion.
To situate gendered contestations around Fair Trade, I first elucidate Fair Trade’s gradual imbrication with local patriarchies and then demonstrate the ways women have contested this imbrication. I first briefly detail the political economy of smallholder tea production in Darjeeling, situating local tea production within broader changes in the tea industry, and I discuss how these changes have in turn affected gendered resource sharing in small tea farmers’ cooperatives. I then provide ethnographic detail of women’s mobilization at the time of Fair Trade certification inspections and describe women farmers’ relationship with middlemen and how those relationships have affected their skepticism about and contestations of Fair Trade. Finally, I detail how smallholder women tea farmers have made critical connections between the multiple forms of disenfranchisement they face and how they remind themselves and interlocutors about their role in the economic and social reproduction of their families and communities by holding on to their gendered projects of value. This in turn has helped them develop a “vernacular calculus of the economic”—a gendered evaluation of Fair Trade from the vantage point of everyday struggles for resource and recognition (Ramamurthy 2011). They articulated their gendered projects of value from this vantage point.
Smallholder Tea Production and Fair Trade in Darjeeling
Before the advent of Fair Trade and the organic tea boom, local NGOs intervened to help these marginalized tea producers in many ways, encouraging them to form cooperatives and explore animal husbandry and other economic ventures for selling their produce. The cooperative that the women in this study belonged to was formed in 1997 but was not registered with the state until 2007. Seeing the economic potential of Fair Trade alliances for small tea producers, they formally registered the cooperative, with NGO help, so that they could better bargain with plantation managers. Because small-farmer cooperatives could not afford expensive tea-processing equipment, they had no option but to sell their tea as raw tea leaves. NGOs intervened to ensure that the cooperative received a competitive price for the raw tea that they sold to plantations. They also introduced safeguards so that the plantations could not sell smallholder grown tea under the plantation’s own label, but would instead help with processing so that it could be marketed as cooperative-produced tea. Additional Fair Trade certification of the cooperative by Fair Trade Labeling Organization International (FLO)—a transnational governing body overseeing the trade and governance of Fair Trade operations across the world—ensured that good contracts with plantations were established and monitored. At present in Darjeeling, two formal tea cooperatives represent smallholder tea producers living outside plantations (Thapa 2012), one of which is studied here.
Although non-plantation tea cultivation is fairly common in Darjeeling’s informal sector, it is rarely researched or written about because of the domination of plantations in production and visual representation. Only sixty thousand workers are employed in the eighty-seven plantations formally, but most of Darjeeling’s rural poor subsist outside of these sites, and there is little data on how they survive by combining agriculture and trading.
In these areas, even though women overwhelmingly performed the actual work of tea production, it was male middlemen and male members of tea-farming households who sensed an important economic opportunity with the advent of Fair Trade, in part due to the lack of other economic opportunities in rural areas of Darjeeling. Men gained prominence in the process of formalizing the cooperatives, and local NGOs began to rely on these patriarchs. Smallholder women tea farmers, the “subjects” of Fair Trade, realized their worth in the organic tea production process but simultaneously felt a sense of loss as male community members and local middlemen came to control tea profits by dominating the newly formed cooperative. Their realization of self-worth led women to battle the male-dominated tea-farmers’ cooperative over its failure to acknowledge their efforts to sustain organic tea production, from which the cooperative itself was now benefiting.
As economic resources from Fair Trade agreements started pouring into the cooperative, smallholder women tea farmers realized these resources were inaccessible to them because the money was being invested in community development projects that did not involve women. Women’s contention that Fair Trade was not swachcha vyāpār was a way to signal their disenfranchisement within their own cooperative. Swachcha vyāpār was also a critique of middlemen within their own communities who now dominated cooperative affairs. Therefore, swachcha vyāpār is a creative and powerful iteration of the Fair Trade philosophy that incorporates a gendered awareness that male cooperative heads, male traders from their villages, and male Fair Trade officials controlled the Fair Trade network.
Women continually debated what Fair Trade meant in everyday talk since the current operations of the tea cooperative were inimical to their aspirations of running their own businesses. For instance, THulo yojanā was a pet plan of smallholder women tea farmers who also belonged to self-help groups and accessed microcredit loans. The Women’s Wing devised THulo yojanā in order to begin an organized business of their own that sold everything they produced besides tea, whose trade was now monopolized by men. Women lamented that the success of the Fair Trade cooperative did not directly help them or their collective entrepreneurial ventures. Their repeated juxtaposition of Fair Trade and swachcha vyāpār was a rhetorical strategy that smallholder women tea farmers used to make visible the precarious forms of labor and entreprenurialisms that maintained their households and sustained organic tea production (albeit by default). Furthermore, the uncompensated labor of women was critical for running Fair Trade awareness programs, internal control of organic standards, and organic farming training classes that sustained the cooperative’s Fair Trade certification and hence its ticket to the financial resources of the global Fair Trade movement.
Despite the marginality of Darjeeling’s smallholder farmers within the tea industry, their landownership and practice of agriculture, as opposed to perceived lower-grade work like coolie kaam (menial or plantation labor), shaped the identity of smallholder tea farmers’ families, who considered themselves to have more freedom than plantation workers. Smallholder women tea farmers in this study also highlighted this distinction, since, as Piya Chatterjee (2001) has noted, plantation work was seen as demeaning and plantation women as wanton. Smallholder women tea farmers’ self-identification as housewives working on their own farms and their receipt of microcredit loans shaped their subjectivities as housewife-entrepreneurs, the lens through which they assessed the significance of Fair Trade.
From Debating to Contesting Fair Trade
Beyond their discussions around the meaning of Fair Trade and the strategic juxtaposition of Fair Trade with swachcha vyāpār to interlocutors like me, Women’s Wing members actively contested Fair Trade policies that affected their position within the cooperative without generating any real benefits in terms of advancing their economic entrepreneurial ventures. They voiced their displeasure by targeting specific aspects of Fair Trade’s governing principles and their implementation in the tea cooperative.
Despite its aim of creating a better alternative to neoliberal trade and development, Fair Trade relies on technical interventions resembling the liberal methods of conventional development practice. For example, Fair Trade certification involves checklist-style, top-down, bureaucratic procedures for monitoring and inspecting farms and farming techniques, for examining on-farm labor relations, for tracking the use of Fair Trade premiums by farming communities, and for implementing empowerment directives from Fair Trade inspectors (Raynolds et al. 2007). I have argued elsewhere that these governance schemes make for an interesting biopolitics where people and process are measured against liberal notions of empowerment and development (Sen and Majumder 2011).
Smallholder women tea farmers encountered the technical rationality undergirding Fair Trade practices in the form of yearly inspection visits by a male Fair Trade inspector from Delhi. In order to continue to be certified, each community has to pass a Fair Trade inspection every year. International Fair Trade monitoring organizations such as the aforementioned FLO also send inspectors to check whether producer organizations are run democratically. Depending on how cooperative members fared in the inspection interviews, FLO inspectors decide whether a SPO (such as SKS) could continue to receive Fair Trade premium funds for economic development. Due to their significant consequences, inspections are tense times in the community.
In December 2006, I had the opportunity to witness one such inspection, as well as the dynamics in the cooperative as its members prepared for the inspection. In the days preceding the one-day inspection, male cooperative members were busy organizing documentation of tea sales and the cooperative budget. Women’s Wing members were given the task of informing cooperative members’ families about the meaning and benefits of Fair Trade certification, as well as cleaning and decorating the cooperative office and preparing meals for the inspector. Cooperative heads wanted to ensure that cooperative members would be able to answer basic questions about Fair Trade and organic production if the inspector decided to interview average members, which is why Women’s Wing members were charged with the task of explaining the meaning of Fair Trade certification to each household. The inspector spent most of his time with the cooperative board. I interviewed him soon after the inspection and witnessed his interactions with male and female cooperative members. During the interview he made a notable comment about the women:
Figure 6.1. Woman Tea Farmer at an Internal Inspection with Her Organic Farm Diary. Photo by the author.
Figure 6.2. Women Tea Farmers Conducting Fair Trade Awareness Programs. Photo by the author.
Inspector: Women in Darjeeling are much more forward than women in other parts of India, where society is more patriarchal.
Me: Why do you think women are more forward here?
Inspector: At least you see them sit in the meeting when you come for inspection, and they even answer my questions correctly. They are more free.
I was struck by the inspector’s comments about women farmers’ freedom, considering that he spent a total of two days in Darjeeling and six hours in the cooperative, talking mostly to the male board members. Moreover, the inspector was from Delhi and did not speak Nepali, the local language; most of his conversations with cooperative members were in Hindi, which the majority of cooperative members did not understand. Still, during his routine inspection, the inspector was impressed by the awareness and enthusiasm of smallholder women tea farmers within this male-dominated cooperative.
The aforementioned Women’s Wing consisted of smallholder women tea farmers who were relatives of the male cooperative members. The Women’s Wing operated at a level below the cooperative governors. The cooperative governing board made the major operational decisions and dealt with the management of tea within the cooperative community. Women’s Wing members were involved in microcredit and assisted the cooperative by cooking for major events, running trainings, and the like. The inspector sensed this hierarchy. He wanted the smallholder women tea farmers to dissolve the Women’s Wing and join the governing board in larger numbers. The inspector argued that women were ready for “more empowerment” and ought to be members of the main cooperative.
During our conversation, the inspector remarked that Darjeeling was not as patriarchal as the rest of India, which was borne out by the demographic fact that the female-to-male ratio in Darjeeling was higher than elsewhere in India—that is, there were proportionally more women in the population than in other regions. He had observed numerous woman-owned businesses in the marketplace. In addition, local women did not observe strict norms of purdha (veiling) that women did in the other parts of north India he had observed. Consequently, he assumed that smallholder women tea farmers would welcome his Fair Trade directives as guaranteeing them more political presence in the community and ensuring a more equitable distribution of Fair Trade resources, such as an annual Fair Trade premium to each certified community. Hence he used the word “forward” to imply that women were more advanced in Darjeeling. I could not rule out that the use of the word “forward” was an influence of the reigning negative stereotypes about women in Darjeeling.
Members of the Women’s Wing, in contrast, did not endorse the Fair Trade directives. During my participant observation, I picked up terms women commonly associated with empowerment, such as aggi barhnu (to move forward/progress), bato dikhaunu (showing the way), swachcha vyāpār garnu (doing clear/transparent/fair business), THulo yojanā banaunu (making big business/big plan), and balio hunu (becoming strong). All these phrases invoke notions of empowerment and entrepreneurialism based on equality and imply particular kinds of economic action and accompanying household and community level interventions. Joining the governing body of the cooperative was never associated with these concepts or viewed as empowering. I wondered why the suggestion of joining the governing body did not sit well with the Women’s Wing. Why did they not want to make this potentially empowering move and give up their women’s group? What were women trying to achieve collectively by defying the inspector’s directive, when they knew that such defiance could lead to the loss of certification and subsequently Fair Trade funds for their community?
Through their persistence women wanted to publicly demonstrate their disillusionment with the governing board and the problematic operation of Fair Trade within their community. It was a way to publicly express their doubt about Fair Trade’s potential to break the monopoly of middlemen in the cooperative and ensure transparent business in their communities, as became evident from their constant contrasting of Fair Trade and swachcha vyāpār. In the end, the cooperative’s Fair Trade certification and funds were not revoked because of the Women’s Wing’s defiance. The cooperative’s certification was put on probationary status with a warning to straighten out matters within the cooperative, especially with the Women’s Wing. The fact that the cooperative received “probationary action,” not a full-fledged “pass,” pleased Women’s Wing members. It was a symbolic victory for them, as I detail later.
The Women’s Wing had asked the cooperative board for a share of Fair Trade funds in 2005–6, before this inspection took place. Binu, one of the active members of the Women’s Wing, filled me in on this background. The cooperative received Rs. 222,000 ($6,000) in Fair Trade premium money. The Women’s Wing members were happy because the governing board told the villagers that the money would be used for development. Leaders of the Women’s Wing requested Rs. 10,500 (less than 5 percent of the funds) as start-up capital for a produce business, as an alternative to approaching a bank and burdening themselves with a loan. Many smallholder women tea farmers described this money as a reward for all their work on behalf of the cooperative. The cooperative immediately refused the request, which angered the women. As Binu explained,
You know, it was all fine until we asked for our share of the FLO money; somehow we became everyone’s enemy. We could not even imagine that the men would show their true colors, and there would be so much hostility. We have been taking individual loans from the bank for the last couple of years and always repay the money. After all, we get periodic suggestions and encouragement from the NGO and government officers running the SHGs [self-help groups] on how we should stand on our own feet and learn new skills. When we are selling raksi [rice wine] and biri [cigarettes] it is fine, but when we want to found a big business, that is just not accepted. When we put pressure on the cooperative men to give us some money from FLO funds, they immediately asked us, “Who are you, what is your identity? Your group is nothing without the cooperative, why are you asking for a separate share of the money? If we invest the money into the community as a whole, you all will benefit, what makes you all special? Women also benefit from our rising tea sales, don’t they?” I replied saying that women are the ones who provide the labor in the plucking season from which you get this money, and we are going to use this money to learn new skills. To tell you the truth, we absolutely have to make this business a success and show these men that we can do the things they can; otherwise, they are going to make fun of us again.
Binu further explained that if the Women’s Wing dissolved and joined the main cooperative, then women would never get any money for this separate business. The middlemen in the cooperative would never allow the women a separate share of the money to start a business, arguing that funds spent on the entire community would benefit everyone. Women’s Wing members like Binu were proud that they preserved their group and that the male governing board had to deal with probationary action because of their resolve. This was a key moment when the women felt they had received some redress for the cooperative’s unwillingness to share any monetary resources with them. Binu elaborated,
We go for all sorts of training so that we can move forward. Then why not give us the money now, when we can gain some real training to better ourselves? It is okay if they want us to be on the cooperative governing board, but we really want to have our own organization. We women have lāj [modesty, shame] and we can support each other, even if it is just five of us. I know the men in the cooperative must have jumped at the inspector’s suggestions because this was a way for them to wipe out our existence so that the cooperative would not have to share money with us again. By the time the secretary finally gave us the money, things had become bitter, but he told us then that this was the last time we were going to get our demands met.
Other women in the Women’s Wing shared Binu’s reading of the Fair Trade directives as collusion between male cooperative board members and the inspector. They interpreted the Fair Trade directives as the final step in wiping out the Women’s Wing in retaliation for their request for Fair Trade premium money that the male-dominated cooperative governing board wished to monopolize. They saw the recommendation that they join the board as a way for middlemen to retain their voice in the cooperative, since a few women on the board could be easily silenced. The few women board members would hesitate to stand up for themselves based on local codes of honor and modesty that the women themselves invested in. Women in the cooperative community had a bigger battle in mind. They feared that dissolving the Women’s Wing and joining the cooperative leadership might lead to middlemen coopting their business plan, destroying the collective space where they resisted male domination, and shaming them.
The Women’s Wing, which on the surface seemed contrary to the goal of Fair Trade to empower women within the cooperative, in reality represented women’s collective aspirations for economic justice at the community level. Smallholder women tea farmers understood that the success of the cooperative was important for getting a good price for their tea and for the general development of their community. But they also saw the Fair Trade−certified cooperative as standing in the way of their business ventures. Therefore they coded the Fair Trade cooperative as a men’s domain that discriminated against them.
My participant observation and analyses of women’s narratives revealed that the decision of Women’s Wing members to reject the inspector’s suggestion was a critique of the gendered spatial and ideological politics prevalent in their communities and reflected in the cooperative structure. This politics restricted the scope of their economic activities within the village, which made it difficult for them to succeed in their business ventures and repay their microcredit loans. In addition, as I detail in the next section, members of the Women’s Wing faced ideological challenges because of their actions. The inspection and subsequent directives provided an opportunity for the women to publicly vent their anxieties about the challenges they faced in improving their families’ economic situation. Refusing to accede to the inspector’s suggestion was a way to question the appropriation of women’s labor through gendered spatial politics and denial of Fair Trade resources.
I am not arguing that FLO’s vision of empowerment is inherently depoliticizing, because the inspector did recognize the hierarchies within the community. However, his directive was based on the liberal modernist ideal of equal gender representation in numbers, without considering the context of empowerment. Hence his suggestion that it was important to have more physical presence of women on the cooperative governing body failed to recognize that the effectiveness of their presence was questionable. Examining how these women questioned the depoliticizing tendencies of Fair Trade as they charted out their own plan of empowerment and community participation revealed the significance of emerging forms of collective self-governance among women in rural India, within but against the market (Subramaniam 2006; Sharma 2008; Moodie 2008; Klenk 2004).
In recent years feminist scholars have used a transnational feminist framework to analyze aspects of the emerging global morality market and its specific manifestations (Chowdhury 2011). Feminist anthropologists and other social scientists have been preoccupied with issues around transnational justice regimes and the possibilities for local actors to connect their struggles to its promises (Adelman 2008; Merry 2006). Aihwa Ong draws our attention to the workings of modern justice regimes, the particular places that subjects of justice occupy in their own struggles, and the nuances of how these modern schemes of justice work. Commenting on the burgeoning justice initiatives in the transnational sphere, she writes:
Increasingly, a diversity of multilateral systems—multinational companies, religious organizations, UN agencies, and other NGOs—intervene to deal with specific, situated, and practical problems of abused, naked, and flawed bodies. The non-state administration of excluded humanity is an emergent transnational phenomenon, despite its discontinuous, disjointed, and contingent nature. (2006, 24)
Ong characterizes these new justice regimes run by non-state agencies as “techno-ethical regimes” trying to bring justice to morally deserving yet excluded populations around the world. FLO’s efforts resemble “techno-ethical regimes” in that they have devised technical directives for empowering marginalized producers. A Fair Trade label ostensibly implies quality, sustainable agricultural products, and well-governed people who understand and work within Fair Trade guidelines. Such a label reassures socially conscious consumers that marginalized producer communities are enjoying the material benefits of Fair Trade, such as social development premiums, and are operating in a democratic way. The process of certification thereby becomes a technical fix for existing inequalities in producer communities.
My encounter with the Fair Trade inspector demonstrates how the formula of justice emanating from the larger moral rubric of these liberal techno-ethical regimes was transformed in particular localities where subjects reinterpreted the rules to meet their own ends. Therefore, this book takes Ong’s logic further by showing how women producers both reject and take advantage of elements of these techno-ethical regimes to gain prominence in their local communities, while all parties are working within Fair Trade certified institutions.
Ethnographic attention to the gendered cultural politics around certification also closes a major gap in the interdisciplinary literature on Fair Trade certification by providing a more nuanced understanding of how the broader goals of techno-ethical regimes do and do not translate at the local level and how such translations are gendered. In establishing the gendered nature of translations, I address what Tad Mutersbaugh and colleagues see as an exciting and important area that needs attention; that is, how producer communities are affected by these techno-ethical regimes and, more importantly, how people make use of these directives to substantiate and advance their own projects of justice (Mutersbaugh and Lyon 2010).
In this next section I discuss why the Women’s Wing had a falling out with the middlemen and how this affected their skepticism about and contestations of so-called Fair Trade.
Middlemen, Gendered Spatial Politics, and the Government of Women’s Work
Why is it that we get these stares when we walk down the village road? Are we different, now that we are trying to do big business?
This comment by Minu, one of the women tea farmers, alludes to the crisis of respectability that Women’s Wing members experienced after they formally asked the cooperative for money to start a women-only business. Male middlemen called them names like bāthi (street smart)—a derogatory term when applied to women. What precipitated this slander was women’s questioning of how middlemen used their clout and monopoly to control the women’s entrepreneurial practices, even though these were critical sources of income for the middlemen themselves.
Before this cooperative was founded in 1997 and before the advent of Fair Trade institutions, local people depended on middlemen for credit and to sell their surplus produce and dry, “illegal” tea on the local market. These middlemen were not sardars—liaisons between the plantations and adjoining communities who recruited tea plantation labor. They were middle- to upper-caste, relatively wealthy Nepali men who negotiated between farming communities in rural Darjeeling and urban markets. Smallholder women tea farmers identified four important reasons for the role of the middleman: (1) middlemen had good contacts in town to sell products from the village, (2) they had money to hire people to transport merchandise from the villages to town, (3) they were necessary because women’s family members resented them making frequent trips to town, and (4) the middlemen brought back supplies of food and other essential commodities to these remote villages. Smallholder women tea farmers often took loans from the middlemen and were obligated to sell their produce to the middlemen in return.
Although they were usually better off and better educated than the village farmers, some of the middlemen were distant kin of the smallholder women tea farmers. They were often larger landowners who had political contacts with the local party or low-level government jobs in town that supported their business activities. Some had become wealthy over time, and many also held important positions in the cooperative after it was formed.
With the formation of the Women’s Wing, members started taking out lower-interest loans from a government bank through microcredit schemes, and subsequently the middlemen saw their income from moneylending to women decline. This history formed the backdrop of the hostility between Women’s Wing members and middlemen, who spared no effort to impugn women’s respectability, as Minu’s comments in the epigraph attest. Smallholder women tea farmers welcomed the comparatively low-interest loans available from NGO microcredit schemes, and they reported that their family members did so as well. The advent of microcredit enabled women to free themselves from the high-interest loans from middlemen, but they still had to depend on the middlemen to sell their produce so that they could repay the loans.
The middlemen were not pleased with the NGO involvement and the microcredit schemes. Those who served on the cooperative board had tried to monopolize the sale of other local produce, such as turmeric, ginger, cardamom, milk, and vegetables. Most smallholder women tea farmers complained that the middlemen offered the villagers very low prices for their produce, but because of the lack of adequate transportation and contacts, the villagers had few alternatives. The formation of the cooperative had further entrenched the power of middlemen, as they could control who did or did not become members of the cooperative and learn how to get organic certification for their land. Most respondents also reported that they expected that in the future the cooperative would sell more goods besides tea. Thus, the local middlemen would become the virtual brokers of transnational market-based justice regimes in the villages.
After Fair Trade funds for development started pouring into the cooperative, Women’s Wing members devised their plan of THulo yojanā (big plan/big business), to ensure that cooperative households would also get fair prices for their produce other than tea. From running Fair Trade trainings, they knew that Fair Trade supported women’s income earning. Meanwhile, the middlemen were already upset with the smallholder women tea farmers because new sources of microcredit for the women had dried up previously guaranteed sources of income for the middlemen. Yet the middlemen still benefited from their dealings in selling other produce from the village. When the Women’s Wing floated their business plan involving other produce, open animosity erupted between the middlemen and Women’s Wing members. The middlemen defamed Women’s Wing members, making use of existing gender ideologies to undermine the women’s respectability (Hodgson and McCurdy 2001). They spread rumors that the smallholder women tea farmers were becoming like market vendors or women plantation workers, who were considered bāthi (street smart) and less than respectable.
One needs to understand the competing gender ideologies in Darjeeling to understand the power of these shaming practices for women’s self-identification. Smallholder women tea farmers had a particular investment in distinguishing themselves from women plantation workers, who were considered inferior in social status due to their wage work and lack of control over their leisure activities. Smallholder women tea farmers and their families took pride in saying, “Our daughters, sisters, and wives do not go for hajira (wage work).” This gendered moral distinction had particular meaning imbued by past labor recruitment practices in the tea industry of Assam and North Bengal. As Jayeeta Sharma and Piya Chatterjee have both noted, sexualized and racial tropes accompanied plantation labor recruitment, which occurred mostly among tribal groups in east central India. In the postcolonial period, however, there has been a divergence in the identity politics of specific tea-producing communities in terms of how they situate themselves vis-à-vis these racialized and sexualized histories of plantation work. In Darjeeling, women plantation workers are also stigmatized as sexually immoral and alcoholic.
These specific stereotypes have shaped a gendered moral terrain of critical distinctions where women who do not work on plantations but live nearby, such as the smallholder women tea farmers discussed here, distinguish themselves from women plantation workers and their families, even though they likewise cultivate tea. Because among Nepali Hindu families the withdrawal of women from formal labor force participation marks upward mobility, these smallholder women tea farmers identified themselves as housewives and engaged in practices of social mobility. Smallholder women tea farmers also realized the limitations of this role identification. Despite their entrepreneurial ventures they were seen as housewives, not capable of organized business ventures and hence were denied Fair Trade resources. The spatial manifestation of these gender ideologies also put severe limitations on their ability to procure resources for their families, since middlemen used these ideological tropes to discipline women.
Smallholder women tea farmers performed as obedient housewives or good sisters who always asked for permission to go to town. Elder men and women in their households resented women’s frequent visits to town, even if they relied financially on the women’s petty trade. The smallholder women tea farmers tried to live up to these ideologies but also found them constricting because they left women dependent on middlemen who paid them very little to take their produce to town.
This form of spatial and ideological control hurt the poorest smallholder women tea farmers the most. Whereas comparatively wealthy households in the cooperative could afford to have the wives and sisters stay at home, poorer women were desperate to venture out of their homes to sell produce. For these women absolute confinement to home-based work was not economically feasible. Their families tolerated some amount of non-farm-related economic activities, such as loan taking and selling produce in the village. These women’s non-farm activities were confined to the space of the village, preventing them from forming sustainable links with the market.
The persistence of gender ideologies not only confined women’s economic activities to certain spaces; it gave some middlemen the moral resources to strategically question the actions of women who attempted to challenge the monopoly of middlemen in the village by going directly to the market. Practices of defaming were used to challenge the respectability of women who defied the dominance of middlemen in local business (see also Lynch 2007). Women believed that these shaming practices curtailed their earnings and thereby reduced their family income.
Thus, the smallholder women tea farmers determined to defend their Women’s Wing articulated their gendered projects of value. They knew that joining the governing board of the cooperative would not end the existing double standard in their community pertaining to the appropriateness of women’s business ventures. Fair Trade rules, as they unfolded, only strengthened men’s control of smallholder women tea farmers’ operations within the cooperative. This is why women read the Fair Trade inspector’s directive about dissolving the Women’s Wing as collusion among the men. They interpreted joining the governing board as giving in to the tactics of the middlemen, some of whom were important members of the cooperative. The change the Fair Trade inspector proposed in the interests of empowerment was perceived as giving in to the existing spatial politics in the community, which limited chances of women’s economic success.
In the next section I show how women categorically engaged in practices of reminding community members and interlocutors such as myself that their labor was critical in sustaining their families and community. These reminders were responses to the shaming practices they were subjected to, and they became a key ingredient in developing Priti Ramamurthy’s aforementioned “vernacular calculus of the economic.” For Ramamurthy, the concept “vernacular calculus of the economic” helps explain the actions of subaltern actors that might not make rational economic sense. In explaining why poor Dalit Madiga farmers chose to cultivate hybrid cottonseed without the assurance of profitable returns, instead of laboring on other people’s farms or migrating to cities for assured wages, Ramamurthy emphasizes how the practical consciousness to Madiga farmers in choosing this apparently irrational or nonprofitable act is shaped by a local “material and cultural grid.” This grid consists of histories of economic and social humiliation associated with work and migration, which Dalit farmers have endured for generations. Similarly in Darjeeling, poor smallholder women tea farmers’ decision to contest the Fair Trade bureaucracy despite its potential harm for the economic success of the cooperative was an instance of a “vernacular calculus of the economic” since it would not make rational economic sense to bring harm to the cooperative that helped legalize small-farmer-grown tea and ensured that small-farmer-grown tea in Darjeeling would fetch a good price from plantation owners. Smallholder women tea farmers were willing to settle for lesser economic rewards for their community based on their calculations of potential gains they would make in the local gendered political economy where their reputations were at stake (Kapadia 2002). In this case, “vernacular calculus of the economic” can be seen as smallholder women tea farmers’ attempts to evaluate transnational justice regimes and their liberal rules from the vantage point of a localized gendered projects of value in order to gain access to resources and respect for their labor in a political field dominated by entrenched patriarchies.
“We Are the Police of Our Own Fields”: Gendered Boundaries within Sānu Krishak Sansthā
Smallholder women tea farmers’ rhetorical juxtaposition of swachcha vyāpār and Fair Trade in their daily conversations, their use of it to inform interlocutors of the distinction between the terms, and their subsequent actions within the cooperative were ways for the women to constantly connect the multiple forms of disenfranchisement affecting their everyday lives and also to remind themselves about their critical role in the economic and social reproduction of their communities. These reminders were necessary because women’s own investment in seeing themselves as housewives at times prevented them from making these critical distinctions. These realizations and reminders also helped them cultivate a vernacular calculus of the economic through which they interpreted the value of the economic success of the certified tea cooperative and Fair Trade. These critical reminders were also attempts to insert themselves into global narratives of trade-based justice, which they sustained through creating virtualities about smallholder women tea farmers’ lives. Hence Prema’s comment in the opening section of the chapter: “You know, that smiling woman on that tea package is not us.”
The reminders to themselves and to interlocutors took many forms. At the beginning of my ethnographic research I was just learning the routines of farm work, and from interacting with the male cooperative members, I got the impression from their descriptions that they were the farmers. When I began my detailed interviews with smallholder women tea farmers I always asked them to describe what farming duties male and female members of the household performed, in order to capture their perspective.
On one such occasion, I started my interview by asking Sumita didi (elder sister) when her husband was going to return from the field and what kinds of farming duties he performed. Sumita didi replied that her husband was in the army. Apparently, her sons were also preparing to join the army. Then, with a sarcastic smile, she said, “But, sister … we are the police of our fields.” This short statement was an extremely powerful reminder: the “we” meant women.
The sarcasm was directed at me because on this visit, my first to Sumita didi’s house, having just conversed with the male cooperative heads, I assumed that her husband always assisted her in farming. Sumita didi alerted me to women’s key contributions to farming and corrected my initial misunderstanding. This was a learning moment for me to understand how women were conscious of their household labor and were not ashamed to emphasize its significance, even to visitors. Both of us burst out laughing at the dry humor and sarcasm in the statement. It implied the de facto rights women had over their lands (even after the cooperative farmers received title to the land, most of the titles were in the name of the male family head) and also the importance of their labor and oversight for producing other cash crops in addition to tea. The extreme poverty in this community had forced many men to take up other occupations outside the village, particularly because the state considered farming tea outside of plantations illegal. Women at times were single-handedly responsible for the production and marketing of household agriculture. The statement was a very powerful reminder of how women interpreted their place within the community—the place from which they reinterpreted the meaning and value of Fair Trade.
Sumita didi’s statement also had dual meaning. Women in the tea cooperative not only had de facto rights over their land and produce, but they also needed to police the boundaries of their operation from the Fair Trade rules that enabled localized patriarchies to thrive. They needed to protect their dreams and desires of large-scale business within the community, even from well-meaning Fair Trade directives. Her comments were representative of how women perceived their contribution to their households and the challenges they faced within the cooperative at that time. Most visitors assumed that men were the farmers because they dominated the affairs of the cooperative. These misconceptions frustrated the women, and they felt compelled to remind people of their rightful place in the cooperative community.
Women in the cooperative community felt that they had sustained the production of organic tea even before the 1990s when there was no organic boom, no cooperative, and no NGO involvement. That is why Prema (as quoted at the beginning of this chapter) questioned the self-righteousness of Fair Trade institutions by asking, “Why now? Where were these people when we had no roads, when no one gave us loans, when we ate only stale rice?” Women performed the tedious jobs of plucking, hand-rolling, and drying the leaves, which they had hitherto sold to local tea shacks via middlemen because the tea board considered their tea illegal. This same tea had now gained the reputation of authentic, hand-rolled, traditional Darjeeling tea in NGO circles. As tea farmer Ashika commented, “It seems strange, some of us got arrested if the police checked our bags and found this loose tea. Now foreigners come and want to drink the same tea from us and praise it. They perhaps do not understand that our tea’s fortune might have changed, but that did not change the fortune of smallholder women tea farmers.” Ashika again subjected the celebratory narratives of Fair Trade—which they themselves recited to FLO officials during inspection visits—to the “vernacular calculus of the economic.” She reminded me that Fair Trade bodies had made them visible in certain ways, but also concealed their everyday challenges.
Smallholder women tea farmers’ everyday narratives were recollections and reminders of the dangers they had risked for their families. They had put at stake their reputation and physical life in pursuing invisible entrepreneurialism. The cooperative community did not have a proper road passable by car until 1996. Women, out of desperation to earn money, used chor bāto (hidden/thief’s roads) to take the tea leaves to the town of Darjeeling, a distance of twenty kilometers. Before the road was built, people had to walk six or seven hours to get to the town to sell their produce. The women used to start at night to ensure that they reached the town early and that fellow villagers would not see them going to town. As tea farmer Gayatri told me, “Being arrested was a common feature; we slowly learned to pay bribes at police check posts and learned how to hide the tea under the vegetables. But these dangerous journeys were worth it, because they helped us put food on the table and send our children to school. Tea would still fetch us more cash than vegetables.”
I heard similar narratives of risk taking from both older and middle-aged women. As Phulkumari, a woman in her eighties, reported,
We occupied plantation land and did not have patta [land title], the constant fear of getting ousted from the land was there. Like my husband, many men from the plantation villages then started looking for work in the town or outside Darjeeling: some went to Nepal, but the women had no choice. We lived on, tended the bushes which had grown wild and unruly because there was no one to maintain them. What you see now are the very remnants of those wild bushes. At times the bushes were as tall as me. But we kept plucking and making Hāthe chiā (hand-rolled tea) and made the long journeys to the town. Now that we have the cooperative, it is so much easier, but still people fight. I just don’t understand why.
Phulkumari’s comment that “still people fight” alluded to the conflicts between the cooperative and the women that upset her. She, like many other older women in the community, recollected and reminded me of the specific contributions of women’s farming practices and their role in sustaining their households. She further mentioned that along with some other women who used to go to town to sell tea, she had once blockaded the local police office, without the knowledge of her family. She stated that women had to take some action to stop the police from regularly arresting them when they were found with “illegal” tea. She said, “Women were good at this because if there were men protesting, they would have been put behind bars immediately.” Women used their submissiveness and femininity strategically for economic gain.
The introduction of Fair Trade in the cooperative community provided smallholder women tea farmers, old and young, an opportunity to reflect on, reevaluate, and remind themselves and people around them of their indispensable role in keeping alive the production of formerly illegal (now organic) tea and maintaining the economic well-being of their households. It also helped them cultivate a vernacular calculus that interpreted the value of Fair Trade. As tea farmer Lata once told me, alluding to the use of women’s labor for food preparation during cooperative events, “We cook rice for our homes, we are not going to do it for free for the cooperative.” Lata and Binu later forced the cooperative chairman to pay women for cooking for the inspection event. Lata further mentioned, “How can we have swachcha vyāpār if no one understands the value of rice we cook every day? We have to make the Women’s Wing survive to remind everyone about the value of our work and sometimes get money for it.” Lata’s comments were a reminder of the Women’s Wing’s efforts to make visible women’s contributions to their families, community, and cooperative through creative cultural entreprenurialism. One of the ways they sought public acknowledgment of their labor and time was through defending their own organization, where women called the shots.
My interviews revealed to me women’s very subjective interpretations of Fair Trade. Their goal of a THulo yojanā (big business) was an attempt to retain the vantage point of the vernacular calculus of the economic. They did not necessarily see Fair Trade practices as enabling a fair distribution of resources within the cooperative community and wanted to retain their collective space of critique—the Women’s Wing—to help remind everyone about their important roles in the household and community. These subjective reflections had raised deep doubts in their minds about Fair Trade’s ability to offer them swachcha vyāpār.
Conclusion: Empowerment Fix?
While the language of enabling choice and “giving voice” to the marginalized sounds powerful in theory, in reality the terrain of empowerment is uneven and highly contested. This problematic emerges partly from a lack of shared political vision(s) or agenda(s) among those who advocate empowerment … and partly from the narrow frameworks within which development planners frequently attempt to “simplify and fix” long-term and deep rooted social inequities and injustices.
—Nagar and Swarr 2005, 291
Political consumerism is often perceived as a panacea for redressing some of the inadequacies of global free trade. Fair Trade, as opposed to free trade, is seen as a new moral engagement that is better able to articulate Western consumers’ desire for justice promotion with Southern farmers’ empowerment needs. But does our well-meaning daily caffeine fix provide a meaningful empowerment fix in places of struggle? Or does it inadvertently support policies that try to contain the multilayered struggles of women into static frames?
The ethnographic details of existing gendered resource struggles in producer communities and events surrounding the implementation of Fair Trade provide us with an opportunity not only to understand the place-based gendered interpretations of Fair Trade in producer communities, but also to glimpse emerging modalities of women’s collective self-governance in Darjeeling, which are in critical dialogue with market-based “progressive” trade initiatives aimed at giving women more voice. Women use available opportunities to insert themselves into the global history of Fair Trade and expand its static frames of empowerment. Their efforts to juxtapose Fair Trade and swachcha vyāpār were thus a catachrestic effort to demonstrate the limitations of the value frame of Fair Trade. This process reveals how subjects of justice have to repoliticize the technical directives of the Fair Trade movement to defend their own dreams of development and entrepreneurialism—their gendered projects of value.
The gendered resource battles around Fair Trade directives opened up a space for women to enact their gendered projects of value by refusing to give up their women’s group. The Women’s Wing was a public reminder to their community of women’s refusal to fit themselves within the narrow frame of empowerment and of their long-standing efforts to sustain family and community—at times detrimental to their own safety. In the process, they also drew attention to the inadequacy of Fair Trade practices to address deeper gender-based structural inequalities in their community that maintained the hold of middlemen over people’s lives. While removing intermediaries is one of the central aims of Fair Trade, in Darjeeling the inspector did not recognize the domination of the middleman because he was approaching the situation from a technical, results-oriented perspective.
What is perhaps more critical is that women used their knowledge from previous engagements with market-based development ventures, such as microcredit loans, to interpret the significance of Fair Trade as a market-based justice movement. Through microcredit, women learned the hardships of repaying loans. For them, Fair Trade offered an opportunity to avoid the burden of loans while planning a more sustainable collective business that would assist them to avoid being singled out through shaming practices of local patriarchs. Creative engagement with Fair Trade directives was a way for them to limit men’s economic control of their lives and to reduce their dependence on microcredit loans.
An understanding of rural women’s mobilization within the market has to acknowledge their complex desires around development, which they attempt to further by questioning the directives of transnational Fair Trade campaigns. While Western consumer-activists desire progressive social change in global trade, these reflexive desires are translated through technical inspections that leave larger procedural inequalities in Fair Trade−certified communities intact. Women did not believe that Fair Trade would enable swachcha vyāpār through a meaningless “empowerment fix” and therefore engaged in repoliticizing Fair Trade rules.
In analyzing the background and circumstances of this struggle and negotiations around certification, this chapter illuminates the ways in which women’s collective agency can emerge within market-based production systems and how poor women farmers navigate inequities. Women in the cooperative did not perceive market-based trade as a problem; it was the gendered barriers within their community, unintentionally strengthened by Fair Trade initiatives that they regarded as the major impediment to their options for earning cash and supplementing their family income. Women’s juxtaposition of Fair Trade and swachcha vyāpār and their subsequent actions challenged the double standards within their community about the appropriateness and scope of women’s economic activity. It was a way for smallholder women tea farmers to enact their new subjectivities as entrepreneur-housewives who defended their own dreams of empowerment. Their empowerment was made possible by their creative abuse—catachresis—of “neo”-liberal empowerment frameworks, which tended to use them as instruments for global justice.
Women’s collective entrepreneurship ventures, as evidenced in Darjeeling’s remote rural locations, reduce or calibrate the dependence on market and men. Such ventures produce values, tangible and intangible, i.e., enduring socialities and relationships based on cooperation and coordination that help women and their families in social reproduction independently of market and men. While Fair Trade and the discourse of entrepreneurship makes this possible, women use the significance and importance of the notion of fairness to collectively chart pathways slightly different from the ones originally imagined in individualizing narratives of Fair Trade. The next few chapters will also demonstrate how women’s entrepreneurship moves to the sphere of the household and community to make visible multiple levels of complicity between culture, patriarchy, and capital which makes women’s everyday unsustainable.