3

The Reincarnation of Tea

For us, what is conventional tea is organic. When organic and Fair Trade inspectors ask us about our production practices, at times they are confused because they think we have no idea about organic production and we have switched to organic production recently. They ask us what we used during conventional production; I tell them our convention is organic!

—Secretary of the Tea Farmers Collective Sānu Krishak Sansthā1

I am confident, Ms. Sen, Darjeeling’s pride resides in its plantations. There is no tea grown outside it.

—Head of the Darjeeling Planter’s Association

The advent of Fair Trade organic tea production in Darjeeling provided an interesting backdrop for the articulation of gendered class relations in Darjeeling’s countryside. Although in the aftermath of the first Gorkhaland movement many in Darjeeling’s rural areas formalized their access to land, it did not result in the formalization of their tea production. The first epigraph in this section from the secretary of the Sānu Krishak Sansthā reflects this contradiction. If we recall Biren Rai’s comments in this book’s introduction, which reflected his newfound optimism about the future of organic production for young men, we can see that the celebration of small-farmer-grown tea in the Western world and its effects in the backwaters of Darjeeling’s tea industry had raised the hope of formalizing “illegal tea” grown in the basti. Authorities in Darjeeling’s local tea bureaucracy are in constant denial of the presence of non-plantation tea. What can be traded in the global market under the “Darjeeling” trademark has to be produced within the legal limits of the eighty-seven “Darjeeling” plantations. Even adjacent tea farms on its fringes, under the same microclimatic conditions cannot claim this label.

This contradiction in Darjeeling’s tea industry is telling; it reveals the geography of injustice on which organic tea production in the plantation thrives. In a climate where small-farmer-grown tea is still contraband since hāthe chiā [Darjeeling tea processed in non-factory settings], plantation owners have appointed themselves as leaders of Darjeeling’s small farmer movement (also discussed and demonstrated in chapter 8). Such practices deliberately create terminological confusions to disguise big plantations and their owners as small farmers and small farms. To further obscure the ground realities the FLO has quite ingeniously constructed a nebulous and flexible category—HLO (Hired Labor Organization) that includes small and miniscule farms as well as big plantations, egregiously ignoring the discrepancies on the ground. India, thus, has the highest number of Fair Trade-certified institutions with hired labor (also called Hired Labor Organizations or HLO). In this list plantations get classified as HLOs. Ravi Raman’s (2010) recent research on tea production in South India shows that these intentional terminological confusions leave the feudal structure of colonial tea production undisturbed in the postcolonial times. Plantation owners’ frequent use of the word garden or farm to designate plantations also leads to faulty perceptions among visitors and general Fair Trade tea consumers.

In the remainder of this chapter I highlight how Fair Trade and organic certification has affected plantations and small producer organizations like SKS.

Plantations and the Reincarnation of Tea

The history of Darjeeling is deeply intertwined with the production of tea. This so-called green gold has given this dreamy Himalayan town and its people global visibility and it forms the backbone of Darjeeling’s life and economy. A British planter who brought tea bushes from China in the days of the British Raj planted them in Darjeeling about 200 years ago. Tea is cultivated at altitudes ranging from 600 to 2000 meters. The cool moist climate, sloping mountainous terrains, and sufficient rainfall gave Darjeeling tea its unique muscatel flavor. At present there are about eighty-seven plantations thirty of which are certified organic producers, and the number of organic plantations is growing.2 At present about 17,500 hectares of land are invested in growing this tea, yielding about 10 to 11 million kilograms annually. Control of tea gardens takes three distinct forms: (1) foreign control through local units of transnational corporations, (2) Indian tea companies (public or private), and (3) joint ventures between foreign or national firms. Plantation owners, however, lease the land from the state and pay revenue from the profits earned (see Koehler 2015 for more details).

While the plantations and tea are a matter of pride for some, others hold tea mono-cropping as a reason for the district’s economic impoverishment. They argue that the plantation lobby has prevented any other manufacturing industries to flourish in Darjeeling for the fear of losing their cheap labor (Bhowmik 1981). According to the Indian Tea Board, 80 percent of the tea that is grown in this area is exported to Europe, North America, and Japan. In my interviews with planters, the export figure of individual plantations varied between 90 and 98 percent depending on how much their plantation exported. Darjeeling tea can sell anywhere from Rs100 ($2 approximately) a kilogram to Rs. 18,000 ($400) a kilogram, depending upon its quality. Most ordinary people in India do not drink Darjeeling tea because it is unaffordable. Chai which is made of CTC (short for crush, tumble, and curl) tea is more common.

Plantations, which claim to grow Darjeeling tea have to be registered as a Darjeeling brand. This further complicates the issue of authenticity since Darjeeling’s tea-growing area does not overlap with the administrative district of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGHC). The latter includes eleven plantations in the plains (terai) area, but international buyers do not accept this as orthodox Darjeeling tea. In fact, the tea grown in the plains is of a different quality, considered inferior to Darjeeling tea. In the state of West Bengal, Darjeeling district produces most of its tea for export. The plains tea produced in the foothills of Darjeeling is mostly for domestic consumption and exported to the Middle East and Russia. The tea produced in Darjeeling is known as “orthodox black tea,” and the variety produced in the Assam gardens and the foothills of Darjeeling is labeled as “CTC.” The market and prices of these two kinds of tea are very different (Koehler 2015).

These confusing distinctions have also created trade problems. About 40 million kilograms of tea sold in the world market were under the label of Darjeeling, but they are not produced in this certified Darjeeling area. In the wake of the World Trade Organization (WTO) regulations to protect intellectual property rights within sovereign domains, the government of India has defined a specific area in which Darjeeling tea can be grown. The government in conjunction with WTO has promulgated a Geographical Indications act that will enforce it. The Tea Board of India is also pushing for a registered trademark for Darjeeling tea, which will certify its origin in every transaction. The forging of labels in the international market also hints at the huge demand for Darjeeling tea, which amounts to just one percent of the total tea output in India but is remarkable in terms of the money that it can command in the world market.

Darjeeling tea is known for is distinct flavor that its connoisseurs recognize just by touching it to their palette. Darjeeling is a very common ingredient in “English Breakfast” blends. Blends called “Irish Breakfast” contain lower-grade, stronger black teas from Assam (India) or elsewhere. It is the specialty of the Darjeeling brand that makes boundary disputes very strong. Many plantations want to be part of the chosen group that will enjoy a much higher price and prestige in the world of tea.

The fall of the Soviet Union was a dark moment in the Indian tea industry. Plantations of North West Bengal including Darjeeling were no exception to this general downturn in the tea market. Because of political turmoil in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the assured market of the former Soviet Union was no longer available. Together with these political developments, other nontraditional tea-producing countries also offered low prices for similar quality tea. Kenya and Sri Lanka gave stiff competition. According to some plantation owners, the flooding of Indian markets with cheap, aerated drinks reduced domestic consumption of tea, adding to the tea crisis.

Darjeeling in the 1990s was just recovering from the scars of the Gorkhaland movement (discussed in chapter 2), during which a large part of the industry had reduced production. At the end of the movement, the tea industry was faced with this turbulent tea market. Darjeeling tea producers started searching for new markets in the UK and the US. Darjeeling tea was popular in the West, especially the United Kingdom and Europe, and the market was also big in Japan. However, the adversities for plantation owners had not yet ended. The specialty market in tea was the domain of health-conscious consumers who sought a wholesome cup devoid of chemicals/pesticides. This was a time when food scares dominated Western countries, especially Europe (see Friedberg 2004). Consumers were also increasingly concerned about the socioeconomic conditions of the people and communities where this special cup was produced. There was a growing interest in recognizing the rights of producers in third-world nations who toiled in dreadful working conditions and were vulnerable in the turbulent world market.

On one of my early visits to Darjeeling in 2004, the big, bright-red billboard on my way from the airport “shouted” the following phrase, “the reincarnation of Tea.” The phrase stuck with me; I saw it being used by plantation managers and publicity personnel in the subsequent months. The reincarnation was essential because of a changed market scenario. The recent shift to organic and biodynamic tea production was a response to this demand. In the mid-1990s, huge shipments of Darjeeling tea were sent back from Europe and Japan because of the high chemical residues found in them. Although the tea produced by chemical intensive methods was of superior quality, the returned shipments made some plantations switch to organic production methods. The decision to switch was not an easy one, as I will explain later.

While plantations still provide the order of reason in Darjeeling’s tea economy, they felt the need to form new alliances with the region’s “illegal tea producers.” In Darjeeling, plantations were recognized as legal spaces for tea production. As indicated earlier, “Geographically Indicated,” place-specific branding by the state and confirmed global laws stipulated that Darjeeling tea could only be produced within the eighty-seven recognized tea plantations. Any tea produced outside these boundaries is labeled as illegal. Plantations were and still are forbidden from buying tea from outside Darjeeling, meaning outside these eighty-seven plantations. The Darjeeling tea logo can only be used for tea produced within these plantations. In the tea world, Darjeeling tea means tea grown in plantations. This is the more publicized history of Darjeeling tea production. But there is also an informal shadow economy of Darjeeling tea, which has been around for many years but has gone unnoticed in the official histories and statistics. Obscured in the dominant representations of the area’s geography, which emphasize the orderly colonial plantation aesthetics, this shadow economy has remained outside the tea industry. For instance Jeff Koehler’s popular book, Darjeeling: A History of the World’s Greatest Tea, does not mention anything about Fair Trade, small farmers, tea cooperatives, or women tea plantation workers, at least according to its index. It does discuss organic farming. The book was published in 2015 and perhaps Koehler and I were in Darjeeling talking to very similar people, but the gendered shadow history of the world’s greatest tea is absent in his wonderful book.

Figure 3.1. The Reincarnation of Tea. Photo by author.

Clandestine trade between plantations and small growers were rampant during this time. Every now and then there would be news in the papers, or at best planter’s gossip, that a particular plantation is buying tea from small growers in India or from Ilam (a district of Nepal that shares its boundaries with Darjeeling). The state-recognized legal boundaries of tea production and ability of the plantations to transgress them illegally have enabled this shadow economy of tea to thrive in Darjeeling for many years. This form of boundary maintenance and subsequent crossing, as I found out, has increased as plantations switched to organic cultivation. Plantations seeking organic and/or Fair Trade labels are finding it hard to keep up with the declining tea production due to organic conversion. Pests are hard to control in the absence of chemical use. Production falls by 30 percent when plantations abandon chemically induced production to adopt organic methods (Bisen and Singh 2012). The production shortfall could be overridden only by buying the so-called illegal tea from small growers. Such critical dependence of the plantations on the small farms to keep up the productivity and maintain quality helps the small growers emerge from the shadows. Combined with the historic (by Darjeeling standards) wage increases in 2011 plantation owners are full of lament about rising costs.

Small tea farmers in Darjeeling’s informal economy, who have depended on these illegal circuits and have had no connections with the global market, are now finding new ways to challenge their disenfranchisement within this tea industry by forming their SPOs despite their tenuous contracts with plantations. They are thankful for local NGOs, which are the local face of a new organic movement in the West, bringing these farmers in touch with transnational agencies and certifiers of organic produce to increase their visibility in the international tea trade. In this book, I draw attention to some (positive) impacts of transnational alternative trade campaigns for the regions’ small farmers, who are rarely talked about in the Tea Board or tea planter’s community. It brings to light an alternative history of Darjeeling tea production, which is neglected because very few plantation owners want to try new ways of producing tea. “While some management would be open to implementing an entire new system for compensating workers, they often complain that the mind-set in the Darjeeling hills is entrenched and not open to large changes” writes Koehler (2015: 219). He further quotes an executive from the tea industry to describe the institutional orthodoxy in plantation country—“Those who rule the tea gardens, rule the hills. … They’d rather see eighteen, twenty gardens shut than make any changes,” said the executive (Koehler 2015: 2019). He quotes a world-renowned planter, Rajah Banerjee, who predicts the future of Darjeeling’s plantations post-2011 labor negotiations stating—“They take away the rations and there will be revolution” (Koehler 2015:219).

The new aesthetics of tea consumption in the West, expressed through a movement for organic Fair Trade−certified tea has impacted the spatial politics of Darjeeling’s tea industry. Marketing of the cultural difference of foods through these transnational alternative trade movements has engendered a new spatial politics of production in Darjeeling. The new “politics of recognition” (Fraser 1997), manifested through an obsession with “small farmers,” their “traditional methods of growing tea,” their sustainable lives, and concern about their vulnerability in the global tea market has intensified the struggle over boundaries of legality, territory, and resources in Darjeeling’s organic tea-producing communities. I will explain the history of Darjeeling’s illegal farmers who exist alongside the plantation in the next section.

In Darjeeling, the switch from conventional to organic tea production due to alternative trade movements has led to the dependence of the “legal sector,” or the plantations, on the “fragile-illegal” spaces and unrecognized producers, a majority of whom are women. While the Fair Trade Organic movement gives prominence to the so-called “illegal farmers,” efforts to secure access to land and market among the “illegal” women tea farmers have gained intensity in the political life of the villages, so long excluded from the global circuits of tea trade. Women tea farmers, who claim to have kept alive the production of illegal—now organic—tea feel disadvantaged as male members in their community try to dominate the tea business.

The Shadow History of Tea in Darjeeling

When I began my preliminary research in Darjeeling, I was under the impression that I was going to study the effects of Fair Trade/organic policies on plantation workers. The aesthetics of plantations was so binding on my imagination of Darjeeling that I couldn’t believe any tea was grown outside plantations. Tea production was synonymous with rolling hillsides dotted with bushes, spreading out uniformly for miles on end, very much an effect of centuries of monoculture and large-scale plantation production. Trapped in the aesthetic tropes, I could not recognize a multicropping arrangement of tea production like we see below. Here tea is grown alongside turmeric, cardamom, ginger, and other produce. As I was getting to know more people in Darjeeling’s NGO circle, I heard rumors about “illegal farmers” and their tea cooperative. For me the Darjeeling Planter’s Association (DPA)3 was a natural place to enquire about these new and exciting developments in the history of this region. When I asked the head of DPA, he insisted that there were no tea farmers in Darjeeling. His self-conscious denial stoked my desire to know about the role of farmers in Darjeeling’s economy, especially why no one in places of power wanted to talk about them.

My search soon brought me to the right NGO that was involved in development work among such “illegal” farmers and had organized them into an SPO. I detail this NGO’s history later in the chapter. It was the thick of the monsoon season when I had planned my trip to the illegal niches. The person who was going to guide me to these villages warned me that the road conditions were going to be terrible because of the recent landslides due to heavy monsoon rains. Through the heavy monsoon mist, we started the journey, which was approximately 20 kilometers from the center of Darjeeling town. On my journey, the plantation aesthetics dominated my imagination, I asked Pravin (an NGO worker), “How far are we from the tea farmer’s lands?” He replied “We are there. Soon I will show you the tea cooperative office and you will meet some people.” According to Pravin, my reaction to the strikingly unconventional tea landscape was identical to the tea buyers who come here. An American buyer apparently asked him, “Are you sure this is not some wild variety of tea? How can this even be organic tea, this does not look like an average tea plant.” Pravin had the IMO (Institute of Marketecology) organic certificates for the co-op ready. He said that he loved this moment when people challenged him, and he would show them the paperwork of organic certification. The contradiction of visual aesthetics and taste is an interesting one and outsiders like me let the visual quickly overtake our minds. Also see figure 0.4, Aesthetics of Non-Plantation Landscape in the introduction, which shows a typical scene in a smallholder tea farm practicing multi-cropping by default instead of monoculture.

Figure 3.2. Scene at a SKS Tea Farming Household. Photo by author.

The visual aesthetics not only conceal secret tea histories, but also gendered stories of survival, trade and activism. Soon I tasted hāthe chiā4 with a very distinct smoky taste while chatting in the kitchen of a small farmer. I asked Pravin why the tea tasted different. Pravin told me, “When they pluck the leaves and dry it beside the clay ovens, some of the smoke from the oven gets into the tea, which is very sensitive, and the leaves easily take on the flavor of their surroundings. Most people are not used to this smoky taste which happens because of the lack of proper processing units and use of wood-burning or sometimes coal chulāhs (ovens).” It was because of these limitations that members of the cooperative have had to depend on a plantation to make their tea market worthy. The situation might appear grim for the farmers are at the mercy of plantations, but plantations also have to depend on these farmers for economic and strategic marketing purposes. Their desperation has linked them to these illegal communities in ways which affected the latter’s community dynamics.

For plantations the process of conversion to organic is extremely difficult. Soon after India’s independence, chemical-intensive, green revolution technologies were adopted by plantations to boost production; tea was one of India’s major exports. Pesticides were used to reduce the effects of pests, which are a perpetual problem in the tea industry even today. When plantations converted to organic pesticides they became less effective in dealing with the pest problem. During conversion yields declined because of the non-use of chemical fertilizers (Bisen and Singh 2012). This is where the small-scale tea farmers grabbed the plantations’ attention. Plantations had to wait for three or four years for complete organic certification, but they could expedite the process by buying organic tea from illegal farmers. As I understand from my interviews with plantation owners, organic cultivation methods can never match the volume of productivity achieved through chemical-intensive techniques. Thus, the informal sector tea farmers producing illegal tea suddenly became part of Darjeeling’s new economic transformations. They were cultivating illegal tea so far in the margins of plantations in the shadow of national development. There are various reasons why their tea is considered illegal, as I will explain shortly.

Sānu Krishak Sansthā: The Cooperative of “Illegal” Tea Farmers5

Darjeeling’s tea farmers own their lands; it is the tea they produce on it which the state, even today, considers illegal despite the Tea Board running programs for them. The picture below is of one such training program conducted in 2015. The tea board logo for Darjeeling GI is present in this poster.

Figure 3.3. Poster from a Recent Small Farmers Training Event Organized by the Tea Board of India in July 2015. Courtesy of Navin Tamang.

Below I have included another picture taken at this event where you see women and men listening to the details of state schemes for small farmers. These are “farmers by default” because they were actually plantation workers during the colonial period and became unemployed when the British owners of the plantations left in 1950 after independence. There are many such cases of abandoned plantations in Darjeeling. Very few scholars and policymakers have documented the history of these communities, except for the local NGO which worked with them.

After the plantation closed, the people in these plantations then arbitrarily divided the land among themselves and continued growing tea. From interviews with community members, it became clear that they uprooted many tea bushes to make space for other agricultural products in the face of unemployment and immense hardships. Because the plantation closed down, workers destroyed the factory out of frustration. At that time, as there were no roads in the community, this forced farmers to make dangerous journeys to Darjeeling town to sell whatever they grew. This area was connected to Lebong with a proper road in the early 2000s.

Due to mono-cropping of tea, these plantation workers did not know how to produce anything else, and almost 100 years of acidic tea mono-cropping had made the land unsuitable for any other forms of agriculture (Tamang 2003). These “farmers” therefore found their way out completely on their own, by selling illegal tea. But due to their marginality these farmers had one advantage. The abandoned plantation was away from the state’s attention; there was no use of chemical fertilizers because the farmers simply could not afford it. The people produced superior quality Darjeeling tea through the use of cow dung and compost homemade manure as opposed to the chemical-intensive green revolution technologies. They rolled dried tea leaves beside their chulās (clay ovens) in the absence of processing units. They sold this tea in the local market at dirt-cheap prices because it was not legally cultivated; they did not have processing plants to meet government requirements for exporting or selling outside Darjeeling.

Figure 3.4. Men and Women at a Recent Small Farmers Training Event Organized by the Tea Board of India. Courtesy of Navin Tamang.

The farmers who accidentally practiced “organic” agriculture are now coming to reap some benefits. They have gained international attention from tea buyers in search of an “authentic” cup of Darjeeling tea—just as it was grown during the Raj.6 The latter has raised hopes among these small farmers who had been selling their organic illegal teas in the local market at give-away prices. They had almost given up tea production to grow other cash crops, which had more value in the local market.

The plantation in which the current co-op members worked closed in 1956 after many turbulent years. This closure was not abrupt but a slow process lasting a decade. The process made the plantation workers jobless, and a period of turmoil ensued. When the tea estate closed down, the people distributed the land among themselves, which gave birth to new “agricultural” settlements. The distribution of the land was done arbitrarily. The people, for the next decade, survived by selling tea leaves illegally in Darjeeling town or to neighboring plantations. At other times, they felled trees in the tea garden reserve forest and sold firewood and charcoal. In 1962 the reserve forest was exhausted and the hope of the tea garden re-opening had receded further; the people, then, began to uproot some of the tea bushes and started to cultivate other crops. They began to grow maize and millet. The production was very low. The lack of knowledge of cultivation and the infertility of the soil were the causes of such low production.

The present cooperative members were mainly fourth- and fifth-generation daily wage laborers in the closed and abandoned British estate. They depended solely on the tea estate for their livelihood and were not engaged in any other productive economic activity. Agriculture was an alien lifestyle for them, at which they failed miserably. The people used to supplement their income by selling milk. Most of the people had bought cows with the loans obtained from the village middlemen at very high interest. The interest rates ranged from 72 percent to 120 percent per annum. The milk was bought by the same middlemen, who then sold it in Darjeeling town.

Through the Kisān Sabhā (a leftist farmers’ union) in 1977, official measurement and distribution of land among the people were initiated, which, as I understand from my interviews, was completed after the GNLF came to power in the late 1980s. Informants in the cooperative area attribute their getting land titles to the GNLF. In 1973, the first NGO intervention was made in this area. This was a Jesuit NGO run by Catholic missionaries. This NGO helped establish a dairy union and sponsored medical outreach programs. The dairy union ceased to function once this Jesuit NGO withdrew in the mid-1980s. In 1996, with the intervention of secular branch of the same NGO, the small tea farmers were organized into a cooperative, with milk as its first product. The tea cooperative started functioning in 1997 and filed its official registration paperwork in early 2007. There were many hurdles to this registration, although plans had been in the pipeline since its inception in 1997. The main impediment was the legal battle to ensure that these lands fell within the geographically indicated Darjeeling tea-growing area. Although the area of this now-abandoned plantation was at the heart of the “Darjeeling Tea” growing area, the Darjeeling tea bureaucrats have still not responded favorably to registration efforts or to including these farmers within in the designated Darjeeling tea-growing areas.

In 1996 the NGO conducted a survey among the villagers to find out the development needs of this crisis-ridden community. At that time there were a total of 307 homes and the population was close to 1,469 (male 663, female 806). The area also had high illiteracy, women had even lower literacy compared to men. Total land calculated in this survey was 401.92 acres. Animal husbandry and agriculture were the main occupations of the community. The people of this community are mostly Rais7 and Chettris with a few Mukhiās, Biswakarmas, Gurungs, and Tamangs, ethnic/caste groups who are all members of the Nepali community with Nepali being the common and binding language.

They practice agriculture and most have small land holdings; the average of all the villages being a mere 1.48 acres, and the average per family income (annual) being Rs. 11822.76 (according to the 1996 Survey, $237 at present exchange rates). Another baseline survey of the co-op area was conducted by an NGO during the months of August and September 2004. Table 3.1 shows the results:

Table 3.1. 2004 Demography of the Cooperative

The formation of the informal cooperative was seen as beneficial and more people from the abandoned plantation joined in. This is why we see an increase in the co-op’s total area and number of households between 1996 and 2004. At present, the cooperative is apprehensive about including new members because they suspect that new members might not have organic soil in their lands.

The people grew a variety of crops apart from tea, the most common being corn, vegetables and millet in the lower elevations of the cooperative area. When possible, vegetables were taken to the market (ethnographic details are provided in later chapters). The most important cash crops apart from tea were ginger, cardamom, turmeric, and in lower elevations, oranges. Before the cooperative was formed in 1997, tea farmers harvested tea leaves, hand-rolled and dried them, and sold the dried tea leaves in Darjeeling town. After the cooperative was formed, tea farmers sold their green leaf tea to the plantation through the cooperative and did not have to dry most of the tea leaves. A very small amount is dried today and kept for home consumption or sale in the Lebong, Pulbazar, or relatives in Darjeeling town.

The inaccessibility to the Darjeeling markets due to lack of reliable and cheap communication facilities severely limited the earning capacity of the people. In 1996 the first road was built, but certain neighbourhoods within the cooperative area had no roads until early 2000s. For all marketing and selling needs the villagers relied on middlemen, either from the village or outside. Most of these middlemen were also shop owners. The people took loans from these middlemen and paid them off by giving them their agricultural produce at the middlemen’s rate. Thus, the people were completely at the mercy of these middlemen who dictated rates of interest and prices of agricultural produce. Middlemen sold dry, illegal tealeaf for Rs. 130 to 150 per kg to tea shops in Darjeeling town. They paid Rupees 65 per kilogram in the village. This disparity was true for every commodity. Therefore, the middlemen, leaving the people with a meagre income, maximized a major part of the profit. These middlemen spoke about their own woes to me, stating there were not enough government jobs in Darjeeling and sometimes it was not possible to migrate to Delhi or Bangalore.

In 1998 the cooperative sold tea to the plantation at Rs. 16 per 1 kilo of green leaf tea which increased to Rs. 30 per kg of green leaf tea in 2006−2007 and stood at Rs. 52 in 2016. The Institute of Marketecology (IMO), Switzerland gave a “Producer Organic Certificate” to co-op members maintaining organic farm standards under ECC 2092/91, Naturland, Bio-Swiss (EU Standards), National Organic Program (USA Standards), and National Program for Organic Production (Indian Standards). This is a unique program in the Darjeeling Hills with implications for tea internationally. It is the only small-farmers’ project where the community owns the land, has developed a system of organic farming, and shares profits with a corporate/plantation tie up.

In 2004−2005, Fair Trade Labeling Organization International included this cooperative as a partner member. FLO labeling ensured that the products sold under the label were ethically produced and marketed. A percentage of the profit was provided to the primary producers, which was invested by the cooperative to buy an office space, build small bridges and tea weighing sheds, and repair the water tanks, which were built through the NGO help earlier. The cooperative and its recent achievements and publicity as the first small-farmer organic Fair Trade certified multicrop cooperative has raised a great deal of hope among members and their families. During the tea season, there is a great deal of activity in the households for harvesting tea and making sure that they are selling more tea to the cooperative. People are much more motivated about producing tea. The FLO premium was just Rupees 75,000 in 2004−2005 financial year, and in 2008 it had increased to Rs. 440,000 (I explain the concept of FLO premium in the next section). FLO regulates the contract between the cooperative and the plantation to which they sell their tea leaves.8

The cooperative has an elected governing body whose members were mostly male. Each household within the designated cooperative area is a member. Male household heads have the membership. In rare cases, when there is no male household member present, women are made members. Every two years the households vote to change the governing board. Within the cooperative area there are eleven clusters of households, which co-op members call gāon (village). These cluster settlements vary in size. Some have just seventeen households, whereas others have close to seventy households. These clusters were numbered by the NGO when they began work in this area for administrative efficiency. The cooperative used to have a Women’s Wing consisting of female relatives of the male cooperative members. I detail their activities below.

My interviews and participant observations among women have been instructive in understanding that women have fulfilled the major subsistence needs of this community through farming at home and engaging in all kinds of trade in agricultural and other commodities through informal networks. They call this process sakaunu—to make do—in Darjeeling Nepali. In subsequent chapters I detail their gendered history of struggle within the community and their present economic and political activities in the community, contrasting them with the activities of the women plantation workers. This section is an overview of what the women’s groups have done over the years, to provide a historical backdrop of their present pursuits as they unfold in subsequent chapters.

Figure 3.5. Women’s Wing Meeting at SKS.

While the NGO provided logistical support for all activities in the community, their effort to foster gender equity is not the centerpiece of their development and capacity building initiatives. Some efforts were made between 2006 and 2008 to help the Women’s Wing start an organic fresh vegetable business under a local label, but sharing the same principles of FLO (as per an interview with the NGO’s director). Women still rely on agricultural product sales and seek credit to invest in their farms. The Women’s Wing of Sānu Krishak Sansthā started their Credit Union in February 1999 with over 100 women members from cooperative registered families. The credit was made available through the Indian Bank, Darjeeling Branch, under the Self Help Group Scheme. The table below shows the extent of money borrowed by Women’s Wing members over the years and the amount of money they saved in five years. They got loans from the bank based on the amount they saved in the bank. The NGO handled the distribution of the loans since many women were illiterate; there was also much stigma associated with going to town and general unease with banks. The NGO, working with Sānu Krishak Sansthā, also helped with accounting to make sure that the Women’s Wing members were returning the money to the bank and that their accounts remained updated. Unlike many of the cooperative’s male members, the NGO members were more sympathetic to women’s needs and desires. Women also consulted the NGO members for ideas and logistical support for their various entrepreneurial ventures. In more recent years women have opted out of loan-induced Self Help Groups and reliance on NGOs. I detail some of this in the chapters to follow.

While the governing body of the cooperative was male dominated, members of the Women’s Wing were frequently present at important meetings. The Women’s Wing held their separate meeting on the eighth day of every month where the president and secretary of the Women’s Wing discussed the activities of the cooperative and how the Women’s Wing could benefit from them. Women cooperative members felt that the Women’s Wing should receive a separate share of the Fair Trade premium money each year. Women tea farmers accordingly devised a plan to start their own business to sell other organic commodities that they produce apart from tea. They wanted to do it as a group so that they could reduce their dependence on middlemen for selling such products. Women tea farmers in 2006−2007 felt that their business ventures were in tune with the larger concern over equity within the Fair Trade movement. They did not play ghumāuri, although they knew about its ubiquity among women plantation workers. At one savings group meeting one women tea farmer even compared “inter-lending” of money that they wanted to engage in with ghumāuri. In recent years, due to the Women’s Wing’s run-ins with SKS, each cooperative member village sends two women as Mahilā Pratinidhi to the cooperative to increase women’s participation. Women tea farmers also play a key role at the time of IC inspections (Internal Control tests for organic farming) and are paid modest stipends to assist with the process.

Table 3.2. Total Amount of Loans and Savings of Women’s Wing Members

Fair Trade in Darjeeling’s Tea Sector

Amidst this long and complex history of gendered struggles for resources and recognition and associated economic development processes, Fair Trade and accompanying practices of organic certification in Darjeeling provided a new threshold for some institutional rearrangements in plantations and tea-growing basti areas. Seen from the vantage point of plantation management, as expressed by one of the assistant managers of Sonākheti, it led to greater inroad of NGOs stepping in with resources, which mimicked what the state was supposed to do for them anyway. More insidious was this manager’s celebration of NGOs as institutions that could bring real change in plantations. I elaborate on such processes in the next chapter.

In the small producer organizations like SKS, where NGOs already had established presence as harbingers of development, Fair Trade and organic combined certification ended up strengthening the power and privilege of educated and landed men and their families—powerful male middlemen, compromising one of its goals of moving intermediaries for better return to producers. These middlemen have to be placed in context. They were by no means as middle class as Nepali families in Darjeeling town or plantation officials, but they held relatively more wealth, power, and social networks than the average smallholder farmer.

Fair Trade’s operation with small producer organizations in Darjeeling also resulted in new informal contractual agreements between plantations and small producers that are not sustainable in any way. However, because of the institutional context, the community’s history with development and especially women’s specific actions and social position, Fair Trade realized its potential goals by default. It did so by giving a legitimate presence to a large group of contraband tea producers (who are still not lawful Darjeeling tea makers since the Geographical Indications do not cover them). What is evident from the trajectory of Fair Trade−based sustainable development in Darjeeling is the disconnect from existing struggles for recognition, redistribution, and situated entrepreneurialisms. What is more disconcerting is not really so much the failure to address needs, but the hubris of privatized “Fair Trade” completely in denial of its blind spots when it comes to addressing structural issues pertaining to women’s empowerment and the structural violence of established ways of producing “Fair Trade” tea.

Overall, the goals of the Fair Trade movement are the following:9

Fair Trade is a trading partnership, based on dialogue, transparency and respect that seeks greater equity in international trade. It contributes to sustainable development by offering better trading conditions to, and securing the rights of, marginalized producers and workers—especially in the South. Fair Trade organizations (backed by consumers) are engaged actively in supporting producers, awareness raising and in campaigning for changes in the rules and practice of conventional international trade. (European Fair Trade Association)

Within the Fair Trade movement, there is great concern over what kinds of producer organizations FLO should certify. Recently, Fair Trade affiliated marketers have become conscious about whether plantations should be certified Fair Trade at all. They found inconsistencies in plantation reality and certification. On January 6, 2009, Phyllis Robinson wrote on the Equal Exchange website:

Equal Exchange and others believe that no matter how “benevolent” a plantation owner is, a joint labor-management council and social premiums cannot in and of themselves correct the huge imbalance of power that exists on a plantation. We just don’t believe that deep, structural goals oriented to change the playing field for small farmers can be achieved in a plantation setting. For these reasons, we are committed to building market access for small farmer tea organizations. … (http://smallfarmersbigchange.coop/. Accessed January 12, 2009)

Ms. Robinson, who authored the above article, further wrote that Fair Trade should go back to its roots and attempt to form empowering partnerships with small farmers, recognizing their rights and struggles.

The Fair Trade movement has engendered a diversity of opinions and expectations in its short history and there have been major fissures, like the formation of Fair Trade USA, which many academics and activists alike perceive as a sellout and full compromise of the goals of Fair Trade as noted in Robinson’s comments made at a very different time. The diversity of institutions is a result of the varied ethics and conceptualizations of fairness. Starbucks very recently, at least as evident from field operations in Darjeeling, maintained its own rules and used its own labels through creating its own NGO and rules of operation. In the market for fairness, advocates self-select themselves and do as they please as long as the story and reports sound good. There have been concerted efforts by activists and the Fair Trade bureaucracy to standardize rules and certification requirements. I would like to share the basic certification standards that I saw being used in participant observation and interviews by FLO certifiers:

Figure 3.6. Flowchart of Fair Trade Labeling Organization International (FLO) Operations in Darjeeling.

Fair Trade and Plantations

The plantations in which I did my fieldwork, which I call Sonākheti and Phulbāri were both Fair Trade and organic certified. Both had 60 to 65 percent women workers who did the grueling tasks of plucking, pruning, sorting, and planting new bushes in the nursery and were involved in every stage of the manufacturing process. An additional workforce was hired during the peak season (March to October), especially during June to August when the monsoon rains necessitate quick plucking of rapidly increasing tea tips. It is extremely hard to assess the actual numbers of the informal workers/casual workers. Their wages also varying and are much lower than the regular formal plantation workers. As evident from recent interviews that Jeff Koehler conducted with managers in Darjeeling’s plantations, “unauthorized worker absenteeism has become acute. In summer … it was 30 percent on the estate.” This particular manager in Koehler’s interview states further that the absenteeism has increased from 5 to 10 percent around 2003 to 25 to 30 percent in 2013. Koehler quotes other plantations managers who claim that the worker’s movement in 2011 (in conjunction with the regional agitation) forced them increase the minimum wage by 34 percent, the largest increase in Darjeeling’s tea history. Managers believed that worker absenteeism could be contained through this increase in wage but, on the contrary, absenteeism continued. Koehler quotes a worker from the famous Makaibari estate who explains the continued absenteeism this way, “Life is too expensive. You can buy nothing with ninety rupees” (2015: 156−57). My long stays in similar plantations made evident the daily entrepreneurialism of women as a way to stretch this low wage.

Each plantation worker’s day begins at 7:30 a.m. and continues until 4:30 p.m. with an hour-long break for lunch. The plantation system is hierarchical, with the owner/planter in control of every aspect of production and marketing. Field supervisors, group leaders, and ordinary workers/pluckers are mostly Nepali. Other ethnic groups dominate the management and ownership. The ownership is mostly Marwari, with a few owners being Bengali. The management is a mix of Bengali, Marwari, and well-to-do Nepali men. Women mostly occupy the lowest strata of the hierarchy, with a few female group supervisors. Office workers consist of a few women who work as typists and accountants. These women are Nepalis, belonging to comparatively wealthy families in the plantation, who could afford a college degree for their children. After the Second Gorkhaland Agitation put wage increase for plantation workers on their agenda for struggle, the daily wage of an ordinary plantation worker increased from 53.90 to Rs, 67, with a cumulative Rs, 13.10 increase spread over three years” (Koehler 2015: 156). Since 60 to 70 percent of costs in tea production goes toward labor upkeep and wages, these increases were challenging for plantations to accept. It is important to note that none of this wage increase was due to Fair Trade/FLO interventions. It was enabled by regional political mobilization.

Plantation hierarchies were also spatially represented. Most plantation workers are provided with housing. The owner and management live in big bungalows with an entourage of maids, cooks, guards, and drivers. Ordinary workers live in designated housing areas. Clerical staff (office workers, Chaprāsi, and Kāmdhāri) have better housing provisions than ordinary pluckers. Most plantation workers complained that their housing conditions were a serious issue. Most homes had water leakage, and sanitation was also a major problem. There is a small dispensary in the plantation’s main office premises for basic health check-ups. Most plantation homes now have electricity, but some homes that are located far off from the main office still do not have electricity. Plantation workers’ families have lived and worked in the same plantation for generations. Upon retirement, a family member can retain each worker’s job and his/her housing allocation. This system is seen as a challenge by many plantation owners, evidence of which is found in Koehler’s recent book where he writes, “because of the live-in system and the convoluted laws about firing workers, gardens continue to pay periodically absent workers and cannot easily replace them” (Koehler 2015: 157).

Plantation Work Hierarchy

Figure 3.7. Organizational Chart of Plantation Hierarchy.

Unions, Joint Body, and Fair Trade

All plantation workers in Darjeeling are represented by a union, stipulated by the Plantation Labor Act of 1951. Like elsewhere in India, union activities in Darjeeling are closely tied to the aims and ideologies of the political party with which the union is affiliated (see also Fernandes 1997, Chatterjee 2001, Basu 1992). The union’s leadership is loyal to the party. In Darjeeling pre-1984 most labor unions were of communist leanings. After the first Gorkhaland Agitation, the majority of unions became affiliated with the GNLF, the local ethnic party. Communist- or Congress Party-affiliated unions were few and weak. In Sonākheti, every worker is a union member, but there was no major union activity realated to living wages until the Second Gorkhaland Agitation that began in 2007. My interviews with retired and active tea bureaucrats revealed that plantation unions are much less militant now than twenty years ago. A point of comparison was the plains tea garden unions that in the 1980s and 1990s were mostly non-GNLF and affiliated with Center of Indian Trade Unions [CITU, Communist Party of India (Marxist)] or Indian National Trade Union Congress [INTUC (Congress)], the major political parties in the rest of the state of West Bengal. At present plains unions at the Darjeeling foothills are also affiliating with Trainamool Congress, the ruling party of West Bengal state.

Today most plantations also have an organization called a Joint Body. The formation of this group was necessitated by Fair Trade certification. All Fair Trade−certified plantations are required to have a Joint Body to make democratic decisions about the disposal of Fair Trade premium money. According to the Fair Trade certification handbook, the Joint Body is supposed to be a democratic space consisting of a mix of workers, union members, and management staff. My informants have repeatedly told me that the Joint Body has union members who are not greatly involved with the union. They do not include the leadership of the union or union representatives who are brave enough to challenge the owner or the management. The owner handpicked worker representatives, and the presence of senior management staff made this space lack any form of democratic decision-making. Plantation Joint Body meetings were abrupt and irregular. A senior woman office worker in the plantation told me that Joint Body meetings were organized when inspectors, researchers or important tea buyers were visiting. When I first visited the plantation, I was invited to attend the meeting where a FLO official was also present at a Joint Body meeting. When I interviewed past and present union office holders, they had no idea about what Fair Trade was and said that they were never involved in disbursing Fair Trade funds.

In my participant observation of certification dynamics and interviews with Fair Trade certifiers, I have seen them check for involvement of workers in the disbursal of Fair Trade preminum. However, since the Joint Body was organized by the management workers’ viewpoints about what the premium amount should be spent on rarely made it to the negotiating table. To implement rules, FLO had two specific operations through two departments: FLO-EV, responsible for providing Fair Trade training to member producer communities; and FLO-CERT, which finds out whether producer organizations are indeed carrying out their operations according to Fair Trade standards. To get the Fair Trade label, producer organizations have to undergo yearly inspections by a representative of FLO-CERT.

When producer organizations decide to sell their Darjeeling tea in the Fair Trade market, they send their produce to the retailers in the West. For every kilogram of Darjeeling tea sold in the Fair Trade market, producer organizations get a premium over and above the regular market price of that kilogram of dry tea. For instance, if the tea cooperative sold 5,000 kilograms of black tea in the Fair Trade market in one year, they would get one Euro for every kilogram of tea sold over and above the market price for cost of production. FLO would monitor that the cooperative is indeed getting back 5,000 Euros as Fair Trade premium. My interviews with cooperative governing body members revealed that they were getting their premiums regularly. FLO tried to ensure that this money was being used for community development in producer organizations. FLO officials also ensured that plantations, which processed and exported small-farmer-grown tea, were being transparent in their operations with the co-op.

It is really difficult to trace when exactly Fair Trade projects began in Darjeeling since no one has recorded its history. Plantations try to stretch their Fair Trade legacy as far back as possible for marketing dividends. There is tough competition among the big plantations on how old their organic and Fair Trade operations are, and each has a different story of pioneering these costly changes in the plantation sector. From my interviews with plantation authorities and local NGOs, I gathered that plantations that had a good marketing team were ahead in the Fair Trade game. From their frequent visits to Europe and United Kingdom, particular plantation owners and their managers discovered that they could get their Fair Trade tea certification along with organic branding. The owner of Sonākheti claimed that he has been doing Fair Trade since the early 1990s. Other plantation authorities mentioned that they started their Fair Trade affiliations in the new millennium. Small tea farmers’ affiliation with Fair Trade was much more recent, since 2004.

It is also important to understand how Fair Trade works in Darjeeling. I noticed some patterns. Plantations who are members of FLO carry out their own Fair Trade−related awareness or development work. The management oversees how Fair Trade funds are disbursed. FLO also grants Darjeeling plantations some special opportunities regarding the use of Fair Trade premium monies. In plantations in other parts of the world, Fair Trade premium must be spent for the enhancement of workers’ socioeconomic conditions beyond what they get as wages and fringe benefits. In these plantations, for instance, FLO would not allow wage supplementing or paying a bonus. Keeping in mind the severe under-development of Darjeeling, FLO states, “An exception is made in case of Darjeeling where basic needs for workers (e.g., housing, water, and sanitation) may be partly financed through Fair Trade premium. This is due to the critical economic situation in the Darjeeling region” (FLO 2011). Plantation owners of course have turned this special provision to their advantage by covering 30 to 50 percent of facilities maintenance and worker provisions costs, which they have to provide to workers as per the Plantation Labor Act. What is even more interesting is that these funds are frequently loaned out to workers and the plantation earns interest.

Small farmers’ organizations usually work with NGOs to carry out Fair Trade awareness campaigns and plan development. The reason why local NGOs get involved is because these small farmers’ communities have depended on NGOs for previous development work. The NGOs now act as consultants and explain Fair Trade rules and regulations to small farmer communities in the local language (Nepali) and assists the cooperative governing board in making the best use of Fair Trade premium money. One NGO member told me, “We are so happy that Fair Trade money has begun flowing into these developmentally deprived communities. Our resources as an NGO are limited for perennial supply of development money to these communities.” NGOs also monitor the relationship between the small farmer co-op and the plantation which processes their tea and sends it to Western retailers. Not all Fair Trade work in Darjeeling happens according to FLO rules. Large beverage giants run their own Fair Trade−related NGOs. Plantations that sold their tea to these large beverage giants involved their own NGOs to carry out welfare work in the plantations. In such instances, these NGOs also provided funds and logistics for welfare work in the plantations.

Conclusion

This partial privatization of state actions through Fair Trade, alongside the celebration of NGOs within plantations indicates the steady emergence of private transnational regimes of governance (Mutersbaugh 2005). The logic of these privatized transnational governing practices is similar to the ones of the state that rule over a national society. Michel Foucault (1990: 13) identifies the logic of the modern state’s ruling practices as biopolitical, since administrative and political practices of the state derive their legitimacy by fostering self-disciplining of its citizens by regulating “bio”—the ordinary and existential life of individuals or citizens. These individuals and citizens constitute a national society where individuals and groups depend on each other and impersonal bureaucratic rules for their basic existence. Thus, biopolitics operates by regulating society through the self-regulation of individual citizens (Sen and Majumder 2011).

In the era of globalization, mutual dependence extends beyond the borders of nations. Hence, transnational governance mechanisms like Fair Trade have emerged to govern trade relationships that traverse continents. The Fair Trade model and its practice of certifying and labeling food and agricultural commodities are means of nurturing ecological and equitable life on a transnational scale. Fair Trade practices also operate as a regulating, disciplining, and governing mechanism that is both restrictive and productive. It entails technical interventions in producer communities by monitoring and inspecting farms and farming techniques, checking the conditions of on-farm labor relations, and tracking the use of Fair Trade premium by farming communities to approve Fair Trade labeling of agricultural products. In this sense, Fair Trade fosters individual and collective self-regulation among producer communities and is a transnational biopolitical regime.

Moreover, the effects of Fair Trade as a biopolitical regime are similar to the effects of bureaucratic and governing practices of the state in instructive ways. A contradiction between a bureaucratically inclusive national society and exclusions that curtail rights of minorities characterizes state-centric biopolitics (Ong and Collier 2005: 15). This incessant clash between inclusive ideals and actual facts of exclusion is also the emerging trait of Fair Trade, which promises equality and justice for marginalized producers. Incidents of exclusion of marginalized farmers, who find meeting Fair Trade standards costly, are very common as corporations are appropriating the Fair Trade model or making use of certification practices. Thus the Fair Trade label, whose primary purpose is to convey on-the-ground situations in producer and farmer communities, is displaced to give a false sense of moral choice to consumers buying labeled products. Consequently, the goal of defetishizing the commodity is defeated by further fetishizing the imagined moral relationship that the consumer strikes with the producer. This has lead Mark Moberg and Sarah Lyon (2010: 8) to see Fair Trade as “shaped advantage” that enables “a limited number of producers to enter the global market under more favorable terms, utilizing enhanced institutional capacity and marketing skills to tap into a growing niche market.”

However, the resemblance of state-centric biopolitics and Fair Trade extends beyond simply being a mechanism of domination. Disenfranchisement and exclusion notwithstanding, the idea of inclusiveness of state practices nurture expectations among citizens. These expectations make people aware of their rights and give rise to counterpolitics. Similarly, Fair Trade and its certification practices cultivate certain kinds of expectations in producer communities, even among the excluded groups (Lyon 2008; Sen 2009). These expectations serve as a launching pad for critical counterpolitics that tend to challenge and contest national and transnational political economic relationships undergirding Fair Trade, conventional trade, and state practices, as well as various kinds of inequalities within the producer communities, such as class and gender inequalities, that keep the poorest or the most disadvantaged groups from accessing the benefits of Fair Trade or trade in general (Renard and Pérez-Grovas 2007; Sen 2009). This aspect of Fair Trade is relatively unexamined and is highlighted in this book through ethnographic attention to the effects of Fair Trade certification in producer communities. Fair Trade has set in motion a process that helps global market relations to penetrate the remotest corners of the world for resources, but it also creates potentials and possibilities for a global counterpolitics.

The trajectory of Fair Trade is best understood as an interaction between Fair Trade as a social movement (Jaffee 2007) with commitment to ethical and environmental issues, and Fair Trade as a transnational biopolitical regime. Its movement through place and time is marked by shifts, displacement of goals, reassertion of activist values, and uneven impacts on the ground. I argue that Fair Trade blurs the distinction between market-based exchanges of agricultural commodities that extract resources from the Global South, and the global counterpolitics that challenge inequities of market-based exchange. This blurring sometimes engenders new possibilities for producers to articulate their situated demands for social justice, but it is also a new system of disciplining producers. Fair Trade’s mixed trajectory unfolds in the next chapters of this book.