Organic Sovereignties

Struggles over Farming in an Age of Free Trade

Guntra A. Aistara, K. Sivaramakrishnan

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780295743127
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This first sustained ethnographic study of organic agriculture outside the United States traces its meanings, practices, and politics in two nations typically considered worlds apart: Latvia and Costa Rica. Situated on the frontiers of the European Union and the United States, these geopolitically and economically in-between places illustrate ways that international treaties have created contradictory pressures for organic farmers. Organic farmers in both countries build multispecies networks of biological and social diversity and create spaces of sovereignty within state and suprastate governance bodies. Organic associations in Central America and Eastern Europe face parallel challenges in balancing multiple identities as social movements, market sectors, and NGOs while finding their place in regions and nations reshaped by world events.

CHAPTER ONE

Normal and Exceptional Sovereignties

WHEN I visited the Dīķzemes farm in western Latvia, Artūrs boasted that he was the seventh generation of his family living on the farm, and his wife Milda whispered to me that they sometimes even heard spirits of the ancestors in the attic. Artūrs’s relatives had worked as foresters for German barons in the nineteenth century but turned to agriculture in the 1900s. During the Soviet era, his family was allowed to remain in the house as an exception, because his father had participated in the resistance against Nazi Germany. His father’s farm before World War II had been thirty-five hectares, and after independence it was divided among the three sons, meaning that Artūrs regained just under twelve hectares in the first wave of post-Soviet land reform in the early 1990s.

Like most farmers, Artūrs and Milda started out small, but by 2005 they owned one of the largest organic farms in Latvia, where they raised 170 beef cattle in an extensive grazing system on over 400 hectares of agricultural land and another 130 hectares in forests, along with fields of grains and potatoes and home-scale fruit and vegetable production. They had acquired all of this land over the decade since decollectivization. Artūrs explained that no one else had been interested in the land around them at the time, so they invested their privatization certificates in land and borrowed money to acquire more, at prices of 15 lati per hectare (approximately twenty-eight dollars/hectare).1 “All of my ancestors struggled their whole lives for a couple of hectares of land, and now I was being given it for almost nothing.… I had to take it!” he exclaimed. While few farmers in Latvia can claim a seven-generation history on their land, Artūrs’s relation to his farm and his longing for land embody the long agrarian history remembered by many Latvian organic farmers, in relation to which they envision their futures.

Agrarian histories influence farmer subjectivities and conceptions of the pros and cons of entering free trade regions such as the EU or CAFTA. These histories shape how farmers imagine their future sovereignties in relation to, rather than necessarily independent of, the state (Cattelino 2008; Erazo 2013). In both Latvia and Costa Rica, national identities have been defined in relation to past patterns of domination by foreign powers, either political or economic or both. Within these national narratives, smallholder farmers play a central role as the backbone of the nation and the symbolic foundation of independence in Latvia and democracy in Costa Rica. While these national narratives relegate the concepts of independence and democracy to the symbolic realm, organic farmers experienced them as lived practices through which they realized their relations to their land and seeds, the state and the market, and their future in free trade regions.

While both Latvia’s and Costa Rica’s national agrarian narratives have been historically challenged, they still hold considerable sway in their respective national imaginaries in defining farmers’ relations to various pasts. Smallholder farmers as a key figure in both played a role in how organic farmers anticipated that entry into free trade regions would transform their possibilities to create alternative futures as forms of organic sovereignties. Latvia’s national imaginary as a nation of smallholder farmers in the first independence period promoted hegemonic discourses of entry into the EU as a return to normality, while Costa Rica’s national myth of early yeomen farmers as the foundation of democracy served as the contested root of its exceptionalism.

In both countries, farmers were disillusioned by neoliberal reforms that called into question the accountability of the state; they had different expectations of protection by the state. In Latvia, the recency of independence, compounded by an “antipolitics” sentiment (Gille 2010; Konrad 1984) cultivated in the socialist era, resulted in a relatively silent opposition. Despite widespread worries about the potential effects of joining the EU expressed to me by organic farmers before the 2003 referendum, the LBLA never overtly questioned EU accession, due in part to the strength of the hegemonic narrative of returning to Europe. Organic farmers hoped for independence to define their own organic practices on their individual farmsteads, supported by the state, as a return to normality and a form of quiet sovereignty (Visser et al. 2015).

Meanwhile organic farmers in Costa Rica challenged the colonial myth of democracy. They drew instead upon the more recent history of resolving conflicts and maintaining political stability through peaceful popular protest, and MAOCO formed a visible part of the extremely diverse, widespread, and vocal anti-CAFTA movement. Their protests were an embodiment of Costa Rican exceptionalism and democracy in practice, as well as a call to preserve it. The organic movement promoted agroecology as an alternative to free trade, which encompassed redefining relationships to nature while preserving Costa Rica’s exceptional model of social democracy and a freedom to maintain their seeds as a form of autonomy from corporate control.

Although the drive to return to normality in Latvia and to preserve exceptionalism in Costa Rica emerged from and led to different political subjectivities, farmers in both countries envisioned strong state support and protection, rather than isolation from the state, as a component of their organic sovereignties. Organic farmers highlighted a few critical moments in each country’s agrarian past in their farm histories, which reveal how national narratives have influenced farmer subjectivities and expectations of the possibility to define their own futures in the context of free trade regions.

RETURN TO NORMALITY

In March 2006, at the end of a group discussion in Kurzeme, the western part of Latvia, about the effects of globalization on organic farmers, Dāvis, a tall, white-haired fruit farmer whose eloquence reflected his previous life as an actor in the regional theater troupe, took the floor. He handed out a photocopied sheet of lyrics and proposed that we close the seminar by singing together the “Organic Farmers’ Hymn,” which he had composed to the tune of a popular folk song in honor of the LBLA’s tenth anniversary. The first stanza professed that organic farmers had always been “green,” and would remain so and not be “scared of Europe.” The second stanza invoked the loneliness of farmers who had moved to Ireland or other foreign countries in search of better incomes, while the final stanza poignantly expressed his view of Latvian farmers’ relationship to the land:

Gar šiem ozoliem,

Zaļiem zemzariem,

Kungi nāk un iet,

Un katrs grib lauzt un liekt.

Lai tie nāk un iet,

Vien turi zemi ciet!

Latvju tauta,

Paliec vienuviet.

Along these old green oaks,

Rulers come and go;

The lower branches they bend and break.

Let them come and go,

Just hold on to your land!

Latvian people,

Stay together in one place.

Landless Lives

Dāvis’s hymn reflects the fact that due to Latvia’s long history of foreign rule, land and its ownership have taken on an almost mythical quality, as important symbols of independence at the individual and national levels. The struggle for control of the land is best reflected in two opposite poles in Latvian history: serfdom on German manors until the nineteenth century and forced collectivization in the Soviet Union after World War II, punctuated by the brief period of independent statehood in between. Each of these periods emerged in Latvian organic farmer narratives of the land they regained through decollectivization in the 1990s.

The plight of the peasant under foreign rule began in the late twelfth century, when Teutonic knights invaded the territory that is now Latvia.2 By the fourteenth century, German noblemen had established medieval castles and manorial estates, and by the mid-fifteenth century, due to increasing demand for grains for export, they instituted a system of serfdom using local populations to guarantee labor. At the height of serfdom, local peasants were considered part of the landed gentry’s property and were tied to the land through their labor (Boruks 2003; Plakans 1995). In the seventeenth century, parts of the present territory of Latvia came under Polish-Lithuanian and Swedish rule. Latvian territories were incorporated into the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century, but the German landed elite continued managing the manor houses, and peasants, until the twentieth century (Purs and Pabriks 2013).3

Against this backdrop of foreign rule, the emancipation of peasants beginning in 1817 created a dream of land ownership as the embodiment of historical justice (Priedīte 2012) and the ideal of smallholding as a national vocation.4 Freed serfs did not receive many immediate benefits as they had no land or rights to purchase it, and were still tied to their former landlords until the middle of the century. Latvian peasants were first able to move around freely in the 1840s and 1850s, and to purchase land from German landowners in the 1860s in the western and central regions of Kurzeme and Vidzeme, and later in Latgale (Purs and Pabriks 2013). A rapidly growing population and new mobility led to the growth of both country and city in the nineteenth century. While some purchased land and developed new farmsteads, others formed a new urban class in Rīga that fueled the first national awakening at the end of the nineteenth century, eventually leading to the declaration of independence in 1918 (Purs and Pabriks 2013), but landlessness also became an important issue.

State of Independence

Latvian organic farmers stressed their connections to the land in narrations of their farm histories. For instance, Marts, in northeast Latvia, recounted to me that his land had been the servants’ quarters of a German manor originally established in the 1500s, which had been bought, sold, and renovated numerous times in the intervening centuries. He proudly told me his grandfather had received the land in 1920 as a reward for participating in wars that led to the liberation of Latvia. Though Marts’s grandfather was lucky enough to receive a plot through land reform, he had to pay it off over time.

Another farmer, Inita, in the eastern region of Latgale, was also farming land inherited from her grandfather. He had purchased 113 hectares in 1913—a large area for the time, including a dilapidated house built in the eighteenth century. They built a new log frame, which they covered with home-fired bricks as a symbol of the new possibilities for peasant landholders. Inita’s grandfather died, however, before the new house was completed, leaving her mother with a young baby and a hefty debt to the Bank of Latvia. As anthropologist Dace Dzenovska (2009, 28) has noted, “History thus saturates the everyday landscape in Latvia and shapes people’s sense of self and their relationships with others.”

Indeed, land reform is often noted as one of the defining features of Latvia’s first independence period between the two world wars. While some peasants had purchased land beginning in the 1860s, the desire for land of many more Latvian peasants was realized through agrarian reform from 1919 to 1937, which created approximately 55,000 new farms averaging twenty hectares—a size deemed manageable with a horse and family labor (Strods 1992). Nevertheless, many of the new farmers of the 1920s and 1930s lacked agricultural skills and equipment and ended up in debt years later (Strods 1992). Inequality also persisted in the countryside: the biggest effect of the reform was actually in creating medium-size farms in the twenty- to fifty-hectare range that could produce for markets, rather than small farms as is often assumed,5 and there was still an 18 percent landless population that provided agricultural labor on larger farms, coupled with an influx of farmworkers from Poland and other countries (Strods 1992).

Despite these issues of growing debt and remaining landlessness, this era of national independence and land reform is still remembered and romanticized as the backbone of Latvian small-scale subsistence agriculture. Prime Minister Ulmanis, from the Farmers’ Party, who fired the Parliament in 1934, seizing control of the government and serving as president until 1940, is credited with having supported the development of agriculture despite, or because of, his authoritarian regime. Animal husbandry, followed by grain farming, became the main agricultural activities. Latvia became self-sufficient in grain production in 1932, and by 1938 was a leading agricultural exporter of butter and bacon in Europe, still invoked as a source of national pride.

Land and smallholders became potent cultural symbols in literature and art (Schwartz 2006). The famous Latvian novelist Jānis Jaunsudrabiņš nostalgically recounted happy childhood moments on the farmstead in his book Baltā Grāmat (1946), and Latvian soldiers were given a copy of Edvarts Virza’s 1933 romantic epic poem, Straumēni, depicting a timeless farmstead in harmony with the seasons, to bring to the front with them in World War II. As literary scholar Aija Priedīte (2012, 188) has concluded, “Latvian rural inhabitants’ main value for centuries has been land and its cultivation,” despite the associated hardships.

Lost Lands

The presumed prosperity of the smallholder in Latvia was as short lived as the country’s independence. Zinta, another farmer in Vidzeme, told me her farm of sixty-six hectares was land her grandfather had received in the 1920s that had been divided off the property of a nationalized German manor. Her grandfather had cleared the land and built new structures. She recounted, wiping tears from her eyes: “Grandfather [in the 1930s], with [these] thirty hectares, could educate his children—all three children have a higher education—and build these stone houses, which are now in ruins.… And for his good work, Grandfather was sent to Siberia.”

As Zinta’s sorrow shows, the significance of land was made more poignant by the history of forced collectivization during the Soviet period. Latvia was first occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940. The existing inequality in land tenure from the independence period was used to justify further land reform, whereby all land exceeding thirty hectares was nationalized and redistributed as ten-hectare farms to approximately 50,000 new farmers, and given as additional land to another 23,000 small farmers (Strods 1992). This reform was short lived, however. During the Nazi German occupation from 1941 to 1944, land was once again returned to the pre-1940 owners (Venners 1988). Farmers had to pay shares of their harvests to the Nazi government to support the war effort, and some lands were planned for colonization by German settlers. Because many young men were called into the German army, city workers from Rīga had to provide six weeks of annual farm labor for the war effort (Venners 1988).

After the second Soviet occupation in 1944, collectivization was forestalled by debate and the Latvian Communist Party’s desire to form a “third way” in agriculture (Swain 2003). The Soviet government ...