Abstract
Farmer Producer Companies (FPCs) are driving agricultural frontier expansions in India. Their main objectives are to mobilize small-scale farmers to collectivize and organize in order to gain collective bargaining power, in the process empowering farmers and eliminating middlemen. However, they have not established any demonstrable success in achieving these goals. This chapter seeks firstly, to draw transnational connections between agro-ecological transformations in India and larger market/capital expansions through FPCs, contextualized amidst national development goals for farmer empowerment, changing labor patterns, and ecological degradation. In doing so, it will, secondly, explore the gendered dimension of FPCs in India by analyzing how the process of establishing women-only FPCs by using mandatory inclusion as a participation tool can serve to disempower and further burden women. While mandatory involvement of women farmers on their Board of Directors as an empowerment strategy can prove crucial to enhancing women’s decision-making roles, this chapter asks whether such an inclusionary approach remains meaningful to achieve FPC success in a context where external support for women’s empowerment is not provided.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Agarwal, Bina. “Rethinking Agricultural Production Collectivities.” Economic and Political Weekly 45, no. 9 (2010): 64–78.
Alvard, Michael S. “Testing the ‘Ecologically Noble Savage’ Hypothesis: Interspecific Prey Choice by Piro Hunters of Amazonian Peru.” Human Ecology 21, no. 4 (December 1993): 355–87. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00891140.
Batliwala, Srilatha, and Deepa Dhanraj. “Gender Myths That Instrumentalise Women: A View from the Indian Frontline.” IDS Bulletin (Special Issue Repositioning Feminisms in Gender and Development) 35, no. 4 (October 1, 2004): 11–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1759-5436.2004.tb00150.x.
Baviskar, Amita. In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts Over Development in the Narmada Valley. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
———. “The Dream Machine: The Model Development Project and The Remaking of the State.” In Growth, Equity, Environment and Population: Economic and Sociological Perspectives, edited by Kanchan Chopra and C.H. Hanumantha Rao, 287–307. New Delhi; Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2008.
Bose, Sugata. “Instruments and Idioms of Colonial and National Development: India’s Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective.” In International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, edited by Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard, 45–63. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Cairns, Maryann R., Cassandra L. Workman, and Indrakshi Tandon. “Gender Mainstreaming and Water Development Projects: Analyzing Unexpected Enviro-Social Impacts in Bolivia, India, and Lesotho.” Gender, Place & Culture 24, no. 3 (March 4, 2017): 325–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2017.1314945.
Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Diamond, Jared M. “The Environmentalist Myth.” Nature 324, no. 6092 (November 1, 1986): 19–20. https://doi.org/10.1038/324019a0.
Ellingson, Ter. The Myth of the Noble Savage. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Ferguson, James, and Akhil Gupta. “Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality.” American Ethnologist 29, no. 4 (2002): 981–1002.
Gadgil, Madhav, and Ramachandra Guha. Ecology and Equity: The Use and Abuse of Nature in Contemporary India. London: Routledge, 1995.
Government of Madhya Pradesh. “Madhya Pradesh Human Development Report 2007,” 2007. http://www.dif.mp.gov.in/MPHDR2007.htm.
Gupta, Akhil. Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998.
———. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012.
Hames, Raymond. “The Ecologically Noble Savage Debate.” Annual Review of Anthropology 36 (September 2007): 177–190. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123321.
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Kaviraj, Sudipta. The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
Khandelwal, Meena. “Cooking with Firewood: Deep Meaning and Environmental Materialities in a Globalized World.” In Mapping Feminist Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Ellen Lewin and Leni M. Silverstein, 211–33. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016.
Leach, Melissa, and Cathy Green. “Gender and Environment History: From Representation of Women and Nature to Gender Analysis of Ecology and Politics.” Environment and History 3, no. 3 (1997): 343–70.
Lewis, David. “Anthropology and Development: The Uneasy Relationship.” London: LSE Research Online, 2005. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/253/.
Ludden, David. “India’s Development Regime.” In Colonialism and Culture, edited by Nicholas B. Dirks. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992.
Mies, Maria, and Vandana Shiva. Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books, 1993. https://www.cabdirect.org/cabdirect/abstract/19941800191.
Moore, Jason W. “Sugar and the Expansion of the Early Modern World-Economy: Commodity Frontiers, Ecological Transformation, and Industrialization.” Review 23, no. 3 (2000): 409–33.
Mosse, David. “Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice.” Anthropology, Culture, and Society. London; Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2005.
Mosse, David, Sanjeev Gupta, Mona Mehta, Vidya Shah, Julia fnms Rees, and KRIBP Project Team. “Brokered Livelihoods: Debt, Labour Migration and Development in Tribal Western India.” The Journal of Development Studies 38, no. 5 (June 1, 2002): 59–88. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220380412331322511.
Mosse, David, Sanjeev Gupta, and Vidya Shah. “On the Margins in the City: Adivasi Seasonal Labour Migration in Western India.” Economic and Political Weekly 40, no. 28 (2005): 3025–38.
NGO Publication. “Watershed Development Program Manual (Second Amendment),” April 2010.
Padel, Felix, and Samarendra Das. “Cultural Genocide and the Rhetoric of Sustainable Mining in East India.” Contemporary South Asia 18, no. 3 (September 2010): 333–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2010.503871.
“Planning Commission, Government of India: Five Year Plans.” Accessed May 28, 2018. http://planningcommission.gov.in/plans/planrel/fiveyr/welcome.html.
Redford, Kent H. “The Ecologically Noble Savage.” Cultural Survival Quarterly 15, no. 1 (January 31, 1991): 46.
Research Institute (IFPRI), International Food Policy. “Gender, Assets, and Agricultural Development Programs: A Conceptual Framework.” Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute, 2011. https://doi.org/10.2499/CAPRiWP99.
Shah, Tushaar. “Farmer Producer Companies: Fermenting New Wine for New Bottles.” Economic and Political Weekly 51, no. 8 (2016): 15–20.
Shankar, P.S.V. “Four Decades of Agricultural Development in MP: An Agro-Ecological Sub-Region Approach.” Economic and Political Weekly 12 (2005): 5014–24.
Sharma, Aradhana. Logics of Empowerment: Development, Gender, and Governance in Neoliberal India. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Singh, Sukhpal. “Producer Companies as New Generation Cooperatives.” Economic and Political Weekly 43, no. 20 (2008): 22–24.
Singh, Sukhpal, and Tarunvir Singh. Producer Companies in India: A Study of Organization and Performance. Centre for Management in Agriculture, IIM Ahmedabad, 2013.
Smith, Eric Alden, Robert L. Bettinger, Charles A. Bishop, Valda Blundell, Elizabeth Cashdan, Michael J. Casimir, Andrew L. Christenson, et al. “Anthropological Applications of Optimal Foraging Theory: A Critical Review [and Comments and Reply].” Current Anthropology 24, no. 5 (December 1983): 625–51. https://doi.org/10.1086/203066.
Tandon, Indrakshi. “The Women-Nature Correlation: Mapping the Legacy of Ecofeminism.” Voices 12, no. 1 (2012): 15–22.
Tandon, Indrakshi. “‘We Get Nothing’: An Ethnography of Participatory Development and Gender Mainstreaming in a Water Project for the Bhil of Central India.” PhD diss., University at Albany SUNY, 2019.
Trebbin, Anika. “Linking Small Farmers to Modern Retail Through Producer Organizations—Experiences with Producer Companies in India.” Food Policy 45 (April 2014): 35–44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2013.12.007.
Trebbin, Anika, and Markus Hassler. “Farmers’ Producer Companies in India: A New Concept for Collective Action?” Environment and Planning A 44, no. 2 (February 2012): 411–27. https://doi.org/10.1068/a44143.
Venkattakumar, R., and B.S. Sontakki. “Producer Companies in India-Experiences and Implications.” Indian Research Journal of Extension Education Special Issue 1 (2012): 7.
Washbrook, David. “South Asia, the World System, and World Capitalism.” The Journal of Asian Studies 49, no. 3 (August 1990): 479–508. https://doi.org/10.2307/2057768.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Tandon, I. (2019). Gendering Farmer Producer Companies at the Agricultural Frontier of India: Empowerment or Burden?. In: Joseph, S. (eds) Commodity Frontiers and Global Capitalist Expansion. Palgrave Studies in Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15322-9_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15322-9_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-15321-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-15322-9
eBook Packages: Economics and FinanceEconomics and Finance (R0)