Waiting for accelerations. Speculating on guar seeds in the Indian desert

ABSTRACT

This article unfolds how an extreme acceleration in the price of a seed in 2012 changed farming in a rural area of India by reorienting the imagined sources of wealth in farming. The seed in question is guar which have been grown for centuries for cow fodder, but which is also used in fracking, and because of a growing international demand combined with a limited supply and wild speculation, the prices in 2012 grew exponentially with 1500% in a period of 3 months, after which it crashed at a similar rate. The article argues that this acceleration of prices caused an escalation that changed the perspective of change for farmers. it shifted the main focus from farming as a repetitive event tied to the seasonal weather changes, to one of future potentiality tied to sudden market movements. This shift in the scale of measuring change in farming moved farmers from producing seeds to also speculating in seeds, through methods of trading and stocking. The guar price acceleration opened up to imaginaries of new avenues of future income from farming that was not flowing in with the rain, but with the market.

KEYWORDS:

• India
• farming
• speculation
• escalation
• guar
• trade

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This despite the fact that there since 1955 has been a ban on storage beyond 6 months on all seeds through the ‘Essential Commodities Act’ which was introduced as an attempt to avoid elevated speculation in food, which in the past equal to the lack of rain been causing hungers killing millions of people (Sen 1982).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Danish Research Council for Independent Research [grant number DFF – 4001-00223].