Infrastructuring ‘Red Gold’: Agronomists, Cold Chains, and the Involution of Serbia’s Raspberry Country

ABSTRACT

Serbia has exported raspberries since socialism. Its production network withstood the post-Yugoslav property transformations and grew despite global competition. This article traces the configuration of the ‘infrastructures of value’ that underwrite the raspberries’ spatio-temporal reach to distant markets. Combining new and historical materialism, it contributes to economic anthropology by studying the interplay between two infrastructures – agronomics and the ‘cold chain’ – and their differential weathering of historical transformations. During socialism, the agronomists ‘infrastructured’ the environment in collaboration with farmers and plants, while the containment technologists upgraded the freezing infrastructure, solidifying the fruits into graded, storable, and transportable commodities. After socialism, private entrepreneurs replicated the cold-chain modules, while agronomic research and quality control became de-institutionalised. As the agronomic infrastructure stagnated, the cold chain went into overdrive. In this late-capitalist ‘infrastructural involution’, political-economic transformations reshaped multispecies infrastructures, devaluing the contributions of plants and rural labour while benefiting entrepreneurs and wholesalers.

KEYWORDS:

• Agronomics
• cold chain
• food
• infrastructural involution
• Serbia
• value

Acknowledgments

An early version of this article was presented at the workshop ‘Consuming the Unique: Food, Art and the Globalising Infrastructures of Value’ that Daniel Monterescu and I co-organised on 9–10 May 2019 at Central European University, Budapest. Later iterations were discussed at EASA 2020; at the PLACES conference at Riga Stradins University; at Bielefeld University and at Masaryk University Brno; and at the workshops ‘Unsettling the Hegemonic Gaze: Translation and Transfer of Knowledge from South-Eastern Europe’ at Regensburg University and ‘Ecologies of Decay: Modern Ruination in the Global (Post)Socialist Peripheries’ at UCL London, as well as at AAA 2022. Many thanks for helpful feedback and suggestions go to the organisers and participants of these forums, and to Christof Lammer (my indefatigable co-editor of this special issue), Ina Kerner, Martin Ramstedt, Bertram Turner, Raphael Schapira, three anonymous reviewers, Patty A. Gray for language editing, and, last not least, editor Mark Graham. Remaining errors are mine.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Between 2010 and 2019, world raspberry production grew from approximately 370,000 tons to 680,000 tons, while Serbian production grew from approximately 76,000 tons to 92,000 tons, with a peak of 111,000 tons in 2015. In other words, between one eighth and one quarter of worldwide production came from Serbia (see http://internationalraspberry.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Serbia.pdf, last accessed 14.12.2021).

2 This anecdote is collated from narrative biographical interviews conducted with Mr. Petrović (former General Director of Jedinstvo), Mr. Radojević and Mr. Nenadić (former heads of Latvica agronomic station), Ms. Vujović (former technologist of Jedinstvo) and four other pioneers of Arilje’s raspberry production network. Names of interview partners have been changed to provide anonymity, except for pensioners or deceased persons whose historical contribution is emphasized.

3 See also Ana and Lammer (both this issue) on the adaptation of infrastructural modules from the capitalist West to the older infrastructures in post-Soviet Moldova and post-Maoist China.

4 In Atsuro Morita’s (2016; 2017) account, strong floods had overflowed riverbeds and canals (the ‘aquatic infrastructure’), breached dams, and undermined the ‘terrestrial infrastructure’ of roads and land-based rice farming (Morita 2016). In response to this crisis, but also to environmental activism and scientific concerns, the government ordered engineers to enhance the aquatic infrastructure by providing more water retention basins, and the endemic floating rice with its several-meters-long roots became revalued. Previously perceived as an underproductive weed, it now became conceived as part of the multispecies infrastructure of the delta and a sustainable crop (Morita 2017).

5 This is part of my long-term fieldwork in Serbia since 2009, where the raspberry sector is a major employer and export earner. My understanding of raspberry globalisation was deepened by short field trips in Hungary, Bulgaria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Latvia and Germany, and by desk research.

6 Ideally, raspberries are planted on gentle slopes allowing rain water to run off, because on the valley bottom stagnating water levels can suffocate the roots. With the raspberries’ value overshadowing that of other crops, such agronomic cautions have been swept aside. On the way land’s value depends both on material infrastructures of production and on information infrastructures for either comparing past prices or calculating future rents, see Sippel (this issue).

7 The General Director maintained that the UK, with its fruit research institutes in Dundee, Scotland and Malling, England, was the best producer at the time, with 28,000 tons of raspberries.

8 The pruning of young raspberry shoots (bearing fruit the following year) happens four times until shortly before harvest (see Petrović and Leposavić 2016: 114, fn. 37).

9 The logo of Jedinstvo and its predecessor, Arilje’s voćarska zadruga (fruit-growing cooperative) established in 1922, was an apple. Only in 1990 did Jedinstvo’s successor, the zemljoradnička zadruga (farmworker’s cooperative) Arilje, change it to a raspberry (on the connection between information infrastructure and infrastructures of containment, see Lammer, this issue).

10 On how the material features of specific crops interact with different forms of information infrastructure see Lammer (this issue).

11 For socialist Yugoslavia, the coating of roads with tarmac both meant building new mobility landscapes and reshaping the socialist identity of their builders (Matošević 2017).

12 During the time of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (April 1992 – October 1995), when the international community embargoed trade with rump-Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), Arilje’s raspberries travelled west via Macedonian and Croatian mediators.

13 When competition for raspberries is high, most cold stores evaluate produce as Quality I, as in 2019. Entrepreneurs wooing farmers may offer a Dinar more than Stanić Ltd., who has become a local price setter. In 2018, however, when heavy rains turned thousands of raspberry crates mouldy, rain-soaked raspberries were evaluated as Quality II, fetching half the price – and cold stores took a loss.

14 Julie Guthman (2019: 22–23) has analysed such agrochemical easy fixes as ‘undone science’ leading to ‘unknown unknowns’. But Stanić Ltd.’s strict phytosanitary agronomics also enables it to comply with the 1994 WTO Phytosanitary Regulation used by free market economies in the EU (and elsewhere) to exclude external competitors that cannot ‘properly’ document their plant treatments (see Freidberg 2004: 9).

Additional information

Funding

This research received funding from the Latvian State Education Development Agency (VIAA), research grant number 1.1.1.2/VIAA/2/18/271, Agreement No. 9.-14.5/87; and from the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences.