‘Communication sovereignty’ as resistance: strategies adopted by women farmers amid the agrarian crisis in India

ABSTRACT

This study draws on a culturally centered collaboration with a community of dalit women farmers in South India who were organized in a cooperative in their collective resistance against the corporatization of agriculture. Situated in the backdrop of the epidemic of farmer suicides in the region, this manuscript examines how those at the margins of global neoliberal transformations symbolically and materially make sense of and resist these transformations. The voices of the women farmers disrupt the underlying neoliberal assumptions that undergird the importation of cash crop agriculture into a subsistence and community-centered farming culture. They depict the ways in which Western cash crop agriculture disrupts community, food security, local health care systems, and the unique gender relations. Moreover, the communication advocacy work carried out by the women seeks to transform agricultural policy through material interventions as alternative practices of agriculture that challenge the hegemony of cash-based individualized agriculture.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberal agriculture
• communication sovereignty
• listening infrastructure
• culture-centered approach
• gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The Deccan Development Society (DDS) is a three-decade old grassroots organization working in about 75 villages with women’s Sanghams (voluntary village level associations of women farmers from low-income households) consisting of over 5000 women members in Medak District of Telangana. A majority of the women farmers belonging to Sanghams primarily work as agriculture laborers.

2. Names of the women farmers have been changed for purposes of protecting their confidentiality.

3. Dalit refers to the category of the ‘oppressed,’ and is loosely used as a term to signify scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, and other oppressed castes in India that have been historically disenfranchised, situated within the caste politics of India. In the theoretical framework of Subaltern Studies that offers the broader conceptual root of this essay, dalits constitute the subalterns in the political economy of Indian society, often having been disrupted from modes of production. Moreover, among dalit communities, there exist differential levels of access to spaces of recognition and representation. Women often constitute the ‘subaltern of the subaltern,’ having been erased from sites of articulation and representation.

4. The neoliberal ideology is organized around a framework of political-economic organizing that privileges the free market, coupled with technology and expertise, as the solutions to human health and wellbeing (Dutta, 2015). The neoliberal restructuring of nation states has been carried out under the aegis of structural adjustment programs imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The neoliberal organizing of Indian agriculture started with the liberalization program of the 1990s, with dramatic reduction in state-based subsidies, opening up of the agricultural sector to the global market, and the further acceleration of the technology-based framework of agriculture that had started with the green revolution.

5. Since the time the fieldwork started, Monsanto has been bought out by the agro-corporation Bayer.

6. The West, referring to US-Eurocentric spaces, serves as a site of knowledge production, not only in terms of developing and disseminating global economic and policy solutions, but also in normalizing specific value-based solutions as universal. West-centric institutions such as World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, and Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) have played pivotal roles in pushing globally a corporatist, biotechnology-driven model of agriculture (Shiva, 2008).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National University of Singapore.