The marketing of corporate agrichemicals in Western India: theorizing graded informality

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the young men from agrarian backgrounds who work as field marketing agents for companies like Monsanto in western Maharashtra, India. They promote pesticides, herbicides and other agrichemicals to farmers who often belong to higher castes. My ethnography suggests that the promotion of agrichemicals deploys the idiom of agricultural extension, upsetting India's tenacious social hierarchies on the one hand, and driving corporate profits and indebtedness among farmers on the other. With respect to the subordination of agriculture to industrial capital, I contend that farmers and marketing agents can neither be arrayed against one another, nor is their relation to industrial capital alike. Agrichemicals marketing troubles dichotomous frameworks, such as farmers against industrial capital. Ultimately, I call for re-conceiving political economy in terms of graded informality, where opportunities and constraints for accumulation map onto a gradient, rather than fall on opposite ends of a binary.

KEYWORDS:

• Corporate marketing
• agricultural extension
• pesticides
• informal
• caste
• capitalism

Acknowledgments

The author’s informants in Nashik were exceedingly patient and generous with their time. But for them, this study would not have seen the light of day. He is also grateful to K. Sivaramakrishnan, James Scott, A. R. Vasavi, Mrinalini Sinha, Omolade Adunbi, Andrew Flachs, Chitrangada Choudhury, and audiences at the Agrarian Studies Colloquium, Yale University, the University of Heidelberg, and the Michigan Society of Fellows, among others, for their comments and feedback. Harshada Kapoor provided valuable help with the transcription of interviews. Finally, he thanks two anonymous reviewers for their perceptive suggestions and criticisms. The usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Aniket Aga http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1074-3441

Notes

1 In this region, farmers refer to agrichemicals as ‘medicine’ (aushadh) and ‘powders.’

2 Real names of people, villages and companies withheld, except those of the ‘Big 6’ global agribusinesses i.e. Syngenta, Monsanto, Dow, Bayer, Du Pont and BASF.

3 The literature on agrarian differentiation and dispossession is vast and extensive. Some important entry points to contemporary scholarship include the literatures on the Green Revolution in different parts of the world (Patel 2013), on food regimes (McMichael 2013), food sovereignty (Edelman et al. 2014), and recent attempts to re-think agrarian transitions (Bernstein 2010; Fairbairn et al. 2014; Lerche 2013).

4 The more familiar modes of surplus appropriation include the adverse terms of trade vis-à-vis industry and control of merchants over prices realized by farmers.

5 This is the landscape of informality that Bernstein (2010) conceives of in terms of classes of labor and capital. Since farming variably combines the class locations of capital and labor, I prefer to speak in terms of graded niches.

6 In western Maharashtra, this process has roots in colonial programs to encourage cotton and sugarcane cultivation, which received a further fillip post-Independence with state support to co-operative institutions like sugar factories, and the expansion of irrigation and electrification (Baviskar 1980).

7 Farmers reported that paddy and millet cultivation simply did not generate enough surplus to meet children’s education-related expenses, the desire for consumer goods, mounting healthcare costs, etc.

8 In the case of genetically modified (Bt) cotton, particularly in Gujarat, farmers with means have multiplied extra-legal ‘underground’ seeds which are cheaper than corporate hybrids (Herring 2007), but whose performance is variable and implications ambiguous (Shah 2008). The popularity of such seeds owes partly to the failure of the state to develop viable public sector Bt cotton seeds (Stone 2007).

9 The crisis is not total. There is a small section of capitalist farmers who are accumulating within agriculture while diversifying beyond it (Pattenden 2011; Ramachandran, Rawal, and Swaminathan 2010).

10 Besides marketing agents, farmers consulted retailers and their friends for advice. Younger farmers also accessed information online. With that said, marketing agents and retailers played a crucial role in making sense of the different bits of information, and tailoring them for farmers’ specific circumstances (see also Aga 2018).

11 i.e. Sigma is one of the following companies: Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, Dow, BASF, and Du Pont.

12 Roughly, companies assigned one agent to about 5–10 villages in this region.

13 Farmers must go to a retailer for actual purchases. Such shops are slowly spreading outwards from cities and market towns to large and small villages. Generally, the retailer tries to push products of small domestic companies over those of large domestic and transnational companies. The latter rely on marketing agents to invigorate the demand for their products. Elsewhere, I examine the sociology of retailing in detail (Aga 2018).

14 Although there was a state-funded extension center about 10 km from the areas of my fieldwork, my farmer-informants did not consult the extension staff, nor did the staff visit the villages. Since the public agricultural research system has generally neglected horticultural crops, extension officers lacked varieties and technologies for farmers. Consequently, farmers relied on corporate agents and private retailers for technical advice.

15 Jeffrey and Dyson draw on Prause and Dooley (1997) for this conceptualization.

16 Government jobs remained of interest for their stability, the associated power in local affairs and opportunities for extra-legal enrichment.

17 Landholding sizes are poor indicators of class. However, these are the categories familiar to farmers and marketing agents. Landholding is also the metric through which government bodies classify farmers: Marginal: less than 2.5 acres; small: 2.5–5 acres; semi-medium: 5–10 acres; medium: 10–25 acres; large: greater than 25 acres. Small and marginal holdings comprise 85% of all holdings as per the Agricultural Census 2010–2011. In everyday parlance, those holding around eight acres and over were simply referred to as ‘big (mothe) farmers,’ while ‘small farmers’ referred to the rest. This is how I use both the terms in this article.

18 The Territory Manager was on Sigma’s payroll, unlike marketing agents.

19 Maratha agents had similar experiences with big farmers.

20 Big farmers tend to enjoy better access to state extension (in however attenuated form it exists), co-operative credit societies, irrigation infrastructure and government schemes. Such access cushions them somewhat from uncertainty and makes them less dependent on marketing agents for advice.

21 These were the goals envisaged for public extension in the 1950s and ‘60s (Butt 1961).

22 Public extension too pushed chemicals, but that was not all that it did.

23 As another illustration, no agent toured the adjoining hills, where Adivasi (indigenous) farmers practiced rain-fed paddy and millets cultivation. The Territory Manager for Sigma told me that these areas lacked market potential.

24 Marathas proudly trace their lineage to the armies of the medieval warrior-king Shivaji. Waghmore (2013) glosses the culture of Maratha power in rural Maharashtra as kingly (rajeshahi).

25 This rubbed off on my interactions with agents as well. As a student trying to understand their work, I could easily approach both Maratha and Dalit agents. It was comparatively harder for me to maintain ties with both Maratha and Dalit farmers. My Maratha farmer-informants frequently chided me for meeting with Dalit farmers.

26 This was exactly what Suraj had said in the charcha satra, when Madhav cornered him.

27 The binary logic of civil/political society would downplay the tensions between marketing agents and farmers, in gathering both within political society (Chatterjee 2011).

28 They encompass a whole range of livelihood strategies, from well-paying contract employment to casual labor and labor tied to specific employers through interlocked relations and obligations. Some niches straddle wage work, petty commodity production, self-exploitation, and exploitation within the household (see Harriss-White 2012; Lerche 2010).

29 This is an analytic point. Politicians and activists may well have good reasons to deploy binary divisions in mass politics.

30 These include reservations for Marathas, farm loan waivers, and remunerative prices.

31 This extends Ambedkar’s (2014b, Part III) argument that most caste positions have some interest in maintaining the hierarchical system.

32 Just as conflicts among castes can sometimes lend tenacity to the hierarchical structure.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Science Foundation's Division of Social and Economic Sciences [1324382]; South Asian Studies Council, Yale University; Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University; Michigan Society of Fellows; Wenner-Gren Foundation [8726].

Notes on contributors

Aniket Aga

Aniket Aga is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Ashoka University, India. He is interested in science and technology studies, democratic politics, and agrarian studies. His research examines the ongoing controversy over genetically modified (GM) food crops in India. More broadly, he works on questions of environmental justice, food democracy, and sustainable agriculture, with a focus on Maharashtra.