In the video below, Professor Shaila Seshia Galvin provides a rich, original study of the social and bureaucratic life of organic quality that challenges assumptions of what “organic” means. 

Examining certified organic agriculture in India’s central Himalayas, she explores how the rise of commercial organic agriculture, and along with it, third-party certification, standardisation and contract farming, reshapes the relations of nature and agriculture, state bureaucracies and agricultural markets, farmers and agrarian intermediaries. 

The book reveals how the fraught concept of “organic” is less a material property of land or its produce than it is a quality that is assembled in discursive, normative and affective registers through complex relationships of diverse actors.

Publisher's page: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/97803...