Becoming Organic: Nature and Agriculture in the Indian Himalaya by Shaila Seshia Galvin

Author:Shaila Seshia Galvin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2021-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Cultivating Demand

Over the course of my time at the UOCB, efforts to create market linkages—and indeed markets themselves—took varied forms, including selling organic products in melas and exhibitions, which I discuss in chapter 5, as well as buyer-seller meets on a range of scales, from small-group discussions on the margins of cultivated fields to organized meetings in larger venues. The UOCB stood between Uttarakhand’s hill farmers, who cultivate crops little known in urban markets, on the one hand, and a still-inchoate world of existing and prospective buyers, markets, and consumers, on the other. One day, Deepa Agarwal departed from the bureaucratized language of “facilitation” to describe the UOCB more powerfully and evocatively as an “umbilical cord” for the region’s hill farmers—a conduit of technical and institutional nourishment that would in time enable them, in her words, to “stand on their own feet.”

She was not alone in her conviction that the UOCB’s work was to grow markets and organic farmers together. In late 2007, Ajay Solanki, the marketing manager of COF, told me that they began with “a base of products that had never before been seen in markets” in Delhi and other metropolitan areas. These products included finger millet, barnyard millet, black soybeans, and other coarse grains, pulses, and dryland rice. Of the forty-odd organic commodities on their product list, he observed, only ten—among them spices, kidney beans, cereals, wheat, and vegetables—had reasonable demand in the market. The challenge for the marketing cell was to discern where there was demand and organize for its supply, an approach that Ajay described as consumer-driven. Though this had been accomplished in the Doon Valley for basmati and, more recently, wheat, it has proved more difficult in the hills, where production is more geographically diffuse and the diversity of crops and varieties is higher. In this circumstance, the UOCB sought to identify niche markets for spices such as chili, turmeric, and ginger as well as certain kinds of pulses and coarse grains. For example, the UOCB has worked to cultivate a market for paharī toor in Delhi, as toor (pigeon pea) is a pulse widely used in regional cuisines across India.

Demand for other hill crops does not exist simply because such crops are not widely consumed outside the region or in urban centers. The UOCB has struggled to find a market for finger millet, for instance. With high calcium and iron content, this crop is produced mainly for subsistence. Indeed, in conversations with urban and suburban residents, I encountered the perception that the dark color of the flour produced from finger millet, which is often consumed as roti (a type of flatbread common in many regions of north India), would make one’s complexion “black,” something that many considered undesirable in a cultural milieu that privileges fair skin.17 Wheat, rice, and maize were therefore preferred cereal crops. When I arrived in 2007, the UOCB had already undertaken a series of efforts to find buyers for this widely cultivated coarse grain. These included an agreement with

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