Organic Sovereignties

"This book should be required reading for students or scholars entering fieldwork in these respective countries. This book would also make an excellent case study to compliment graduate or advanced undergraduate courses in environmental anthropology and agrarian studies."

"This comparative ethnography offers a helpful discussion of free trade agreements and the politics of harmonisation centred on organic farming in addition to being relevant to readers interested in organic agriculture, seed politics, and biodiversity. This book would be a good course text for advanced undergraduate or graduate students in anthropology and environmental studies because it engages key debates about organic agriculture, offers new material on the struggles faced by organic farmers in these two countries, and provides an interesting discussion of theoretical approaches and key concepts."

"[A] wonderfully insightful comparative ethnographic study."

"Organic Sovereignties makes a powerful case for the value of studying small organic producers around the world and understanding the complexities they navigate...The book is appropriate for upper-division undergraduate or graduate courses on biodiversity, culture, and agriculture, and readers interested in these topics will benefit from “thinking between the posts” of postsocialist and postcolonial studies."

"Organic Sovereignties deepens and refines understandings of contemporary organic move-ments positioned within agrarian landscapes undergoing political, economic, and social transformations. Aistara presents a carefully researched and nuanced account of how organic farmers in Latvia and Costa Rica navigate their ideals in tandem with new forms of regulation that have accompanied the former’s accession to the European Union (EU) and the latter’s incorporation into the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA)...Her research makes an original and valuable contribution to a growing body of critical scholarship examining organic farming."

"[R]igorously researched...The book makes several noteworthy theoretical contributions."

"[A] wonderful book on the complex nature of global organic agricultural production. It is a book that needs to be read closely and completely, not skimmed or perused."

"Addresses the troubled relationship between locally meaningful organic practices of farming and trade demands for harmonization of legislation that both promise to provide markets for and constrain those practices."

"Organic Sovereignties is gently provocative and covers entirely new ground. It goes far beyond the debates on organic certification and conventionalization that have preoccupied so much scholarship on organic agriculture and focuses instead on how imagined agrarian histories and the respective relationships to (post)colonial and (post)socialist states shape organic farmers’ subjectivities."

"Organic Sovereignties is a nuanced ethnographic exploration of how the daily practices of organic agriculture and agrarian livelihoods transcend national borders and facile distinctions between 'first' and 'third' worlds. Aistara's research provides critically important insights into how small-scale farmers are building sustainable rural futures within diverse political economic contexts."

"Examining parallels in Latin America and post-Socialist Europe in terms of the organic agriculture movement, Organic Sovereignties sheds light on the effects of free trade, intellectual property rights, and food regulatory regimes on seed and food sovereignties and biodiversity conservation. What is exciting about it is Guntra Aistara's brave insistence to foreground the construction of "farmscapes as places" and the affective multispecies networks that arise from these hopeful cultivations. I know of no other work that so finely dissects the compelling promise as well as the structural limits of individual, cultural, and societal autonomy on sustainable choices and trajectories."

"Organic Sovereignties provides a theoretically informed and politically committed criticism of the conditions under which the organic agriculture movement must operate, and creates a new methodological standard in using ethnography for transnational and trans-scalar comparison."