Abstract: This paper traces the rise of village-level retailers of chemical inputs in western Maharashtra since the 1990s and explores the texture of their relationships with vegetable farmers. In so doing, it situates farmers in the context of the relationships that enable and constrain the practices and routines of cultivation. Agribusiness retailers are those to whom farmers go for seeds, fertilizers, other inputs, and crucially, technical advice and support including credit. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Kharif 2013 and 2014 with farmers and agribusiness retailers, this article asks: What is the relationship between farmers and agri-business capital? In answering the question, the paper attempts to move away from binary conceptions of capital/peasantry, dominant in the literature on corporate food regimes and neo-liberalism.
Bio: Aniket Aga is a doctoral candidate in the anthropology department at Yale University. His interests lie in the anthropology of democracy, history and anthropology of science, and agrarian studies. For the PhD, he is writing his thesis on the science and politics of the on-going debate over genetically modified (GM) crops in India. He studied electronics engineering at IIT Kharagpur and worked as a management consultant with McKinsey & Company before pursuing higher studies.
Please contact Arudra Burra (burra@hss.iitd.ac.in) for any questions.