School of Social and Political Science

Description

Over the past decade, the use of origin-based labels (geographic indications, appellations of origin, collective brands based in locality) for agricultural products has expanded dramatically both in represented geographies and in sheer quantity. International development organizations from the World Bank to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization increasingly promote origin-based labels as development win-wins that offer economic incentives to maintain sustainable and culturally relevant agricultural practices while potentially revitalizing local farming economies. These initiatives have long been used to market Western European agricultural products and in recent years have expanded to include the Global South, often through development projects. Up until recently, the overwhelming majority of the scholarship on these origin-based labels has explored established products and success stories. This talk, however, analyzes an example of a origin-based label project that failed to come to fruition. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Puno region of Peru during the quinoa boom and bust (2013-18), I analyze an effort to create a collective brand (marca) for quinoa produced in Puno. Adapting Elinor Ostrom’s principles for managing common pool resources, my research builds on the concept of the semio-material commons to explain why this effort failed. Ultimately, I argue that a set of structural factors set up those spearheading the marca to fail, a finding that challenges the unequivocal promotion of origin-based labels for rural development purposes.