The Social and Environmental Dynamics of an Agricultural Boom

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

The research supported by this award investigates the effects that extreme shifts in agricultural commodity prices may have on social and economic inequality. Boom and bust cycles have long shaped relationships of international commodity production and trade. As more producers become entangled in the global economy, they become increasingly exposed to these often dramatic price fluctuations. In this research, the investigator focuses on two overarching questions: (1) When prices for market crops rise and fall, how are social, economic, and environmental relationships altered? and (2) How and to what extent do individual producers then re-position themselves within these larger environmental, economic, and cultural systems of exchange? These questions are important because in both the United States and the world at large, crops subject to boom and bust cycles are frequently produced by vulnerable smallholder operators. Local successes and failures can affect the larger system as well as have consequences for local households and communities. Findings from this research will be of interest to both social scientists trying to better understand the dynamic linkages that comprise globalization and to policymakers who seek to control economic extremes and mitigate negative effects. The research will be conducted by Indiana University anthropologist, Dr. Sarah R. Osterhoudt, in northeastern Madagascar. This is an appropriate site for this project because families in this region have been cultivating an important international commodity -- vanilla -- within agro-ecological systems for multiple generations. The researcher will follow vanilla from the growers that produce the beans through the many specialists in packaging, transport, export, certification, and sales that bring it to international markets. She will collect data at all points of this commodity chain by employing a combination of ethnographic methodologies, including: participant observation, agro-forestry inventories, semi-structured interviews, market narratives, and analyses of court and police records concerning land disputes. These data, collected in the current "boom period," will be combined with comparable data collected during the 2010-2011 "bust" period. The result will provide a unique, in-depth, longitudinal analysis of the dynamic social and ecological dimensions of a key international crop across a boom and bust cycle.