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"Is There a Case for Growing Cotton in India?"
Ron Herring, Government, Cornell

On grounds of sustainability, cotton has been the subject of trenchant critiques. India has more land under cotton than any other country in the world, and just about the lowest yields. Pest infestations are quite severe comparatively, leading to a heavy pesticide load that poisons people, water and creatures -- including insects that prey on cotton pests. Pesticides for cotton alone consume more than half India's massive pesticide bill. Lint quality is low, yields unstable. Suicides among cotton farmers aroused national and international alarm. Cotton absorbs fungible water, hard currency, and land -- all with high opportunity costs, but with insecure returns for average cultivators. Transgenic [Bt] cotton has spread rapidly from farmer to farmer, evading national regulatory authorities and making India's biosafety regime mandated by the Cartegena Protocol a subject for ridicule. Though transgenic cultivars improve farmer profits and reduce pesticide use, many in the scientific community fear the genetic roulette unleashed in the countryside and powerful political forces continue to oppose any products of biotechnology. International market rigging by richer nations and improvements in yields in nations such as China threaten Indian cotton farmers both domestically and abroad. Yet it is difficult to imagine an India without cotton.

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Bureaucratic hubris and peasant resistance: Colonial cotton improvement and its failure
Sumit Guha, History, Rutgers

International trade in raw cotton took off in the later eighteenth century – first as the English East India Company sought to find something to sell the Chinese before the rise of the opium trade. The cotton-growing districts of Gujarat were early acquired so as to extract raw cotton in lieu taxes. The explosive growth of cotton manufacturing in England from the end of the eighteenth century soon outstripped the supply from the Mediterranean, and Indian and American cotton began to supply British manufacturers. American cotton was much preferred, but anxieties over its supply began as early as 1809. The East India Company was already functioning as an arm of the home government which was, in turn, feeling the pressure of the rising manufacturing interest in England. Alarmed at the trend of US policy in the run-up to the war of 1812, the Court of Directors wrote to their agents in India:

The measures which have been lately adopted by the Legislature of the United States of America will, in their consequences, operate to very seriously some of the manufactures of this country, unless a liberal supply of cotton wool can be procured from other sources than these States, and its is to our territorial possessions in Asia that the hopes of the manufacturing classes are principally directed (cited in Cassels, 9).

Occasionally tense relations with the USA notwithstanding, American cotton consistently out-competed that from all other sources, and the southern states soon became an agrarian appendage of British manufacturing. But the growth of the textile industry was achieved at the cost of a consistent lowering of prices and a shift in the terms of trade against textile manufacturers that persisted to the 1860s. As manufacturers saw value-added and their margins decline, they turned not only to technological improvement and speed-up, but also to efforts to lower labor and raw material costs by indirect means.

One of these was consistent pressure on the British Indian administration to "improve" Indian cotton to make it competitive with US supplies. Officialdom then began a campaign to teach the peasants how to farm. An early enterprise was the translation of a tract on cotton farming originally intended for West Africa into Gujarati! (All Third World farmers had to be alike). American cotton planters were then recruited to persist with this enterprise. Repeated efforts at transferring the seeds of cottons that produced superior staple were made. Peasant resistance was met with coercion by officials eager to impress their bosses with their successes in the field. The consistent assumption was that farmers could not recognize their own interests. In an interesting parallel to some modern NGO discourse, this recalcitrance was attributed to either their ignorance or to their being manipulated by capitalist interests. Thus they needed a coercive emancipation from these local exploiters.

The 'cotton famine' resulting from the American Civil War intensified such bureaucratic efforts. A formal structure of control – the Cotton Department was created for the purpose of improving the quality of cotton exports from India. It was headed by a retired Army officer with a Victoria Cross but no agronomic experience. Financed by a cess on exports, it soon fell afoul of powerful British interests in the cotton trade, and was finally abolished in 1881.

Throughout this period, the peasants were better guided by their own understanding of local conditions and market opportunities, and pursued a stealthy independent program of seed diffusion and selection. Illegal pressure grew harder to sustain as rural people found leadership from gentry, lawyers and other influenced by the new urban politics of western India. It was only after the failure of "coercive improvement" that the newly created Agriculture Department began to try and work with the peasants to evolve commercially viable selections. This effort began to yield results in the 1930s and 1940s. By the end of that decade the Nehruvian program of autarkic economic development began to once again regulate peasant farming in ways eerily reminiscent of colonial war-time controls. Coercive paternalism cut off the growers from their export markets and price controls compelled them to subsidize an increasingly inefficient mill industry.

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To Bt or not to Bt? Controversy Among Organic Cotton Farmers in Central Gujarat
Devparna Roy, Development Sociology, Cornell

Proponents of organic farming, both individuals and non-governmental organizations (NGOS), remain in general, vehemently oppposed to the introduction of genetic engineered organisms in organic agriculture. They argue that organic farming is a more sustainable alternative to genetic engineering. Consequently, they maintain a firewall between genetic engineering and organic agriculture. As for farmers themselves, very little research exists to enlighten us as to whether the firewall is going up or coming down. This paper examines the responses of thirty self-identified organic farmers in Gujarat (a state in western India) to a genetically engineered plant, Bt cotton. The farmers can be divided into three groups: first, those who argued that Bt cotton is not part of organic farming; second, those who argued that Bt cotton is part of organic farming; third, those who were undecided on this issue. Some farmers argued that Bt cotton is not part of organic farming because they subscribed to an organismic view of nature and also because they were worried about the negative impact of Bt cotton plants on soil fertility. Other farmers argued that Bt cotton is part of organic farming because a gene (not a pesticide) has been transferred from a soil bacterium to the cotton plant, and also because they believed that there are no side effects of Bt cotton plants on soil fertility. In practice, several of the farmers who believed that Bt cotton is not part of organic farming grew Bt cotton in 2003-04 and were thinking about growing Bt cotton in 2004-05. These field observations are followed by a discussion of the conceptual meaning of such hybrid views among cotton farmers.

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Uncertainty, Deskilling, and Local Traditions among Andhra Pradeshi Cotton Cultivators
Glenn Davis Stone, Anthropology, Washington University

Understanding effects of Bt cotton on Indian cotton farmers requires looking beyond narrow entomological questions to larger issues in social agroecology. This paper presents results from ongoing research on information flows and cultural aspects of decision-making in Andhra Pradesh. It shows ways in which the process of "agricultural skilling" was disrupted before the arrival of Bt cotton, but how the situation has been exacerbated in recent years. It documents the emergence of strong patterning in cotton choices that have virtually no agrocnomic basis, reflecting how the combination of high unpredictability and disrupted skilling lead to the decline in environmental learning.

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Cloth, Identity and Authenticity: Creating Community through Clothing in Kachchh
Farhana Ibrahim, Anthropology, Cornell

This paper examines the meaning of cloth in consumption and circulation. It argues that cloth is a condensed symbol of identity politics in the border district of Kachchh in Western India. Drawing on examples from both men and women among the Muslim Jatts, a one time pastoral nomadic community, this paper addresses the centrality of cloth and clothing in a groups' self definition.

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Aesthetic Expressions in Cotton
Banoo J. Parpia, Human Ecology, Cornell

Indias greatest artistic and technical contribution to the world is seen in Indias diverse and beautiful cotton textiles that encompass an astounding variety of motifs, designs and styles. Since the dawn of civilization, every dimension of interactions between India and the rest of the world, including religion, statecraft and commerce, is graphically captured in the pervasive interchange of Indian textiles, specifically cotton cloth, across cultures. Until little more than 300 years ago, cotton was virtually unknown in the West. In contrast, indigenous cotton has been grown, spun, dyed, woven and worn in India for 4000 years or longer and throughout this time span Indian artisans held the position of master craftsmen, second to none. The amazing variety of Indian cotton cloth including production solely for domestic consumption as well as for trade and export will be examined and explored.

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Common Histories, Divergent Paths: Cotton, Jute and Coir
Shobha K. Bhatia, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Syracuse
Jennifer Smith, Civil Engineering, Syracuse
Corri Zoli, English Textual Studies, Syracuse

Our presentation is comparative: it situates recent research on natural fibers produced in the developing world (coir, jute from Shobha Bhatia/Jennifer Smith's data in Kerala) in the context of the history of cotton. Issues we address are: commonalities and differences in the historical, technical and social aspects of these industries, including impact on workers (primarily poor rural women); present similarities in structures of international political economy (first/third world relations), including the role of culture and advertising in global marketing and the "gendering," "classing" and "racing" of labor relationships in India; the politics of research in that the production of cotton and natural fibers gives researchers a window into the history of colonialism and present first/third world knowledge relations; and the role of interdisciplinary inquiry, how bringing together science-engineering, policy, and cultural analysis addresses some of the problems of research.

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Cotton Body Politics and Inter-generationality in Andhra Pradesh
Priti Ramamurthy, Women's Studies, University of Washington

Cotton bodies are the very stuff of politics in contemporary Andhra Pradesh. “Cotton suicides,” cotton widows, child labor, much of it of the “cottonseed girl child,” and “kidney sales” to pay off cotton debts are no longer simply experienced by those directly effected but have become politicized. Less directly linked, but nevertheless politicized, are rapidly declining fertility rates (despite high rates of maternal mortality) and high rates of breast cancer purportedly due to the long-term effects of pesticide consumption in the growing of cotton. Cotton bodies are sexed, vexed, abject, consumed, pathologized and criminalized (suicides appear as crime figures, for example). They are also claimed, compensated, and “liberated” by opposing political parties and the state, by national and international NGOs, and by corporations and industry groups, groups as diverse as Bt cotton seed manufacturers and anti-child labor advocates. My earlier articulation of feminist commodity chain analysis was primarily socio-spatial, I have begun to explore its possibilities to think about cotton bodies and inter-generationality, especially as a means of conceiving political responsibility outside of teleological narratives of progress.

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