Abstract
Global development initiatives frequently promote agricultural commodity chain projects to improve livelihoods. In Morocco, development projects, including the Plan Maroc Vert (PMV), have promoted apple production in rural regions of the country. In order to access domestic markets, these new apple producers often use pesticides to meet market standards. Through situated ethnographic inquiry and commodity chain analysis, using a combination of surveys (n = 120) and interviews (n = 84) with apple wholesalers, government officials, along with farmers, this paper works to critique the PMV’s development approach that implicitly values commodification. By exploring interconnected processes of commodification, I link subsidized apple saplings and cold storage infrastructure to the dependence on pesticide usage, which has become a part of daily village life. This has important implications for community health and riparian ecosystems. Alternatively, I propose how we can imagine different development trajectories that decommodify livelihoods by focusing on local knowledge creation and diversification strategies.
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Notes
Commodification is also situated as one of the two fundamental historical processes associated with capitalism alongside primitive accumulation (Kloppenburg 1988, p. 8). Castree (2003) breaks this process of commodification into six aspects: privatization, alienability, individualization, abstraction, valuation, and displacement.
This paper avoids the term commoditization, which for many refers to the process of increasing interchangeability (i.e. Kopytoff 1986). However, others use commoditization similar to this paper’s use of the term. For example, Harriss (1982, p.22) writes that the “process of commoditization…or the linking of rural household producers with capitalist production in various ways…is perhaps the dominant process of change in contemporary agrarian societies” (see also van der Ploeg 2010). This is highly similar to Kloppenburg’s (1988) spelling of the term, commodification.
Commodification of food is never a complete process because it can be termed an “uncooperative” commodity (Bakker 2004). Legun (2016, p. 138) perhaps explains the apple as an “uncooperative” commodity best: “The apple tree is never fully committed to the commodity project, and perhaps this positions it as a perfect character of our contemporary economic moment.” This refers to the tendency for blemishes from pests and other ecological relations.
Here, “clean” is referring to without blemishes rather than without chemicals. It should be noted that much of pesticide use is to achieve apple commodity standards rather than to maintain yields. Based on a study on apples in North Carolina, Babcock et al. (1992) concludes that “fungicides are shown to reduce both yield and quality degradation, while insecticides are shown to reduce quality damage. Quality considerations account for all insecticide use and up to 15% of profit maximizing fungicide use. Both insecticide and fungicides appear to be applied in greater amounts than profit maximizing amounts, even when quality considerations are taken into account” (171).
Most pesticide poisoning is serious problem in the Global South. Investigations in the 1990s estimated that 25 million people suffer from acute poisoning in non-industrialized countries (Jeyaratnam 1990). These populations use 20% of global agrochemicals yet are sites for 99% of pesticide poisoning deaths from unsafe handling and application (Jeyaratnam and Chia 1994). Moroccan Anti-poisoning and Pharmaco-vigilance Center tracks pesticide poisoning in urban and agricultural regions, but there is no data for mountain regions, such as Tifnout.
Increasing jobs is a sixth goal of PMV but does not fit neatly into the commodity chain analysis.
This contradicts data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which reports that apple production has doubled from 404,310 tons in 2007 to 820,547 tons in 2017 (FAO n.d.).
The “Festival of Apples” also promoted new varieties of apples for the purpose of upgrading fruit quality to the latest marketable standard. One wholesaler that I spoke to discussed his preference for darker and consistent red color. Starking Delicious is perhaps the most popular variety in Morocco and was originally selected in the United State because it was more red than Red Delicious (Legun 2016).
In some circumstances, this wholesaler visits the farms in the spring when the trees are flowering and sends people who spray pesticides throughout the summer until the products are ready to harvest in the fall.
The high altitude also makes growing apples highly precarious due to spring frost that can decimate the whole season.
Interestingly, Dannenberg and Nduru (2013) find informal pathways for fruits and vegetables to enter highly standardized export chains.
Abbreviations
- PMV:
-
Plan Maroc Vert
- UN:
-
United Nations
- OCP:
-
Organochlorines pesticides
- ADA:
-
Agency for Agricultural Development
- ONSSA:
-
Office National de Sécurité Sanitaire des produits Alimentaires
- EBRD:
-
European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
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Acknowledgements
I would first like to thank the mentors who made this work possible: Bronwen Powell, Abderrahim Ouarghidi, and Yossef Ben-Meir, along with support from Hassan Akorsal, Fatima Zahra Laaribi, Cameron Franz, Mouaad Mouaad, Errachid Montassir, and many more. Thank you to Penn State’s Center for Landscape Dynamics, African Research Center, and the Geography Department for generously funding this research. Thank you to Karl Zimmerer, Ruchi Patel, Robert Chiles, Megan Baumann, Saumya Vaishnava, Sara Cavallo, Ramzi Tubbeh, and Karan Misquitta for helpful comments on my manuscript. I am also grateful for presenting this work and learning from scholars at Pesticide Politics in Africa conference in Arusha, Tanzania in 2019. Finally and most importantly, I share my deepest gratitude with the people of Tifnout.
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Goldberg, Z.A. Development through commodification: exploring apple commodity production as pesticide promotion in the High Atlas. Agric Hum Values 39, 663–682 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-021-10280-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-021-10280-4