The organic label doesn’t tell the full story
During the summer of 2018, Andrew Flachs, an assistant professor of anthropology at Purdue University and Sreenu Panuganti, a graduate student at the University of Hyderaba, led surveys, interviews and focus groups, attended planning meetings and visited farms in two South Indian villages in the Adilabad district, as well as one village near Araku in Andhra Pradesh. They found that farmers decided to produce organic commodities like coffee and cotton not only to add value, but to safeguard their land from corporate interests and extraction operations.