There is No Alternative… Is There? Organic Food Provisioning in Jamaica

In this paper, I examine the relationship between inside and outside meanings of organic agriculture in Jamaica to understand how they constrain, complicate and sometimes contradict each other and contribute to some of the tensions present in the envisioning and practice of alternative food initiatives in Jamaica. These contestations arise from differing interpretations of who organic is or should be for and differing understandings of what organic is an alternative to. I use these juxtapositions to highlight some of the possible implications this has for the re-working of production and consumption relationships around food. I also show how various actors’ deployment of the different meanings of organic leads to an uneven distribution of benefits from the material and cultural economies associated with organic provisioning. Finally, I examine how the diverse meanings of organic agriculture in this Global South context, further complicate a straightforward, already problematized, reading of organic provision as active opposition to the problems associated with industrialized food provisioning, derived mainly from Global North contexts such as the US or Europe. Broadly-speaking, this framing associates organic food provisioning with local resistance, and pits it against global forces of neoliberal capitalism. The different meanings of organic agriculture in Jamaica, however, highlight that in many respects the global and local are mutually constitutive in the process of shifting food production and consumption relations. This raises questions about whether the Global North/South dichotomy is appropriate as scholars and activists seek to envision more equitable alternatives to the conventional food system.