Yui Sasajima

This project offers a critical appraisal of agroecology by interrogating the ways in which global development discourses become not only localized but embodied by women through their daily work. Against the encroachment of the global cut-flower industry in the northern Ecuadorian Andes, development institutions introduced agroecology as a strategy for indigenous Kichwa and mestiza smallholders to stay on their land. The central protagonist of the agroecology movement is the feminized figure of the successful agroecological producer, who is dedicated to promoting agroecology as a “family project” (proyecto familiar). Over 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the territory of Cotacachi, I investigate how smallholder women navigate their roles in the movement and their relationships to NGOs and community networks amid agroecological transition. I use the lens of social reproduction to follow the daily labor in the home and the chakra (small subsistence plot) required to maintain the agroecological family project. Building on feminist anthropological critiques of capitalism through questions of labor, development, and agrarian extractivism, this project seeks to shed light on how alternative paradigms to development still recapitulate capitalist values and exacerbate existing gendered power relations at the local and global scales.