Bulbs and Biopower: Managing Produce and Price in the Age of Agri-Logistics

Abstract

This paper deploys the material and discursive politics of storage as a lens into agrarian change in rural India. Focusing on onions (Allium cepa), a price volatile crop and a kitchen staple, it maps out the contested meanings of and motivations for storage among growers, governments, and agri-logistics companies. Specifically, this paper asks why storage is increasingly positioned as a key solution to the problem of price instability. This emphasis, I argue, represents a distinct regime of agrarian biopower that seeks to intervene into the physical properties of the bulb to extend its material life, and thereby, manage produce, prices, and populations. In doing so, however, fundamental issues of social inequality and guaranteed prices are bypassed. Moreover, innovations in storage technologies lay the grounds for the entry of corporate capital into agriculture. Ultimately, techno-capital-intensive biopolitical infrastructures of storage portend the restructuring of India's agrarian economy in favour of elite farmers and agri-logistics firms by circumventing the issue of a fixed and fair price for producers and consumers.