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8 UC Irvine L. Rev. 363 (2018)
Transforming the Work of Geographical Indications to Decolonize Racialized Labor and Support Agroecology

handle is hein.journals/ucirvlre8 and id is 375 raw text is: 









   Transforming the Work of Geographical

 Indications to Decolonize Racialized. Labor

                and Support Agroecology


                  Rosemary   J. Coombe   and  S. Ali Malik*


          Critical scholarship  on geographical  indications (GIs)   has
     increasingy focused upon  their role in fostering development in the
     Global  South. Recent work  has drawn  welcome attention to issues of
     governance and sparked  new debates about the role of the state in GI
     regulation. We argue that this new emphasis needs to be coupled with a
     greater focus upon local social relations of power and interlinked issues
     of social justice. Rather than see GI regimes as apolitical technical
     administrative frameworks, we argue that they govern emerging public
     goods that should be forged to redress extant forms of social inequalio
     and foster the inclusion of marginaliZed actors in commodity  value
     chains. In many areas of the world, this will entail close attention to the
     historical specificities of colonial labor relations and their neocolonial
     legacies, which have entrenched conditions of raciali ed and gendered
     dispossession, particularly in plantation economies. Using examples
     from   South  Africa   and  South  Asia,   we  illustrate how  GIs
     conventionally reify territories in a fashion that obscures and/or
     naturaliZes exploitative conditions of labor and unequal access to land
     based resources, which are legacies of historical disenfranchisement.
     Like  other forms of neoliberal governmentality that support private
     governance for public ends, however, GIs might be shaped to support new
     forms of social justice. We show how issues of labor and place-based
     livelihoods increasingly influence new policy directions within Fair Trade
     agendas while concerns with decoloniing agricultural governance now
     animate certification initiatives emerging from  new social movements.
     Both initiatives provide models for shaping the governance and regulation
     of GIs  in projects of rural teritorial development that encompass


* Rosemary J. Coombe is the Tier One Canada Research Chair in Law, Communication and Culture at
York University, where she is appointed to the Departments of Anthropology and Social Science
and the Graduate Program in Socio-Legal Studies. S. Ali Malik is a fifth year PhD candidate in the
Socio-Legal Studies Program at York University.


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