Kicking the tobacco habit: Small farmers, local markets, and the consequences of global tobacco standards

This dissertation examines the rise of private quality standards in agro-food systems and their impact on small producers. Using global commodity chain analysis and multi-sited ethnography, I study the case of tobacco. The study proceeds in two parts. The first part focuses on industry strategy, drawing on internal company documents at the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library to show how Philip Morris has led the industry towards competition based on the principle of "harm reduction." The remainder of the analysis is an ethnographic study of agricultural restructuring in the tobacco-producing region of Misiones, Argentina. There, I investigate how producers have altered their livelihood strategies in the wake of Philip Morris' private production standards. I resurrect and revise theories of simple commodity production to make sense of contemporary dynamics and struggles in the tobacco sector. An old framework originally developed to account for agrarian change in the early 20th Century, I argue it offers an invaluable optic for understanding current aspects of the globalization project.;My most important finding documents an unexpected process of what Jan Douwe van der Ploeg (2008) calls "re-peasantization" that is currently transpiring in Misiones. Like other scholars, I find that rigid new quality standards impose hardships on farmers. As margins decline, neo-classical economists predict that farmers will expand production to make up for reduced earnings. In this case, however, simple commodity producers have reached a "tipping point" beyond which they refuse to expand export production of tobacco. Instead, much to the frustration of leaf dealers, they are maintaining or reducing tobacco acreage and focusing more energy on the production of diversified foodstuffs geared for local spot markets. This livelihood strategy is an outcome of both "new uncertainties" of producing for the global economy and emerging opportunities to sell agricultural goods domestically. But the reason why farmers are able to pursue this strategy is because, as diversified simple commodity producers, they never specialized or withdrew completely from the peasant economy. They are thus well-positioned to return to the region when the opportunity set changes.