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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. 363