Regeneration and its discontents: biodynamic agriculture and Darjeeling tea plantations.

Biodynamic agriculture is akin to organic farming, but with some twists. It involves complex, multi-step, and seasonally appropriate techniques, which together work to ‘regenerate’ the agrarian environment. While biodynamic agriculture is predominately practiced in the Global North and associated with the teachings of the German Anthroposophical thinker Rudolf Steiner, Demeter (biodynamic) certification came to Indian tea plantations in the 1990s along with other third-party certification programs (e.g. fair trade). Biodynamic narratives of ‘regeneration’ on tea plantations in Darjeeling as I argue in this article, are green washing, at best. Biodynamic production and its attendant performances are a means of regenerating a fundamentally extractive industry for consumers desirous of redemptive stories about the ecologies that bring their comestibles into being. Biodynamic practice and marketing on plantations highlights, in the framing of this special issue, a kind of ‘plant intimacy’. But this ‘plant intimacy’ is a fetishized and romanticized representation of plantation work that occludes history, forms of violence and difference and political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]