Ten years ago, Katherine Verdery and Sharad Chari (2009) urged scholars to “think between the posts” (63) by reexamining Cold War legacies, not only for postsocialist eastern Europe, but also for postcolonial struggles for recognition and livelihood around the world. They called for us to “rethink empires,” with postsocialist societies as a key site of what David Harvey has called accumulation by dispossession. Rethinking empires includes thinking about privatization and neoliberalization as processes of revaluing and dispossessing.

In Organic Sovereignties: Struggles over Farming in the Age of Fair Trade, Guntra Aistara takes up the challenge of “thinking between the posts” by comparing the development of the organic agriculture sector in Latvia and Costa Rica, two countries that, respectively, represent the postsocialist and postcolonial predicaments. Some readers might feel skeptical of the value of comparing two sites with such divergent histories. In the Introduction and first chapters, Aistara convincingly makes the case for the value of such multi-sited, multi-scaled work as an “ethnography of frustration” experienced by smallholder farmers (26). Aistara sheds light on the distinctive micropolitics of each case as well as broader trends in how small-scale organic producers in regional peripheries are addressing global challenges in the early twenty-first century.

Aistara sketches the historical trajectory of the agrarian sector in each site. Latvia has moved from smallholder farms in the early twentieth century to kolkhoz-style agricultural collectivization (often supplemented by food production in home gardens) during the state socialist years. Farmers met the restitution of small family farms in the 1990s with high hopes and rapid growth in the organic sector. Their excitement was soon dampened by the hard reality of competing with imported foods and complying with European Union regulations and organic certification systems. While Latvian farmers frame their history in terms gaining independence from Soviet control, Costa Rican farmers emphasize the role of smallholders in resisting colonial control of the land by powerful foreign fruit corporations. Smallholder farmers defended Costa Rica's national independence and their own food sovereignty by putting their support behind social democratic policies, a set of associations that persisted as the organic sector grew in the 1980s. Farmers’ struggles in both places took place under the shadow of Cold War oppositions, “where the South was the traditional (backwards) Other to the North's modernity, and eastern Europe's communism played foil to the North's freedom” (78). The contradictions of this rosy view of modernization and marketization became clearer in the early twenty-first century, as small organic producers in both sites saw threats to their autonomy in the rise of international trade agreements like the European Union's CAP and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).

Aistara's book gives readers insights into organic farmers’ understandings of landscapes and agrobiodiversity. In Chapter 3, Aistara traces how farmers attempt to restore rural landscapes in relation to family memories and broader national and international discourses on what constitutes a desirable landscape. Both countries experienced widespread deforestation to accommodate a growing agricultural sector. In Latvia, farmers have worked hard over time to maintain a forest-field mosaic, and they especially prize meadow landscapes, which have come to be seen as key sites for biodiversity. In Costa Rica, the agricultural sector initially “improved” the land by clearing rainforests for industrial farming, a practice which is now seen as an ecological threat. Organic farmers there have attempted to address this negative image of agriculture by positioning themselves as stewards of agrobiodiversity who plant trees among crops for a productive landscape. Aistara portrays farmers making their living from diverse livelihood strategies in a moment where biodiversity and agrobiodiversity conservation has become a global priority in Chapter 4. Latvian farmers have adopted a mix of primary organic production, agroprocessing, agritourism, and state subsidies for ecological services. One farmer, for example, grows organic herbs and vegetables that are consumed by tourists who come to visit the farm's sauna and see its herd of wild horses, which is part of an EU-supported wildlife restoration effort. In Costa Rica, organic farmers transformed the traditional family practice of seed-saving into a more formal seed exchange network run by NGOs.

As organic farmers have integrated new practices and beliefs around land and seeds, they face new challenges in neoliberal market and policy harmonization processes, brewing conflicts that Aistara presents in Chapter 5. In the wake of EU accession in 2004, Latvian farmers confronted many new rules that challenged their autonomy in land management if they were to continue receiving biodiversity subsidies. Costa Rican farmers had a victory with the passage of a national Organic Law, but experienced new pressures under the new CAFTA regime in 2007, which required the country to sign an intellectual property treaty that they saw as a threat to their thriving seed-saving network. In Chapter 6, Aistara recounts the rise and fall organic cooperatives in each country, battered by “conventionalization” policies that farmers saw as a threat to their sovereignty.

Organic Sovereignties makes a powerful case for the value of studying small organic producers around the world and understanding the complexities they navigate. Aistara portrays how farmers in two countries with very different histories struggle to achieve “place-based, networked, and nested” (212) sovereignties through the global organic movement, and she richly depicts their everyday frustrations and joys. The book is appropriate for upper-division undergraduate or graduate courses on biodiversity, culture, and agriculture, and readers interested in these topics will benefit from “thinking between the posts” of postsocialist and postcolonial studies.