The Quinoa Bust

Quinoa rose to global stardom pitched as an unparalleled sustainable development opportunity that heralded a bright future for rural communities devastated by decades of rural-urban migration, civil war, and state neglect. The Quinoa Bust is based in a longitudinal ethnography centered around Puno, Peru, the main quinoa production area in the world’s chief quinoa exporting country. This book traces the social, ecological, technological, and political work that went into transforming a humble Andean grain into a development miracle crop and also highlights that project’s unintended consequences. The Quinoa Bust shows how even efforts based in the best of intentions—counteracting the homogenization of global food supply, empowering small-scale farmers, revaluing local food cultures, and adapting agricultural systems to climate change—can generate new kinds of oppression. At a time when so-called forgotten foods are increasingly positioned as sustainable development tools, The Quinoa Bust offers a cautionary tale of fleeting benefits and ambivalent results.

Emma McDonell is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and coauthor of Critical Approaches to Superfoods.

Contents

Note on Names and Places 
Quinoa Timeline 

Introduction: Quinoa’s Promise 

Part one
Miracle Crop
1 • Reimagining the Future of a Neglected Crop 
2 • Whitening a Comida de Indios: Culinary Bioprospecting and the Inca Superfood 

Part two
Boom
3 • The Quinoa Frontier: Making a Productive and Orderly Landscape 
4 • Producing Good Quinoa: The Moral Politics of Quality Standards 

Part three
Bust
5 • Disarticulations: Uneven Risks and Fragile Relations in the Quinoa Bust
6 • Fragmented Knowledge and Intractable Residues in the Quinoa Supply Chain 
7 • (Re)building Reputation: Origin-Based Labels and the Elusive Promise of Differentiation 

Conclusion 

Acknowledgments 
Appendix: Quinoa Production, Export, and Price Charts 
Notes 
Bibliography 
Index