Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 71 (2015): 100–113 © Stichting Focaal and Berghahn Books doi:10.3167/fcl.2015.710109 “Ginger is a gamble” Crop booms, rural uncertainty, and the neoliberalization of agriculture in South India Daniel Münster Abstract: Responding to agrarian crisis at home, cash crop cultivators hailing from the South Indian district of Wayanad increasingly engage in the seasonal produc- tion of ginger in other states of India. his is a purely proit-based and unsustainable crop boom that takes a toll on both labor and the environment. his ethnographic analysis of speculative ginger cultivation situates this emerging economic complex in the regional political ecology, farming practices, individual farmers’ hopes and aspirations, and in relation to the qualities of ginger as a cultivar. It argues that gin- ger is a special kind of boom crop and that its cultivation on large tracts of leased land is the manifestation of a moment of agrarian uncertainty and the neoliber- alization of agriculture in South India coproduced by the properties of ginger. As a neoliberal boom crop, ginger exempliies a regime of lexibilization of agrarian accumulation that has proved a proitable move for some, but has brought inan- cial ruin and debt traps for many others. Keywords: agrarian crisis, agricultural anthropology, boom crops, Kerala, neolib- eralism, political ecology, risk and speculation, ginger Ginger, or Zingiber oicinale (from the Tamil iñciver), has been commercially cultivated on the Malabar Coast for centuries (Ravindran and Babu 2005). Together with pepper, it is among the earliest recorded spices to be cultivated and exported from southwest India, particularly from the region that constitutes the present-day state of Kerala. Despite this long-established relation- ship of Kerala’s cultivators to ginger, over the last decade a new practice of ginger cultivation has assumed a central role. Ginger has become a boom crop (Hall 2011) cultivated by large num- bers of smallholder growers from Kerala seek- ing to control fertile land on a new agrarian frontier. As Derek Hall has argued (ibid.: 838), attention to tropical crop booms, such as cocoa (Li 2002), rubber (Peluso 2012), cofee (West 2012), or oil palm, may bring to light the ne- glected role that smallholders play as agents in global struggles over land control (Peluso and Lund 2011; Hall 2013). his ethnographic account deals with groups of growers hailing from Wayanad district in northern Kerala who have recently turned to out-of-state cultivation of ginger on leased land. By focusing on this novel agrarian activity, I