Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Rural Studies journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jrurstud Organic rural development: Barriers to value in the quest for qualities in Jordanian olive oil Brittany Cook Department of History, Geography, and Philosophy at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, P.O. Box 43605, Lafayette, LA, 70504, USA ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Organic certification Quality Commodity networks Jordan Agriculture Olive oil ABSTRACT Globally, governments have encouraged organic farming with smallholder farmers as a rural development strategy. However, certified organic agriculture has proven to be a paradox: certification requirements designed to promote environmentally sustainable farming often lead to agricultural intensification contrary to organic agriculture's stated goals. Meanwhile, certification itself is not the sole cause of this paradox. This article, based on 15 months of qualitative fieldwork in Jordan, argues that the paradox of organic agriculture in Jordan centers on the ways in which the ‘alternative’ organic olive oil production functionally requires producers to abandon local markets and engage in long-distance commodity chains. This shift alters how value is added to olive oil and changes technological requirements for processing, storing, packaging, and transporting the oil to international gourmet markets. By calling attention to the social relations in differing commodity networks and chains, my analysis focuses on, first, how quality and value is constructed within material and cultural systems, then how farmers become dependent on access to distant consumers, and, third, how production for these consumers alters the structure of relational and technological rents. As a result, I find that the promotion of certified organic, gourmet olive oil for sale in global markets privileges specific regions within Jordan. In short, the structure of relational and technological rents favors resource-intensive production in a Jordanian desert region over ‘tra- ditional’ low-input production in Jordan's mountainous hinterland. In theoretical terms, this study highlights teleologies of success and modernization in agricultural development and offers an examination of those en- vironmental, socio-economic, and political factors that prevent small-farmers from realizing rents in certified agriculture. 1. Introduction “The goal of doing organic is to put Jordanian olive oil on shelves in Japan regardless of gains or losses” - a Ministry of Agriculture em- ployee, as quoted by an organic farmer Ahmed, 1 a businessman who has been working with organic farmers for about 8 years, scoffs when recalling how some government officials cited an organic olive project in Jerash as a successful model. In his opinion, the project's dependence on external support is not sustain- able. However, to the Ministry of Agriculture, as quoted by a farmer, the project has succeeded because there is Jordanian olive oil in Japan. As seen from these contrasting perspectives, questions of success and failure are embroiled in disparate goals, desires, and outcomes of par- ticipants across the commodity network. This paper steps away from this teleological question of success and failure to conduct a political economic analysis of value and of who gets included or excluded in production (Bair et al., 2013). Such an analysis highlights the ways in which the larger social and environmental context of certified organic production constrains who and what are included or excluded. Through this approach, this article identifies how smallholder farmers in tradi- tional regions of rainfed olive production have difficulty capturing the technological and relational rents necessary to change their products and sell it according to quality demands of distant markets. Meanwhile investment firms and capital-intensive cultivation methods, often in desert areas, lead organic olive production in Jordan. While this finding supports the idea that organic both weakens smallholder landowning farmers and strengthens intermediary firms and capital-intensive cultivation methods (Guthman, 2004b), I found that, unlike the context of California, in Jordan the incentive to enroll small-scale producers into organic certification is linked to interna- tional development projects and wider economic efforts to increase Jordan's presence in expos and supermarkets worldwide. So it follows that, although much of the literature has addressed the organic paradox (Guthman, 2004b; 2004a; Mutersbaugh, 2004; Trauger, 2014) and https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.04.014 Received 9 July 2018; Received in revised form 21 April 2019; Accepted 27 April 2019 E-mail address: brittany.cook@louisiana.edu. 1 Names in this article are pseudonyms in order to protect confidentiality. Journal of Rural Studies 69 (2019) 106–116 0743-0167/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T