Northwestern Jordan, near Irbid, is known for its rolling hills and, during the later months of the year, its abundant olive oil. People of the region proudly speak of trees that have been around since the Roman occupation. Even the French Development Agency has tried to establish a geographical indicator (GI) for olive oil from Irbid. Meanwhile, this region has not always been primarily famous for its olive oil. It is historically part of the Houran, a region spanning across Syria and Jordan and famous for its wheat production. Many farmers during my research stated that US and international wheat imported as food aid during the 1950s and 1960s contributed to the falling prices of wheat and the subsequent widespread planting of olives. During that time, prices for olive oil were favorable and many farmers bought seedlings from the Jordanian Ministry of Agriculture. Through an analysis of interview and archival data from more than 15 months of ethnographic research, this project traces the transition from wheat to olives, placing the current debates around olive oil quality and best practices within the context of longer-term agricultural change. By examining both the shift from wheat to olives and the current olive industry’s capacity building efforts in the same region, this paper demonstrates that, despite these crops being produced overwhelmingly for local consumption, they are the products of global networks of development, trade, and geopolitics. Recent scholarship in geography has examined how quality and standards are produced within global production networks (GPN), but much of the work focuses on export-oriented crops. By putting GPN literature in conversation with work on the “global rural” and rural development, I call attention to how, even if olive producers are not producing for export, like in GPNs, their agricultural practices are often affected by broader capacity building networks embroiled in international networks of knowledge, value, and standards. Understanding how even non-exporting rural producers are engaged with socio-technical practices food standards and quality through global development networks is essential to understanding rural change and agrarian futures in Jordan.

In Tunisia, social mobilization increasingly centers around ecology – the “environmentalism of the poor.” In the Global North, consumption and development are often perceived to be in zero-sum conflicts. In the South it has been otherwise. In Tunisia, the development project was part myth, part deception, and never enfolded much of the country. It brought with it poverty and the dissolution of ancestral life-ways through resource extraction and pollution. This paper will interrogate Tunisia’s “environmentalism of the poor” by tracing the imbricated use and contestation over phosphates, fishing, and farming in Gabès, Tunisia’s fast-evaporating garden oasis. There, the phosphate-based economy and accompanying informal urbanization has damaged or destroyed oasis farming and fisheries which have long been the basis of the local economy. Contestation over resource development intertwines with questions of developmental models more broadly – whether such models will be sustainable, based on land, or ecologically and socially toxic, and based on extraction and processing. This paper will offer a historical account of how phosphate-processing and urbanization replaced agro-ecological oasis farming, and how theories of environmentally unequal exchange cast light on this process. It will use primary observation, archival sources, and secondary data to trace the course and assess the consequences of resource processing and thereby allow us to interpret to what degree such conversion of resources into capital flows has meant despoliation or development for Gabès’s people. It will assess whether we might understand such protests as an “environmentalism of the poor” and to what degree they prefigure an alternative developmental model.

How does the construction of the rural as a site of poverty in need of development by external forces impact communities’ sense of self, vision of place and notion of a good life? I will respond to this question by analyzing the representation of Turkey’s northernmost city, Sinop as a deindustrialized zone to explore how the multinational nuclear energy project envisioned by the Turkish government influences Sinop residents’ idea of who they are, their understanding of locality and their aspirations. Envisioned as one of Turkey’s first two nuclear plants -with the other one already underway in a Mediterranean city- this project is intended to provide a response to Turkey’s assumed energy shortage, while providing Sinop with a thriving industry. Understanding Sinop’s construction as a site in need of development requires evaluating this representation of deindustrialized apathy alongside Sinop’s designation as Turkey’s happiest city by the Turkish Statistics Institute based on factors such as the region’s ecological richness and slow-paced lifestyle. I will show that while these two representations appear to negate one another, they are, indeed, intertwined in their strategy to popularize and legitimize the project. Bringing together ten years of ethnographic research and archival analysis, I will illustrate how the extractivist logic imposed by external forces has resulted in paradoxical tendencies in Sinop. While Sinop residents are passionately concerned about their province’s deindustrialized state, they are as passionately opposed to the nuclear industry. While they challenge their fame as the country’s happiest city by citing deindustrialization, they base their opposition to nuclear industry on the same criteria employed by the government in the happy city rhetoric. Finally, while they take pride in the progressive politics of the province, they also espouse an isolationist discourse, which undermines their self-prescribed cosmopolitanism through a parochial sense of locality. By demonstrating how these paradoxes reveal the complexities of Sinop residents’ notions of self, place and future resulting from an externally imposed nuclear energy project, I will contribute to and complicate the understanding of extractivism and the global rural.

While extraction has occurred in Morocco for centuries, new kinds of extraction in the rural periphery have spurred conflict as residents question how resources are valued and benefits returned to their communities. In the southeast, for example, residents draw similarities between the environmental and economic impacts of a silver mine and a recently-constructed solar energy plant. Press accounts and ethnographic research reveal a shared conception of mines and renewable energy alike as extractive because of how the state approaches governance of these and other natural resources. Residents are not only concerned about the impacts after extraction happens—the appropriation of scarce water, the limited jobs, and limited investment in local development. They also wonder how their historic economic and political marginalization informs state policies for valuing resources and facilitating extraction without involving residents in resource governance. While scholars have addressed extraction impacts after projects are implemented, we still do not understand how cultural and political processes contribute to producing resources as valuable for extraction in the first place. Nor do we understand the role of bureaucracies in privileging quantifiable values suited to extraction over the multi-valent values associated with place, culture, and history. This paper will examine how the bureaucratic management of natural resources facilitates extractivism as a mode of governance as well as economic activity. An anthropological approach to the way culture and power inform the daily operations of government illustrates how extraction creates new resource frontiers-- lands where resources are being commoditized for the first time—in Morocco and beyond. This paper is based on collaborative research with civil society actors in Morocco who are exploring how exctractivism intervenes in long-standing debates and claims around rural marginalization, especially in Morocco’s arid southeast.