CULTIVATING POST-SOVIET GARDENS: SEED SAVING AND THE HOUSEHOLD PLOT IN RURAL TAJIKISTAN

Over the last five years, local NGOs across Tajikistan have established community-based seed banks to support households cultivating agrobiodiverse kitchen gardens. While social movements to preserve local crop varieties are well-documented in other rural contexts, they are new to Central Asia and had gone without study. This dissertation brings together insights from political ecology, feminist political economy, and critical agrarian studies to explore how and why this effort emerged and what rural women’s participation in it signals about life-making in Tajikistan’s post-Soviet countryside. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork and document analysis, I argue that community-based seed banks are a response to persistent challenges in Tajikistan’s seed system and that women’s engagement with them—despite tradeoffs—indicates the kitchen garden’s importance to social reproduction. National institutions responsible for genetic preservation, seed breeding, production, and import oversight have struggled to recover after independence, a reality compounded by fragmented interventions from mainstream development actors. This has left local markets for vegetable seeds dominated by imported F1-hybrid varieties of inconsistent quality, raising concerns about varietal loss and frustrating households grappling with income insecurity. Encircling rural homes, kitchen gardens provide a protective barrier against an ongoing crisis of social reproduction, offering access to means of existence irrespective of income. To protect this function, women are turning to community-based seed banks to provide trusted, locally adapted seeds and reduce their reliance on expensive, unreliable imports. Locating the gardens and seeds of Tajikistan’s rural households within global trends— including growing dependence on women’s unpaid labor to subsidize patchworked precarious livelihoods, the corporate consolidation and enclosure of agricultural inputs, and the search for strategies to live as best as possible under constraint— this dissertation bridges often disparate academic discussions to nuance understandings of grassroots initiatives and small-scale cultivation under capitalism.