Paper short abstract:

Newly proliferating pests threaten smallholder farmers’ livelihoods in Western Kenya. In this context, intensified agrochemical use emerges as a default solution, but also raises questions about the cost, both in terms of economic sustainability and long-term health.

Paper long abstract:

“Fall armyworm is everywhere.” During my fieldwork with smallholder farmers in Western Kenya in 2019 on pesticide use, I heard this refrain repeatedly. That year I did not come across a single plot under cultivation that had not been ‘invaded’ by this moth species: having only arrived in 2017, it reduced maize harvests overall by a third in 2019, and even up to 58% in some places, impacting most negatively on smallholder farmers (De Groote et al. 2020; Kansiime, Rwomushana, and Mugambi 2023). While the outbreak seemed sudden, I argue that the conditions for it were created over centuries of intensifying global connections, colonial policy, and capitalist modes of production. I show how a higher intensity and lower diversity of crop cultivation, and of maize in particular, contributes to a vulnerable ecology that resembles larger-scale monocropping, but without the techniques, inputs, or scale that create the profit margins of cash cropping – creating a partial plantation condition with its attendant impacts on human and environmental health. Staying close to farmers’ perspectives, I take pests as novel ‘monsters,’ analysing how these ecological shifts of the Anthropocene are tied to the accelerations of imperialism and industry and can be read in landscape disturbances, processes of ruination, and feral proliferations (Tsing, Mathews, and Bubandt 2019). Newly proliferating pests threatened farmers’ livelihoods; In this context, intensified agrochemical use emerged as a default solution, but also raised questions about the cost, both in terms of economic sustainability and long-term health.