Short abstract:

The Agrochemical Association Kenya (AAK), teaches farmers that pesticides exposure can be blocked, creating a sense of safety exploited to boost pesticide sales, but also invoked by farmers who aim to find middle ground between protection and exposure.

Long abstract:

A plethora of anxieties about growth, contamination, and risk crystalize around pesticide use. Pesticides draw awareness to the openness of bodies to their environment, and the simultaneous potential for growth and well-being and possibility of harm and disease that come from such body-environment exchanges. The material qualities of pesticides open up imaginations of bodies’ porosity that go beyond ingestion alone, as the body responds not only to food, but the environment at large. In this paper I reflect on a series of ‘responsible use of pesticides’ trainings, organized by Agrochemical Association Kenya (AAK), a lobby group representing the pesticide industry in Kenya, which I attended in 2019. In this training, the openness of bodies was reduced to three clearly delineated routes (touching, inhaling, ingesting, or skin, nose, mouth) that become passable in particular moments only (during spraying or eating). I argue that this notion remains an important facilitator of growth: macro-economically, to boost pesticide sales and the national production of maize, but also on a smaller scale, for individual farmers who aim to find middle ground between protection and exposure, openings and closures, in order to keep growing their food and families.