Format/Structure

The panel consists of five article-based presentations, each lasting 10 minutes, followed by a 5-minute Q&A session.

Long Abstract

Political ecologies of pesticides have long explored the social and ecological effects of pesticide use. Foundational works have centered on the ‘Circles of Poison’ (Weir and Shapiro 1981), wherein pesticides banned in the Global North are produced and exported to countries in the Global South and applied to export crops, thus returning “north” as residues on imported crops. Although the Circles of Poison thesis served to highlight uneven exposure and harm to pesticides along a classic dependency axis, its assumptions failed to account for major changes in the political ecology of pesticides since at least the early 2000s. The dynamics of global pesticide use, supply, and regulation have undergone significant transformations, sparking new interest from the social sciences (Mansfield et al. 2023). China-centered generic production and trade networks have facilitated access to pesticides in farm systems that hitherto used few inputs, while weed and pest resistance has increased loads in genetically modified seed packages whose corporate promoters promised the opposite (Shattuck 2021). The implications of these changes for agricultural workers, agrarian livelihoods, social and environmental health, and food systems remain unclear. Political ecologies of pesticides have addressed these issues through the ‘global pesticide complex’, an analytical framework to study interactions between agricultural practice, the agrochemical industry, regulatory actions, and knowledge of toxicity (Mansfield et al. 2023; cf. Galt 2008). Inspired by over fifty years of research on the political ecologies of pesticides, this session brings together papers that explore both old and new questions in contemporary contexts.

Possible themes could include, but are not limited to:

Production networks and the global pesticide industry

Precision agriculture, digitalization, and financialization

Regulation, bans, and toxicity

Epistemologies and politics of knowledge

Violence and agrarian change

This Panel has 8 pending paper proposals.
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