Presentation short abstract

Australia has the second highest rates of herbicide resistance in the world. This presentation draws on extensive qualitative research with farmers, agronomists and distributors to explain why Australian farmers are so reliant on herbicides and the enabling social and regulatory environments.

Presentation long abstract

Australia has the unenviable position of having the second highest rates of herbicide resistance in the world as well as the most extensive evolution of weed populations with resistance to multiple herbicides in grain producing regions. Yet there has been limited research into the social, regulatory and commercial environments that enable and encourage a high reliance on herbicides. This presentation draws on over 80 interviews with farmers, government staff, agronomists and distributors to consider how farmers perceive herbicides to be critical to profitability and sustainability, the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on herbicide use when supply chains were interrupted, and the concerns being raised by some in the farming sector about the toxicity of herbicides banned elsewhere, such as paraquat. It then goes on to consider how the regulatory, commercial and technological environments reinforce the reliance on herbicides, the implications of Australia's dependence on China to produce herbicides and growing concerns among consumers about herbicide use and residues. Finally, the presentation considers the factors that may shape Australia's herbicide use in future and how this relates to international trends.

Presentation short abstract

Our research follows the rise and fall of efforts since 2015 to ban the weedkiller glyphosate. While bans have failed, there are new restrictions on non-agricultural use. Our findings suggest that bans are best understood as effects rather than drivers of political economic conditions.

Presentation long abstract

Are bans on pesticides effective at forcing change or are they signs that things have already changed? This paper examines chemical regulation through the lens of the Global Pesticide Complex by exploring this question through a study of efforts to ban or restrict the use of the herbicide glyphosate (commercialized as Roundup) between 2015-2025. Triangulating media reports and government documents, we followed efforts to ban or restrict glyphosate in 39 countries and multiple subnational jurisdictions. None of the bans loudly proclaimed during this time still exist today. Instead, we found a fractured landscape of efforts to control various aspects of production, trade, and/or use of the chemical, for different reasons, at different spatial scales, and shifting over time. Two trends are evident: bifurcation of regulatory efforts between minimal agricultural and stricter non-agricultural policies and a rise of what we identify as voluntary self-limitations, particularly among subnational jurisdictions. While corporate influence and the related politics of uncertainty are well documented as key factors in rolling back glyphosate bans, we argue that they are insufficient to understand the overall pattern. Bans also faced the headwinds of lack of chemical replacements and the expansive ways people now depend upon glyphosate under a variety of socioeconomic and ecological arrangements. Overall, our analysis suggests that bans are better understood as effects of political economic conditions, rather than drivers of them. As glyphosate’s efficacy wanes, we are likely to see more restrictions, but without clear incentives for agroecology, the cycle of chemical substitution will continue.

Presentation short abstract

This paper analyzes the global pesticide complex on Turkey’s cherry frontier. I show how hydrogen cyanamide, an EU-banned growth regulator, functions as a temporal fix that forces early market entry. This creates a temporal rift and a modern Circles of Poison dynamic sustained by an unenforced ban.

Presentation long abstract

This paper analyzes a contemporary Circles of Poison dynamic on Turkey’s agro-export cherry frontier. Growers rely on hydrogen cyanamide—an acutely toxic growth regulator banned in the EU but widely used in Turkey—to force premature blooms and enter markets earlier. Although not formally classified as a pesticide, its regulatory history and exposure profile mirror the dynamics of the global pesticide complex: transnationally uneven bans, dependent production networks, and the offshoring of toxic risk onto workers and peripheral agrarian landscapes.

I conceptualize this system through the notion of a temporal rift. Hydrogen cyanamide acts as a temporal fix that accelerates ecological time, forcing dormancy to end weeks early, collapsing orchard lifespans from thirty years to as few as six, and locking growers into escalating chemical dependency. This temporal violence is borne primarily by farmworkers, who handle a compound linked to reproductive harm, organ damage, and acute poisoning. At the same time, growers confront economic entrapment as early-season competition and export-sector volatility compel reliance on a chemical they know is degrading their orchards.

The paper intervenes in three themes highlighted by the panel. First, on regulation, bans, and toxicity, it examines Turkey’s nominal yet unenforced ban and the “gray zone of legality” enabling continued use. Second, on epistemologies and the politics of knowledge, it shows how state agencies render a political-economic crisis technical. Third, on violence and agrarian change, it traces how chemical acceleration restructures labour, ecology, and growers’ reproduction, positioning Turkey’s cherry frontier as emblematic of contemporary pesticide political ecologies.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores how “simulated ignorance” about pesticide risks among Catalan farmers sustains the corporate agri-food regime. It shows how dependence, power, and epistemic gaps block agroecological transition and reinforce organized irresponsibility.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines the production of ignorance surrounding pesticide risks in the fruit-growing sector of Lleida (Catalonia), based on qualitative research with twenty farmers. Despite widespread awareness of pesticide toxicity and mandatory safety training, everyday practices reveal a form of simulated ignorance: farmers acknowledge the risks but normalize them as an inevitable part of their work. This attitude does not arise from a lack of information but from structural dependencies within the corporate agri-food regime. The power of agrochemical corporations, retail chains, and regulatory institutions creates a system that transfers responsibility to farmers, undermining their autonomy and constraining transitions toward alternative models. From a political agroecology perspective, this situation exemplifies an “organized irresponsibility” (Beck, 1992), where ignorance and inaction are functionally necessary to sustain the hegemonic agro-industrial system. The study also highlights how the absence of institutional and educational references to agroecology reinforces the lack of alternative imaginaries for pest management and agricultural practice. Consequently, the epistemology of “not knowing” surrounding pesticides operates as a mechanism that obstructs agroecological transformation, perpetuating a dependent, toxic, and socially unequal production model. This case contributes to rethinking the political ecologies of pesticides as sites where knowledge, ignorance, and power are co-produced, revealing how epistemic and structural constraints maintain—or potentially contest—the global agro-industrial order.

Reference: Beck, U. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity (M. Ritter, Trans.). Sage.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores why Chinese smallholders intensively use agrochemicals rather than maintain agroecological practices. It highlights how institutions, agrochemical provision schemes, and land–labour shifts drive this change.

Presentation long abstract

Different from large-scale industrialised farming, small-scale household-based farming has historically been perceived as subsistence-oriented, labour-intensive, and capable of making better use of nature by relying on traditional knowledge grounded in farmers’ own experience and experimentation rather than external inputs. In this sense, smallholders’ farming practices are usually believed to be agroecological. However, the case of China is an anomaly. In China, smallholders are observed to inventively, and even excessively, use agrochemicals, including chemical pesticides and fertilisers. Why do smallholders in China use agrochemicals so intensively? How did such a shift in smallholders’ farming practices emerge and develop?

To answer these questions, this paper examines the dynamics of smallholders’ agrochemical use through political economy and political ecology perspectives. It highlights the epistemological, technological, and social changes shaping smallholders’ farming practices. It argues that this shift is not entirely a matter of smallholders’ own preferences but is shaped by institutional changes, agrochemical provision schemes, and evolving land–labour conditions. Moreover, during this transition, smallholders are not passive actors. They are observed to engage in everyday forms of resistance by reserving parts of their farmland for agroecological cultivation to produce food for self-consumption. By doing so, the paper aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the complexities of agroecological transformation.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines the relationship between discourses of smartness and broader conceptualizations of sustainability in the context of precision spraying, situating imaginaries of the ‘future of farming’ within the political economy and ecology of industrial agriculture.

Presentation long abstract

How do discourses of 'precision' and 'smartness' in the development, marketing, and uptake of new spraying technologies relate to shifting conceptualizations of health and sustainability across human and more-than-human communities in contemporary industrial agriculture? Drawing on interviews and participant observation with farmers and precision agriculture researchers in Mississippi (USA) and Limburg (Netherlands/Belgium), this paper situates recent developments in precision spraying - i.e., spraying technologies that use advanced sensors and data analytics to more precisely target weeds, pests, and diseases – in broader discussions about the relationship between industrial agriculture and planetary health in the context of “the future of farming.” I show that the development of precision spraying technologies mobilizes the promise of enhanced efficiency in a way that reinforces the intensification of agriculture, in part by undermining alternative approaches to sustainability that reject economic efficiency as a virtue. I identify several reasons for this, focusing on the political economic situation of small- and medium-sized farmers and their contested role within the dominant techno-solutionalist (Morozov) ‘socioecological imaginary’ (Milkoreit) of precision agriculture. In doing so, this paper highlights the important role of emergent modes of technological mediation and chemosociality in the political ecology of pesticides, and of agriculture more generally.

Presentation short abstract

We show how rural communities in Chile confront the Global Pesticides Complex through collaborative, multiscalar strategies that deepen socio-ecological understanding and advance concrete political proposals and interspecies alliances

Presentation long abstract

There is a growing body of sophisticated and relevant analysis on the transformations of the Global Pesticides Complex (GPC) and its socio-ecological impacts, particularly in the Global South. However, we see a pending need to deepen further an approach that integrates situated and collaborative socio-ecological perspectives on how the GPC manifests and affects rural territories. In this context, drawing on ten years of collaborative research on the expansion of agribusiness in Chile, we propose a multiscalar and multidimensional understanding of community agencies that confront the socio-ecological impacts of pesticides in their territories.

Chile is a country that underwent an early and radical neoliberalization of agri-food production and is often presented as an exemplary and sophisticated model of agro-export-driven economic growth based on fresh fruit production. It is also one of the Latin American countries that has advanced most quickly in adopting “Agriculture 4.0” models as an “innovative and sustainable solution”.

In this scenario, we observe that rural organizations, communities, and critical scholars have moved beyond the strategies developed in previous decades—those based on open confrontation with agribusiness and on documenting contamination as evidence of pesticide impacts. In addition to these, current strategies have focused on: dismantling the narrative of Agriculture 4.0 as a sustainable option; deepening the understanding of the socio-ecological damage caused by pesticides in the territory beyond human health; strengthening interspecies alliances as concrete propositions for confronting contamination; and designing political proposals that make it possible to “sow hope” in order to remain in their territory.

Presentation short abstract

This study, based on ethnography with Ecuadorian smallholders in hybrid maize production, shows how quieter registers of power - knowledge regimes and subjectivation - shift practices toward dependence on kits and technoscience, enabling a high-input model to expand despite socioecological conflicts

Presentation long abstract

This paper addresses agroindustrial expansion from the perspective of smallholders cultivating hybrid maize for feed in coastal Ecuador. Drawing on ethnographic research, it shows how shifts in practice—plant spacing, seed choice, spray schedules, and the adoption of subsidized “kits” of certified seeds and agrochemicals—are made possible and sustained by quieter registers of power. Treating agroindustry as a dispositif, the analysis foregrounds how everyday decisions are shaped by a knowledge regime that legitimizes technoscientific expertise while marginalizing local forms of knowledge. Epistemic hierarchies—and at times epistemic violence—reposition farmers as executors of recipes rather than knowledge holders, impose standardized chemical routines, and establish a “new normal” in how soils, pests, and the living world are perceived, as well as the very purpose of agriculture.

These epistemic power relations are coupled with modes of subjectivation that circulate a normative template of the entrepreneurial farmer—strategic, growth‑oriented, and compliant with the prescribed regimen. Within this imaginary of the “good farmer,” intensive agrochemical use signals progress and proximity to “civilization,” an index of access to technoscience rather than “backwardness.” Ways of doing agriculture are thus profoundly linked to self‑positioning and subjectivity.

However, these structures are not determinative. Farmers negotiate pressure and possibility within the dispositif, exercising agency through creative adaptation, partial integration, reinterpretation, and the mobilization of alternative knowledges. This study contributes at the intersection of political ecology and peasant studies by showing how a high‑input, technoscience‑driven production model expands—and is sustained through knowledge regimes and modes of subjectivation—despite the socioecological conflicts it generates.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines why smallholders in sub-Saharan Africa are slow to adopt agricultural biologicals. Using a feminist political ecology lens, it highlights how power, poverty, risk, and colonial legacies shape farmers’ choices, challenging knowledge-deficit explanations.

Presentation long abstract

Momentum to reduce pesticides and other synthetic agricultural inputs is rapidly increasing as their environmental and health impacts become more widely acknowledged. The EU Farm to Fork strategy, for example, aims for a 50% reduction in highly hazardous and chemical pesticides by 2030, while numerous regional and national initiatives seek to curb agriculture’s heavy dependence on synthetic inputs. In this context, agricultural biologicals—such as biofertilizers, biostimulants, and biological pest-control agents—are being promoted as safer and effective alternatives. While transitions in the EU are happening rapidly, the transition from synthetic to agrobiological inputs among smallholders in sub-Saharan Africa remain limited. This slow uptake is often attributed to farmers’ lack of knowledge, leading to growing calls for awareness-raising and training on the benefits of biologicals. Using a feminist political ecology framework, this paper interrogates such narratives by foregrounding farmers’ situated knowledges and the power relations that shape access to resources, agrarian expertise, and everyday farming practices. Rather than viewing smallholders’ “lagging behind” in adopting biologicals primarily as an issue of knowledge deficits, I situate these dynamics within broader contexts of rural poverty, unequal market relations, and the colonial legacies embedded in contemporary commodity chains and agricultural modernization paradigms. Drawing on cases from Kenya and South Africa—where smallholders are being enrolled in “living labs” designed to promote biological inputs—I explore how farmers navigate risk, uncertainty, and shifting input regimes, and how their perspectives and material conditions complicate dominant framings of agricultural transition as a matter of substituting synthetic pest control agents with biologicals.

Presentation short abstract

This article examines how drinking-water quality standards in Costa Rica are produced, contested, and lived in the face of pesticide contamination, tracing how regulatory shifts are situated within broader dynamics of global pesticide supply and how they shape uneven chemical geographies.

Presentation long abstract

In July 2024, a truck carrying mancozeb, a widely used fungicide on tropical banana plantations, overturned, spilling its contents into water bodies in Costa Rica’s Barranca River watershed. This event triggered an unsettling debate in a country already grappling with contentious politics over pesticides, given widespread concern over the country’s intensive pesticide use. In this contribution, I explore how pesticide regulatory standards for water quality are produced and contested in relation to the global pesticide complex, shaping uneven chemical geographies. Through ethnographic fieldwork, including semi-structured interviews with state institutions, pesticide firms, community water boards, environmental organizations, academia, and other relevant actors, I unpack pesticide residues as contested, multiscalar objects. The mancozeb emergency raised several questions for state authorities over which actors were responsible for the accident and thus its remediation, and what the state could do to address community concerns over contaminated water. In the wake of this and other scandals over pesticide-contaminated water, the Ministry of Health piloted a major regulatory change to the country’s Maximum Admissible Values, which hitherto followed the same precautionary approach as the European Union (0.1 ug/L). Arguing in part that European standards were unrealistic for a country like Costa Rica, the Ministry introduced a new modality: Maximum Allowable Values Adjusted for Risk. I analyze the discourses surrounding this change and the modalities of contestation.