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.