Farmers, Plants, and Poison: Ambivalences over Pesticide Use in Argentina

Pablo Lapegna (University of Georgia, in Athens, Georgia, USA) & Johana Kunin (CONICET & UNSAM, Argentina)

Registration link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/farmers-plants-and-poison-ambivalences-over-pesticide-use-in-argentina-tickets-518717436817

Drawing from in-depth interviews, participant observation, and archival research, our project tackles pesticide use in Argentina. Our goal is to address two main research questions. First, we examine the unintended and undesirable consequences of economic prosperity. Pesticides underpinned the expansion of agriculture in Argentina, feeding an export boom since the late 1990s, while also creating new health and environmental risks. Second, we analyze the relationships among people, plants, and pesticides to better understand the relationship that humans establish with other living beings, and thus capture how humans conceive nature in the Anthropocene. Argentina was among the early adopters of agricultural biotechnology in the mid-1990, and genetically engineered crops (particularly herbicide-resistant soybeans) have fed an export boom that has brought economic prosperity. Farmers, agribusinesses, and governments have reaped the boom’s benefits by collecting profits and taxes. Activists and rural populations, in contrast, have voiced concerns about the environmental and public health impacts of agrochemicals. Engaging scholarship on toxicity, moralities, and care, and debates over life in the Anthropocene, we scrutinize the relationships among humans, chemicals, and plants afforded by agricultural biotechnology. While debates about GMOs and pesticides are usually polarized and present Manichean views, we dwell on the ambivalences, indeterminacies, and ambiguities we found in rural towns, where pesticides are at once a remedy and a poison that can both nurture life and destroy it.

Pablo Lapegna earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Georgia, in Athens, Georgia, USA. His book “Soybeans and Power: Genetically Modified Crops, Environmental Politics, and Social Movements in Argentina” (published by Oxford University Press in 2016) has won the Best Book Award of the Sociology of Development Section, American Sociological Association. In 2022, he was a visiting scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University.

Johana Kunin has a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France, and from Escuela IDAES, Universidad Nacional de San Martin (UNSAM), Argentina. She is a CONICET Tenured Researcher and a Professor at UNSAM, Argentina.

Photo: Pablo Lapegna