Ambiguities at Sites of Acceptance: Agrarian Neoliberalism and Herbicide Exposure in Argentina

Lapegna, Pablo; Kunin, Johana

doi:10.1089/env.2021.0104

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 5 publications

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“…In this essay, I draw on my ethnographic fieldwork to explore how racialized plantation afterlives in the Argentine Chaco shape gringos' acquiescence to an agricultural model that imperils them and the plant species they love. The assent of local farmers and ex-farmersmostly of European descentin soy frontiers across Argentina has posed a puzzle to researchers, given the soy boom's tremendous toll on health, employment, environment, and social relations (Gras and Hernández 2014;Lapegna and Kuhin 2023;Leguizamón 2020;Newell 2009). Whereas many countries have seen broad-based farmer movements against GM agribusiness, farmer consent in Argentina has helped consolidate a "soy state" (Hetherington 2020), with soy agriculture occupying half the country's arable land and a third of its exports.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Soil, Seeds, and Roses: Plantation Afterlives in an Argentine Soybean Frontier

Blickstein

2024

Journal of Ethnobiology

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In the Argentine Chaco — a world hotspot of agribusiness-driven deforestation — descendants of European settlers ( gringos) who built manual cotton plantations on Indigenous land and labor in the twentieth century, have since been displaced from farming by the “soy boom.” Nevertheless, plantation legacies persist in the racialized plant-relations of these actors today, and in their conflicted — and often acquiescent — attitudes to agribusiness. Drawing on emergent theories of the “Plantationocene,” this essay examines how three settler interlocutors grieve the loss of plant-worlds that soy agribusiness has displaced, with a focus on living soil, cotton seeds, and potted roses. I show that these multispecies attachments perform a double role: while they sensitize these actors to the ecological fallouts of the soy boom, they also reinforce settler colonial plantation logics of racialized progress that ultimately feed their acquiescence to that agribusiness model.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Soil, Seeds, and Roses: Plantation Afterlives in an Argentine Soybean Frontier

Blickstein

2024

Journal of Ethnobiology

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A new critical social science research agenda on pesticides

Mansfield,

Werner,

Berndt

et al. 2023

Agric Hum Values

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The global pesticide complex has transformed over the past two decades, but social science research has not kept pace. The rise of an enormous generics sector, shifts in geographies of pesticide production, and dynamics of agrarian change have led to more pesticide use, expanding to farm systems that hitherto used few such inputs. Declining effectiveness due to pesticide resistance and anemic institutional support for non-chemical alternatives also have driven intensification in conventional systems. As an inter-disciplinary network of pesticide scholars, we seek to renew the social science research agenda on pesticides to better understand this suite of contemporary changes. To identify research priorities, challenges, and opportunities, we develop the pesticide complex as a heuristic device to highlight the reciprocal and iterative interactions among agricultural practice, the agrochemical industry, civil society-shaped regulatory actions, and contested knowledge of toxicity. Ultimately, collaborations among social scientists and across the social and biophysical sciences can illuminate recent transformations and their uneven socioecological effects. A reinvigorated critical scholarship that embraces the multifaceted nature of pesticides can identify the social and ecological constraints that drive pesticide use and support alternatives to chemically driven industrial agriculture.

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A relational approach to pesticide use: Farmers, herbicides, nutsedge, and the weedy path to pesticide use reduction objectives

Argüelles

March

2023

Journal of Rural Studies

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Ambiguities at Sites of Acceptance: Agrarian Neoliberalism and Herbicide Exposure in Argentina

Cited by 4 publications

References 5 publications

Soil, Seeds, and Roses: Plantation Afterlives in an Argentine Soybean Frontier

Soil, Seeds, and Roses: Plantation Afterlives in an Argentine Soybean Frontier

A new critical social science research agenda on pesticides

A relational approach to pesticide use: Farmers, herbicides, nutsedge, and the weedy path to pesticide use reduction objectives

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