Other Geographies: The Influences Of Michael Watts (Antipode Book Series) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781119184331
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2017-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

Toward a Biopolitics of Contract Farming

Remarkably, most of the literature on contract farming, including Watts’ significant contributions, has highlighted its effects on grower livelihoods, including that which has focused on the biological risks of agriculture that pesticides presumably mitigate. Taking issue, Galt (2014) noted that dependence on pesticides not only undermines future conditions of production, as pests become resistant to their use and soil quality erodes; it also puts farmers, workers and the surrounding community in harm’s way. Still, in discussing the human cost of pesticide use, Galt treated the problem as somewhat epiphenomenal. A ‘sad irony of pesticide use,’ Galt (2014, 210) wrote, ‘is the unintentional displacement of disease from one organism (the crop plant) to another (humans)’. In contrast, a biopolitical analytic recognizes that sacrificing some life is intrinsic to processes which make life live.

Foucault introduced the term biopower to note a shift in the role of government in modern states towards the assurance of ‘life itself’ distinct from, although not unrelated to, profit‐making and other economic activities. Food production is therefore inherently a biopolitical undertaking: it is about making plant and animal life live in order to make human life live. But as Foucault and others have emphasized, to make life live requires identifying which life is important and then removing the threats to that life. Foucault (1985, 1997, 2007), of course, was writing about human life. He differentiated the ‘population’ from the ‘people’, by suggesting that the former is constitutive of those whose lives count while the others are put to die or let die, depending on whether they are threats or simply not necessary. Recent scholarship has extended Foucault’s notion of the population beyond human life, noting how human management of plants, animals and other organisms – whether in the form of saving endangered species or making cheese – never aims for all life to flourish. Rather, it often entails the neglect or eradication of any life detrimental to valued life (Biermann and Mansfield 2014; Bobrow‐Strain 2008; Collard 2012; Lorimer and Driessen 2013; Paxson 2008). Pesticides are in that way classic ‘technologies of security’ – those that minimize or eradicate threats on behalf of the population (Dillon and Reid 2009; Foucault 1997; Foucault 2007). Clearly, though, pesticide use subjects not only crops and their pests to biopolitical sorting, but also farm workers, neighbours, farmers and consumers.

In the context of California’s strawberry industry, contract growers face the problem of competing biopolitical exigencies. On the one hand, contracts themselves make the life of the strawberry plant paramount, and demand that growers produce the strawberry both as a commodity and as ‘healthy’ food for the consuming population. On the other hand pesticide regulations, technologies of security in their own right, serve to protect the health of the neighbouring population.

The use of soil fumigants puts these competing exigencies into stark relief. Strawberry growers rely heavily on soil fumigants not only to control weeds and nematodes but also to disinfect fields of soil pathogens that kill plants by preventing their nutrient uptake.

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