Risky subjects: Embodiment and partial knowledges in the safe use of pesticide

Abstract

The majority of the world’s food producers depend on pesticides, and most of those users live in the global south. Especially in places where regulation is weak, the primary mode of preventing harm is ‘safe use’ education. Using a case study from Northern Laos, I examine how smallholder farmers come to understand pesticide risks, toxicity and uncertainty in a place where pesticide use has only recently become widespread. I develop a framework for understanding risk based in feminist science studies and political ecology to understand how users grapple with risk and uncertainty in context. In trying to learn how smallholder farmers understand pesticide risk, I found that users are neither ignorant, as the safe use model assumes, nor well-informed. Instead, farmers' knowledge of pesticide risk is both contextual (mediated by numerous other precarities) and partial (derived from embodied experience). Experiences of toxicity combine with individually focused safe use messaging to produce a common sense where individuals are blamed for risky behavior, instead of the socio-economic situations that require them to take risks. I describe the ways that what counts as ‘risky’ and ‘safe’ is locally adapted, filtered through rural community dynamics, and bound up with the other risks farmers are facing – the risks of being poor and rural. I argue that a political ecology perspective grounded in feminist notions of objectivity can help make visible environmental health risks and their local meanings in situations where uncertainty is high.