Between Regulation and Practice: Situated Pesticide Governance in Argentina

Since the 1990s, agribusiness expansion in Argentina involved the exponential growth of pesticide use throughout the country. Pesticide exposure has become a widespread problem in rural areas and farming towns, but protests and conflicts about this issue are the exception rather than the norm. Why? Based on archival work, interviews, and ethnographic observations, in this paper, we scrutinize pesticide governance at the subnational scale to elucidate this puzzle, focusing on a) informal arrangements (face-to-face negotiations between pesticide users and people affected by them), b) juridical conflicts (lawsuits against farmers over exposure of people and crops to herbicides), and c) regulatory challenges (when rural populations and environmentalists push for local ordinances to curb pesticide exposure). We find that local cultural codes encourage informal agreements and that social inequalities prevent conflicts from arising in the public sphere. The interventions of social movements and civil society organizations (or lack thereof) and the mobilization of expertise also shape pesticide governance. Our analysis highlights that pesticide governance is context-dependent or situated, and informed by subtle but significant power asymmetries.