Agribiopolitics: The health of plants and humans in the age of monocrops

Green Revolution biopolitics

In the mid-1940s, the US government and American philanthropists began a series of programs aimed at modernizing global agriculture. The excellent histories we have of this period tend to focus on the accumulation of capital in global agriculture, and the ways that technological advancements have facilitated this accumulation (e.g. Kloppenburg, 2005; McMichael, 2009; Moore, 2015; Patel, 2013). My paper draws substantially on these histories, but here I want to highlight the role of biological thinking in this project. One of the primary sources of funding came from the Rockefeller Foundation, which had, until then, dedicated its efforts mostly to disease eradication (Cullather, 2010). As Marcos Cueto (1994) shows, the Foundation came to see agricultural development as a greater boon to human health than its previous fight against ringworm and yellow fever. By systematically focusing technical expertise on increasing crop yields, early Green Revolutionaries believed they could not only end famine, but end poverty itself. It was, in short, one of the most ambitious welfare programs ever conceived, and because it built its understanding of welfare around notions of population health, it was a quintessential example of what Michel Foucault (1978, 2009) famously called ‘biopolitics’.

In Foucault’s version of this story, the rise of health clinics in the 18th and 19th centuries, along with dietary movements, new labour regimes and sexual mores, were implicated in the emergence of ‘population’ as a new political object which could be known and improved. For Foucault, if sovereignty in the classic sense was the capacity to ‘kill and let live’, biopolitics was a subtle inversion, allowing the state to ‘make live or let die’ human populations. From this arose not only epidemiology, eugenics and public health, but also the welfare state generally. Yet for all of his sophistication about human health care, Foucault had little to say about the plants on which human bodies depended, and that blind spot remained entrenched in the literature on biopolitics until quite recently. ⁴ It is not that agriculture was entirely absent from the story. Foucault in fact began his lectures on the topic with the story of recurrent grain scarcity in France, when the state had to intervene in the distribution of grains to avoid famine and urban revolt (Foucault, 2009: ch. 1). In other words, human well-being was regulated through the regulation of non-humans as well. And yet even the story of grain scarcity prefigures a lack of interest in plant life per se. For Foucault and most other commentators on this period, the main biopolitical techniques deployed to deal with famine were price controls to stabilize the swings of a newly liberalized grain markets (Kaplan, 2016; Miller, 1999; Nally, 2011). Grain is already an abstraction in the story, already translated into an economic variable bearing very little relation to the stalks and roots of wheat, barley and rye, and the fields in which they grew.

In fact the new urban biopolitics of the period was dependent on a revolution not just in how food was distributed, but also in how crops were grown. It is in this early modern period that we see the emergence in Europe of the monocultures that will become a ‘defining mark of Anthropocene ecologies’, including the new biological problems that would shadow them (Brooke and Otter, 2016: 285). Monocrops are fragile assemblages, their uniformity rendering them vulnerable to the life projects of other living beings, and maintaining these populations of plants requires significant government intervention (Besky, 2019). The grain scarcity that led to price controls was often a consequence of crop failure due to black stem rot in wheat, and as a result, this period also saw the emergence of the first phytosanitary measures to protect the expanding wheat fields on which cities depended (Ebbels, 2003: 8). Following closely the discipline of public health, plant health regimes began by separating healthy populations from sick ones (using barriers, buffers and quarantines), then tried to maximize the healthy populations by developing the pesticides and fertilizers that, like modern medicines, would promote certain organisms and suppress others. By the late 19th century, most European states had begun inspecting imported plant material for undesirable companions like the phyloxera aphid (responsible for France’s Great Wine Blight) and the Colorado beetle (that ravaged Germany’s potatoes). Soon, phytosanitary regulators were growing to keep up with a dizzying number of biological agents that threatened crops, while government geneticists sought to create plants that would produce higher yields in monocropping environments (Harwood, 2009).

Part of the reason for the underdeveloped analysis of crops in the biopolitics literature is simply the era and the place in which it was written, when human life was considered categorically different from other life processes. As Roberto Esposito (2008) points out, the term ‘biopolitics’ had already been in use before Foucault came along, but the Swedish and German philosophers who used it in the 1920s meant something quite different by it: biopolitics was a way to describe the state, not as a regulator of life, but as a living entity itself, an aggregate of organisms with its own vital force. Foucault’s primary intervention, therefore, was not to name biopolitics, but to effect an ontological separation between bios and politics, which not only made the politicization of bios seem noteworthy and dangerous, but also made it a singularly human affair.

In Esposito’s reading, this is because the generation of post-war philosophers to which Foucault belonged needed to separate themselves from fascism. But the separation also occurred at a moment when food production was becoming further delocalized, and Europe and the United States were increasingly looking to the colonies and post-colonies to the south to invest in agriculture while their own countries focused instead on industrial production. As Jason Moore (2015) puts it, Europe’s post-war prosperity was made possible by a new phase of appropriation of natural resources, what he terms ‘cheap nature’, much of which was happening at a remove from the centres of capitalism. It was these same ‘centres’, which, conveniently enough, had tasked themselves with producing a new analytics of life proper to the Cold War. If the 18th and 19th centuries had separated biopolitical and agronomic concerns by placing one in the city and the other in the country, the Cold War increasingly globalized this separation, building welfare states around the industrial cities of Europe and North America while offering agricultural development schemes to states in the South.

Just as the biopolitics literature tended to leave its agricultural roots out of the equation, the agrarian technological vanguard of the Cold War also tended to elide its own relationship with the excesses of human biopolitical thinking: eugenics and the holocaust. Green Revolution boosters liked to think of their enterprise as completely new, a grand project of scientific, peacetime mobilization. But as Jonathan Harwood (2012) has pointed out, they tended to overplay the revolutionary novelty of post-war crop science, in part because its most recent antecedents were so closely associated with fascist state projects that sought to produce vigorous, superior crops explicitly to feed vigorous, superior humans (see also Patel, 2013; Saraiva, 2016). All of this suggests that the relative absence of agriculture from the classic biopolitics literature is not an oversight but a feature of the intellectual climate that produced it. And the best way to reframe it may be to look to the frontiers that were on the receiving end of all of that agrarian aid, and look at how these ideas played themselves out there.

Paraguay’s vitalist synthesis (1886–1943)

The history of modern agriculture in Paraguay is usually traced to the arrival, in 1886, of an idiosyncratic Swiss botanist to the banks of the Paraná river, on the triple border with Argentina and Brazil and at the epicentre of what is now soy country. Like many settlers who made it this far up the river in South America, Moisés Santiago Bertoni was drawn to Paraguay for its remoteness and its apparent emptiness, a place where he could escape the stifling institutions of Europe and build a new society, beginning with an agrarian commune he called simply ‘Puerto Bertoni’. He dedicated much of his life to the study of agriculture, but he also published over 500 books and articles in dozens of fields. He was the first rector of the national agriculture school, and a founding member of Paraguay’s Scientific Society and generally sought to remake the country according to his own vision of progress.

Later in life, Bertoni made explicit that this vision of life and human advancement was related to a popular philosophical movement known as ‘vitalism’ (Bertoni, 1927a). In its most basic form, turn-of-the century vitalism posited that all life processes were animated by a substance, or ‘vital force’, that transcended the ‘physico-chemical’ composition of matter. It counted among its adherents both biologists and philosophers, for whom vital force was a metaphysical premise that served to explain the peculiar relationship between organic matter and time, particularly its apparent tendency to grow and dissipate, to reiterate in a linear fashion way without ever repeating. ⁵

Bertoni’s vitalism was always, however, about relational properties, and his agronomy was about assemblages of organisms, collectives which would live or die on the strength of the relationships between them. Consider one of his most important works, El algodón y el algodonero, ‘Cotton and the cotton grower’, a practical guide to producing cotton in Paraguay, both for small farmers and for state institutions that can promote research and export. It begins, however, with a manifesto. ‘The life of cotton’, he wrote,

cannot be maintained with scattered and adventurous elements, with an expensive or demanding workforce, with flighty or mercenary personnel, and it cannot abide populations with disorganized customs, restless character or industrial habits. It is a family cultivar, and demands a family. It is a democratic plant, autonomous, requiring personal initiative, especially for agrarian colonists who know how much their independence is worth. Paraguay can, and must, be a cotton-producing nation. (1927b: 6)

Bertoni’s thinking was part of a continental struggle over how to understand post-colonial biology. On one side were the liberal eugenicists who dominated the southern cone and believed that whiteness needed to be preserved from contamination with indigenous blood. On the other were those who believed that racial purity was the sign of a decaying, retrograde old world and who saw Latin America’s hybrid races as the beginning of a new, universal human experience. Bertoni’s contemporary, Mexican philosopher Jose Vasconcelos (1925), believed that Latin America’s mestizos were destined to become a universal ‘cosmic race’. ⁶ Just as eugenics drew on agricultural analogies (like horse breeding (Stokes, 1917)), mestizaje had favoured analogies in hybrid plant breeding techniques (see Eddens, 2019; Hartigan, 2017). It had recently been discovered that crossing different lines of corn (a Latin American cultivar) could produce extraordinary improvements in productivity. For humanists like Vasconcelos, the relationship between hybrid people and plants remained largely analogical, but for Bertoni it was literal, and Paraguay’s future greatness would be built on the improvements derived from mixes and crosses.

While Bertoni’s persona looms large in Paraguayan history, today few scholars read his work. In my interviews with botanists and anthropologists, I was frequently told to avoid it altogether, as though we were talking about some vaguely embarrassing, potentially dangerous crank. After all, while Bertoni’s embrace of mestizaje was an argument against the purist eugenics of European fascism, it was still a theory of racial superiority. As Donna Jones (2010) has shown, even these sorts of anti-colonial and anti-eugenicist manifestations of vitalism had fascist undertones. Bertoni’s cotton nation had strong resonances with agrarian science in Germany and Italy, where ‘blood and soil’ were connected not only metaphorically but through state investment in agrarian science. Aware of this legacy, and cognizant of the fact that their country remained hospitable to Nazis even after the war, Paraguayan anthropologists and sociologists repudiated Bertoni in 1950s and never turned back (see Barratti and Candolfi, 1999).

The intellectual rejection of Bertoni was a local manifestation of an emergent conceptual firewall between the social and the biological sciences. The discovery of the DNA undermined the metaphysical premises of biological vitalism, and even histories of biology and agronomy began to expunge from their origin stories the ambiguous traces of vitalist thought. ⁷ Vitalism was relegated to the spiritual and environmental fringes of European agriculture where it created the early models of organic and biodynamic farming (De Gregori, 2003). Meanwhile, vitalist critical thought was also sanitized. That which survived after the war (the most notably in the works of Georges Canguilhelm and Gilles Deleuze) became a strictly philosophical affair, which maintained some of the aleatory possibilities of vitalism while uncoupling it from literal biological thinking. ⁸ This is the milieu that gave rise to Foucault and biopolitics as a way of critiquing the regulation of human life. To put it another way, the rise of Foucault, and the tradition he created, is the mirror opposite of the fall of thinkers like Bertoni, who are retrospectively seen as naïve because of their belief that politics is part of life, rather than something imposed upon it.

And yet Bertoni’s peculiar position, as a botanist witnessing the beginning of the Green Revolution reminds us that while it became increasingly difficult to talk about human population health in terms of genetic heritage and strength, the same was not true for plants. The basic practice of creating better and better populations through selection and hybridization became the official motor of postwar agriculture. The analytic separation between the humans and other creatures would make it easier to elevate the agricultural techniques associated with fascism to an incontestable ethical plane. If Mussolini had seen wheat breeding as an instrument of war, much of that science would now be re-cast: before long, wheat breeders would be winning Nobel peace prizes, even as wheat growing became increasingly destructive of non-human life forms. ⁹

The post-war boom and the welfare state (1943–1989)

In Paraguay, the Green Revolution began in 1943 as an explicit attempt by the US Government to woo the country away from its avowed sympathies with Axis powers (Mora and Cooney, 2010). When the war ended, the US turned to halting the spread of communism, the agrarian ‘red revolutions’ underway in China, Vietnam and Cuba, and it found in Paraguay one of its staunches anti-communist allies. The post-war version of agrarian development was decoupled from blood and soil and other nationalist idioms, and instead became a technical fix to a universalist humanitarian problem (Otter, 2020). ‘Feeding the world’ would be accomplished through a dietetical science based on calories that abstractly expressed the relationship between agricultural production and the subsistence of the universal human body. The Green Revolution was also therefore biopolitical, but territorialized differently, connecting an abstract “welfare” of the global human population to the imperial security of the United States (Cullather, 2010).

The ideological usefulness of the story of fighting famine notwithstanding, much agrarian development had little to do with food production per se. In Paraguay, where an abundance of cassava and maize meant that food security was not an immediate problem, the key crops of the Cold War were cotton and tobacco, and the subsequent soy boom was not about saving humans from famine so much as making it possible for them to eat more meat. ¹⁰ The welfare imagined in agrarian development policies was a step removed from the question of hunger: at best, it produced national economic growth which could then be partially reinvested in state redistribution schemes. At worst, as Moore (2015) argues, these initiatives were only about increasing capital accumulation through the appropriation of new frontiers and the proletarianization of the peasantry. The rapid shift towards neoliberalization of agriculture in the 1980s showed how little the rapid expansion of mechanized agriculture during the Green Revolution depended on a notion of human welfare (McMichael, 2009). And yet for several decades, rural welfare was the ideological motor of agrarian development in Paraguay as in much of the region.

Paraguay’s Green Revolution was engineered not only in Rockefeller-funded labs, but also through colonization policies promoted by USAID to bring peasant farmers into the formal economy. Backed by the brutal military regime of General Alfredo Stroessner, landless Paraguayans began to move out of the denser rural regions around the capital city into eastern forests that the regime deemed ‘land without people’ (see Frutos, 1982; Kleinpenning, 1987; Zoomers, 1988). There they were outfitted with the implements necessary for turning the forest into profitable exports. And for a time, these ‘cotton colonies’ were a Green Revolution success story. The labour-intensive plant guaranteed a widespread distribution of export revenue, and a whole way of life sprang into being that tied campesino farmers and cotton plants to a centralized, authoritarian state. It had taken years to actualize it, but so successful was the synergy between campesino families and Bertoni’s ‘democratic plant,’ that within two decades, campesino farmers were not only economically dependent on cotton but also utterly vested in it as a symbol of personal and national identity. By the 1970s, the country was posting the highest growth rate in the region (Weisskoff, 1992). ¹¹

As with all structural upheavals, the Green Revolution was also a violent process which benefitted particular Paraguayan humans and plants to the exclusion, sometimes annihilation, of others. If most of Paraguay had, until the 1960s, been forested, the cotton boom began a process of converting the country into the sort of simplified landscape appropriate to large-scale monocrops, with campesino farmers hacking their way through the eastern forests, building colonies around a single species of cotton distributed to them by the Institute for Rural Welfare (Scott, 1998). As Anna Tsing puts it, landscapes like this ‘kill off beings that are not recognized as assets’ (2017: 52). This includes vegetation that cannot be commodified and people that cannot be recognized (or disciplined) as labourers. To the extent that Paraguay’s rural welfare program during the Cold War was about ‘making live’, it did so by inviting the rural poor into an agrarian labour regime, and thereby differentiated between different sorts of human beneficiaries. Redistribution was focused almost exclusively on young male citizens, excluding not only women (who could not receive land) but anyone who was incapable of ‘working the land’ in very specific ways. Those who did not fit this regime, who could not thrive alongside the chosen plants of the Green Revolution, became expendable (Hetherington, 2019).

Welfare therefore promoted certain forms of life at the expense of others. The most explicitly expendable life forms were trees, whose destruction was mandated in land reform laws (Richards, 2011). But deforestation was not just aimed at trees, and it ultimately promoted the genocide of the Aché Guarani, a large group of hunter-gatherers who lived in those forests (Arens, 1976). The Aché had been hunted in Paraguay for decades, long considered the most ‘primitive’ indigenous people on the eastern side of the Paraguay river. But as the cotton frontier expanded, and their territory diminished, the violence perpetrated against them became systematic. In 1976, in an attempt to drum up a human rights case against the Paraguayan government, lawyer Richard Arens published a collection of harrowing essays by pre-eminent anthropologists and genocide scholars, including Elie Wiesel (1976), who compared the plight of the Aché directly to that of German Jews in WWII.

What is stunning about the literature on this period is the degree to which these two instances of killing remain analytically separate from each other. ¹² This is particularly true of the debates about the genocide, and even Wiesel’s contribution hints at the difficulty that was to follow: by establishing violence against the Aché as a decontextualized ultimate crime, Wiesel’s account removes the appeal from the specifics of agricultural destruction. Indeed, the primary academic effect of the campaign was a debate about whether ‘genocide’ was the right word for the violence in question. A number of US anthropologists and lawyers argued that the violence did not technically constitute genocide since it was not organized by a state with the ‘specific intent’ to erase a particular group. ¹³ To them, the plight of the Aché was unexceptional, similar to many indigenous societies disrupted by agricultural advancement and peasant frontiers throughout Latin America (Reed and Renshaw, 2012). In other words, the killing of an ethnic group did not count as genocide if the primary reason behind it was agricultural. ¹⁴

The example helps to show just how much intellectual labour went into holding the killing of humans and the killing of trees apart. Genocide is, of course, a biopolitical concept, a crime defined as the purposeful eradication of particular forms of human life, and the definition had important stakes for the post-war liberal world order, whose morality is principally concerned with human harm and the respect for human difference. The killing of the Aché, was, by contrast, agribiopolitical, carried out with agricultural intent, but also entangled with racism, brutality and the pleasures of annihilation. It is hard to locate the line between state intent and the various international forces that protected Stroessner and drove the green revolution there, just as it is hard to disentangle the specific racism against the Aché from the overall thrust of agricultural violence. And yet international law requiring specific intent requires that these two things remain separate: the death of trees and fauna may be an environmental devastation, but genocide needs to remain a human rights problem, to the extent that in several of these articles, discussion of deforestation is presented as a disqualifying factor in the identification of genocide (e.g. Hill and Hurtado, 2017; Reed and Renshaw, 2012).

The lack of agribiopolitical reflection on the relationship between deforestation and genocide also makes it hard to think these forms of killing alongside those that were to come, like the inevitable war on new organisms that began to appear among the cotton monocrops. The first pests to attack Paraguayan cotton were fungal infections in the seeds and roots, and later caterpillars. These were nothing, however, in comparison to boll weevils, or picudo, a voracious beetle that attacks cotton bolls just before they flower, effectively destroying the harvest. ¹⁵ In response to a weevil infestation in Brazil in the 1980s, Paraguay's Department of Plant Defense set up pheromone traps along the Brazilian border in anticipation of an eventual invasion. When they did finally arrive, during the 1991 harvest, newspapers declared it a national emergency. While the banks and other agrarian lenders profited from the sudden expansion of credit required to plant cotton (see Areco 2001; Nikiphorroff, 1994), campesinos were not ultimately able to keep up with the increasingly expensive killing agents required to keep cotton alive (Murray, 1994). That is, the welfare of campesinos, established at the expense of Aché and forests, was now dependent on cotton, which was itself vulnerable to new life projects.

The vulnerability of cotton colonies in Paraguay in the 1990s engendered what commentators called the ‘pesticide treadmill’, in which farmers and states tried desperately to preserve a form of human–plant sociality by killing invading organisms. Whether one wants to see this as a welfare project gone awry, as a successful imperial extension of US geopolitics or as the incorporation of Paraguayan soil and forests into global capitalism, the Green Revolution had produced a vital assemblage that most Paraguayans wanted to protect at all costs. Campesinos themselves used the Guarani word poha, or medicine, to describe pesticides, but the medicine was also structural, with the state itself increasingly dependent on these chemicals to maintain power. But cotton pesticides were also caught up in a new realignment of world agriculture in which the idea of using the state apparatus to promote or protect life was becoming harder to sustain, as philanthropic organizations, development agencies and multinational corporations abandoned their interest in state apparatuses. ¹⁶ Under pressure from international lenders to stop subsidizing agriculture, and with the United States withdrawing political support in the waning years of the Cold War, the Stroessner regime fell apart. And in 1991, the year the bugs arrived, Paraguay was already undergoing another agribiopolitical realignment.

The end of welfare agriculture (1989–present)

Two influential uses of the concept of biopolitics in contemporary agrarian studies illustrate well what happened next. The first is by Tania Li (2009), who argues that populations once enrolled in the welfare state through land reform programs have since become ‘surplus populations’. Their labour rendered obsolete by new extensive technology and the roll-back of smallholder support programs, peasants have been abandoned on the old agrarian frontiers, or actively invited to migrate to cities to get away from ever-expanding plantations of soybeans, corn, oil palm or sugar cane. To the extent that the state retains a biopolitical need to secure spaces for human life, these spaces are no longer to be found in rural areas, and the project of increasing agrarian production is decoupled from the well-being of national populations.

The second appears in an article by Julie Guthman and Sandy Brown (2016), who argue that geographical differences in pesticide regulations sort populations into racist categories that protect the health of some (in their case, white, suburban Californians) while allowing others to be exposed to pesticides (particularly migrant farm workers).Their reading follows an increasingly prevalent line in the environmental justice literature that aims to show how class and race affect the degree to which people are exposed to toxicity (e.g. Auyero and Swistun, 2009; Harrison, 2011). That differential effect of increased pesticide use follows the contours of old colonial geography as well. An article in the Lancet in 2002 reported that pesticides were now a more frequent cause of death than infectious disease in what they called ‘developing countries’ (Eddelston et al., 2002). ¹⁷

The most recent phase of agribiopolitics is the result of this double move. On the one hand, agriculture is no longer seen as a welfare project of making certain populations live through labour. On the other hand, agriculture has become so dangerous to human health that if there is anything left to the biopolitical project, it is to mobilize the state to protect people from agriculture. A complete inversion had been completed, from a phytosanitary system devised to protect human health by protecting plant health, to one that protects human health from the medicines of plants.

In Paraguay, this process began at the very end of the Cold War, when the state began to divest from smallholder agriculture. Alfreddo Stroessner, the dictator who had presided over the Green Revolution, was thrown out in a coup in early 1989. Shortly thereafter, the Ministry of Agriculture fell into disarray, and the Interamerican Development Bank stepped into the breach with a restructuring plan. Under its guidance, the state removed price controls on cotton and rapidly privatized its infrastructure in the interior, reduced its extension staff and contracted out most of its agrarian training to NGOs. One of the most telling symptoms of this shift occurred in the Ministry’s annual reports, which, until 1990, were divided into chapters on the performance of key national crops. From 1992 onwards, the reports are focused on the topic of governance efficiency. For three years, while the weevils were ravaging the eastern colonies, the Ministry managed to produce annual reports about national Agriculture without using the word ‘cotton’. ¹⁸

Campesinos suddenly found that the health of their cotton—and by extension their own welfare—was no longer a government priority. Pesticide subsidies were withdrawn and the cotton crop collapsed, making all those new colonies vulnerable to takeover by corporate soy farms. Soy’s capital and phytosanitary needs had never been state-backed, but rather met by cooperatives and multinationals. It could be planted on far larger scales, with precision equipment and pesticide cocktails that mostly obviated the need for labour in the fields. Roundup Ready soybeans, introduced in 1999, sealed the logic of this new arrangement, as Roundup herbicide could now be used repeatedly on a crop to eliminate weeds, and thus eliminate weeders. Cotton farmers, operating at a totally different scale, and stuck in a cycle of dependence on state protection, were shut out of the soy wave, and the cotton colonies began to be overtaken by soybeans.

The remnants of the cotton colonies were soon awash with pesticide drift from neighbouring soy farms, and as the illnesses and deaths began to pile up, campesinos now turned to the state for a completely different kind of support. Beginning in 2003, now allied, somewhat ironically, with environmentalists, they began to lobby the phytosanitary regulator to limit the use of pesticides. The infrastructure for regulating pesticides had slowly been built up throughout the 1990s, when international environmental consultants flooded into Paraguay (Dinham, 1993). Meetings like the International Symposium on Insecticides, Pesticides and Toxic Waste in Paraguay, organized by the Panamerican Health Organization in 1994 (González de Bobeda, 1994) tried to establish new standards for pesticide use, while the Interamerican Development Bank built a new Plant Health Agency into its plans for the restructuring of the Ministry of Agriculture (IDB, 1994). The early effect of these was to make cotton planting more difficult (for instance, through the ban on parathion, widely used in cotton planting, as well as programs that required smallholders to use protective gear when treating their cotton). But it created the bureaucratic infrastructure to which campesinos would later turn when they began to be assaulted by chemical drift from soy farms.

Hence the rise of a new phytosanitary politics in Paraguay and around the world: from campesino unions marching for access to land, the great battles of the 21st century have mostly been about restricting agrichemicals through bans, buffers between farms and houses or barriers to pesticide drift (Harrison, 2011). But environmental justice movements like this always seem too little too late, since exposure to pesticide drift is only one of the effects of becoming surplus, not only surplus labour, but surplus life (Cooper, 2011). In this formulation, campesino lives are to be protected, as an ethical minimum, as a sort of bare life, but they are not to be encouraged (Agamben, 2002).As their existence comes to be defined not by their productive capacity but by their corporeal vulnerability to pesticides, campesinos become at best patients of the state, at worst, pests themselves, allies of the bugs and weeds threatening agricultural development.

Living well, thinking slowly

Two decades ago, David Goodman argued that the social study of agriculture had a blind spot when it came to biological processes.

Engagement with the lively materiality of nature in agro-food studies has been tenuous, at best. The main theoretical currents in the field, perhaps fearful of the taint of biological determinism, have been reluctant to acknowledge nature as an active, relational presence in the eco-social co-production of agro-food networks. (Goodman, 2001: 183)

That is now beginning to shift again with a new genre of analysis in Geography, Anthropology and Environmental History, that takes as its object the entangled politics of human, animal and plant life. ¹⁹ But there are still important problems here for environmentalists and agricultural activists who have tried to rectify environmental injustices by demanding a fairer distribution of environmental risk. Work in this frame is essential for revealing the inherent racism in the differential application of environmental mitigation efforts, just as the enumeration of environmental risks associated with particular chemicals (beginning with DDT in the 1960s, and currently being replicated with Roundup) has been key to curbing some of the worst practices of the Green Revolution. ²⁰ And yet by operating on the separation between the rights of people to equal treatment on the one hand, and the damage done to the environment on the other, defensive phytosanitary politics concedes what may be the most important point of all: that monocrops kill more than humans, and the more they become entrenched, the more they engender more killing. The defensive phytosanitary posture assumes monocropping as a given, leaving the state only to protect the health of its citizens against it. Its primary instruments, the ban, the buffer and the barrier, all enact regulation as negative. Reduced to calculating and mitigating human harms, and conserving some islets of remaining ‘nature’ from destruction, the agribiopolitical state implicitly endorses the mass killing carried out by private parties in the spaces beyond the barriers. But if human welfare is also dependent on plant welfare, it is incumbent on us to think with models that do not pit one against the other.

So by way of closing I want to circle back to the first phase of agribiopolitical thinking, and to briefly exhume another reading of Moisés Bertoni. This is the Bertoni who was a passionate defender of living relations in the farm field, who believed in enhancing life as a relational property, and avoiding techniques, like the use of fire, that tended to kill indiscriminately. He of course had no trouble with killing things. A tireless experimenter and plant breeder, committed to the modernization of export agriculture, at no point in his writings does he argue that one should not kill an insect that is eating one’s crops. He even admitted that the occasional use of fire was sometimes warranted. But in several essays that were ahead of their time, ²¹ Bertoni argued that even though it was an easy and efficient way to clear land, farmers should avoid burning brush as much as possible, because the long-term effects of such indiscriminate killing outweighed any of fire’s short-term benefits. Instead, he offered a series of alternatives to fire, including the most radical, ‘planting without cleaning’, a crop system that would today be called ‘permaculture’, or in Latin America, agro-ecología. Indeed, the promotion of agro-ecology by Via Campesina and other groups or rural activists in Paraguay speaks to the continued relevance of this vision of agrarian alternatives on the margins of, and sometimes in frontal opposition to, the expansion of mechanized monocrops (Altieri and Toledo, 2011; Desmarais, 2008).

Planting without cleaning focuses on companionship between crops, trees, soils and debris. And though it creates intensively farmed plots with a minimum of killing, it definitely takes more time and care. As Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) puts it, it implies a completely different biopolitics which eschews rapid solutions to agronomic problems and demands that a farmer work at the speed of the soil. Bertoni advocated a similar, slow engagement with the world and the creatures in it. His textbook on agronomy advocates meditation, physical self-care and continual learning. Fire’s long-term costs included not only the loss of soil microorganisms and beneficial insects, but also climate stability, family well-being and social cohesion (Bertoni, 1927a: 459–467). It is not clear precisely what time frame he had in mind, but this is also Puig’s point: to adopt soil’s time is not to adjust an investment window but to slow down such that one falls out of phase with productivist reason. Vitalism, after all, is as much an epistemological commitment to the limits of instrumental reason as it is a speculation about the nature of life. In the face of agriculture’s ecological destructiveness, it is not just cultivation that needs to slow down, but thinking itself (Stengers and Deléage, 2014). And this ultimately is why I begin and end the story with such a character as Bertoni, many of whose views are so clearly problematic, but who also leaves a rich sediment of alternative interpretations that might allow us to think agribiopolitics otherwise. It is, I contend, in grappling with these problems that we can more easily see our way out of the facile humanitarianism of the Green Revolution, and the age of monocrops with which it has left us.