The “Pesticide Chip”: Chemical Legacies and Agrarian Futures in Costa Rica

For decades, agro-industrial capital has adopted cascading chemical and biotechnical interventions, or fixes, to secure accumulation through the cultivation of monocrops. We develop a framework that centres on how monocrop-induced susceptibility to pests and pathogens—and the patchwork of fixes to address these—produces uneven chemical geographies. These uneven geographies are not produced by capital alone, but rather they are co-constituted through social struggles over working conditions, chemical exposures and land. Our framework is developed in dialogue with the aspirations and obstacles faced by parcelerxs, worker-peasant farmers, to forge livelihoods in former plantation lands in the southern Pacific region of Costa Rica. We identify three intersecting challenges: contemporary low-cost pesticide commercialisation, pathogen and chemical inheritances, and subjective attachments to pesticide use, or the “pesticide chip”. The possibility for less chemicalised futures thus relies upon a combined strategy that addresses the material and institutional legacies of monocrop plantations and related subjectivities.