Safely poisoned: ontological politics of Eu’s pesticide regulation

Synthetic pesticides and their widespread use in agricultural production is a key part of the materiality of modernity, and a systemic tool for how industrial agriculture re-organizes multispecies life. This article furthers existing research investigating the ontological politics of environmental governance and the global agrochemical complex, drawing linkages between pesticides and the historical expansion of modernity as a way of world-making within the context of Europe. By utilizing a critical policy analysis as a method, the article examines EU policy documents as ontological and political tools for performing worlds. Founded theoretically on political ontology and ontological politics, the main questions explored are: 1. What kind of a “thing” pesticides are understood and made to be within EU’s regulatory documents and 2. How pesticide safety towards human and other-than-human life is understood and constructed within the regulatory framework, and 3. What are the politics of power that guide these assumptions? Additionally, by cross-pollinating ontological politics with a more-than-human/multispecies framework, the article offers a multidisciplinary contribution in understanding how pesticides work, both conceptually and literally, as ways of relating to and (un)making more-than-human life. As such, the article contributes to further understanding about the politics of power and meaning-making around pesticides.