The Global Pesticide Complex: Infrastructure, Fragility and Frontiers of Agrarian Change

Although most pesticides have long been on the market, the political economy surrounding their production, regulation and use has undergone considerable change, spurring renewed interest in the social sciences. The global pesticide complex (GPC) is an analytical device to understand the multidimensional nature of these changes. In this special issue introduction, we offer three perspectives on the GPC—infrastructure, fragility and frontiers. Pesticides are a ‘hidden’ infrastructure that maintains conventional agriculture, while their use is mediated by the liveliness of the target organisms they try to kill and the ecological fragility of the cropping systems that they enable. Frontiers of unpaid nature and the remaking of social hierarchies remain central to maintaining pesticide profitability despite depletion of nature's ‘free gifts.’ Overall, we argue for an approach to pesticide studies that can ‘zoom out’ to macrostructural transformations, while taking seriously rapid agrarian change that both intersects with and supersedes these dynamics.