(Un)Knowing Pesticides in Cambodia: An interdisciplinary enquiry into chemical geography

Abstract

Over the last decade, Cambodia has engaged in agricultural intensification policies and the country is now exporting staple crops such as rice, cassava and maize as well as high value crops such as pepper, fresh mango, and raw palm oil . The intensification package follows the model of the green revolution with access to irrigation and chemical inputs – most noticeable pesticides. Pesticides imports, which can be used as a proxy for use in the absence of a national pesticides production capacity, has increased 10-fold in the last ten years, raising environmental and public health concerns that have not attracted much attention to date. This paper draws from an interdisciplinary (geography, anthropology, hydrology, chemistry) research project that aimed at understanding the dynamics of pesticides in the Cambodian Upper Mekong delta, a region where thousands of smallholders are cultivating a diversity of crops on small fields. Our interdisciplinary investigation brings to the fore (some of the) different ways there are to “know pesticides” and interrogates the daily practice and politics of knowledge making on such a highly volatile and political research object. Notably, we contrast results from chemistry analysis conducted in laboratories with results from interviews with farmers and input sellers. Detailed monitoring of pesticides uses by a small sample of farmers (15) highlights a wide diversity of practices depending on crops grown but also the socio-economic profile of farmers with more than 100 products used (for 70 active compounds) and little overlap between farmers. Interviews of input sellers active in the study area (7), supported by systematic photography of products sold, highlight the murkiness of supply chains that link Cambodia to Thailand and Vietnam but also India and China. We identified several hundreds of products (120 active compounds), only partially overlapping with the products and molecules used by farmers. These were manufactured by nearly 100, mostly foreign, companies and distributed by another 100, most of them Cambodian and Vietnamese. Chemical analysis of soil and water samples, limited by in-country analytical capacities (namely the availability of standard solutions), only allowed identifying 40 active compounds, only 10 of which had been identified in farmers surveys and input sellers’ inventories. Such results point to the limitations there are to rely on chemical analysis only to assess pesticides-related risks but also to the fact that pesticide residues accumulation in the environment is not solely linked to current, local, agricultural practices, themselves shaped by global agricultural capitalism, but the result of prior practices and, in our case, hydrological (flood) processes. More broadly, and analytically, this contribution stress that adopting an interdisciplinary perspective that is reflective on research practices and results might be a productive avenue to advance chemical geographies.