Global pesticide geographies: Public data failures, creative solutions and the politics of knowledge production

Keywords: Pesticides, international trade, politics of knowledge, chemical geographies, agrarian change
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 57

Abstract

Official data on pesticide use are often opaque, hard to get, and misleading even when available. Yet what we know from the data we have is alarming. The best estimate, now a decade old, is that global pesticide use is growing nearly twice as fast as food production (Schreinemachers and Tipraqsa 2012). A recent analysis found that 64% of agricultural land is at risk of pesticide pollution by more than one active ingredient, and 31% is at high risk (Tang et al. 2021). Writ large, the release of synthetic chemicals into the environment has grown faster since 1970 than any other agent of global environmental change (Bernhardt, Rosi, and Gessner 2017). Yet these analyses all depend on the UNFAO’s database on global pesticide use in which country reporting has plummeted: over half of countries have not reported in a given year since the late 2000s. Our paper examines the problems with global pesticide data and discusses a novel method to produce a more accurate accounting of global pesticide use drawing on trade statistics, measures of national reporting accuracy for trade flows, government and industry data, and linear interpolation. Trade statistics offer a better handle on actual pesticide flows and, in turn, a more accurate picture of the geography of global pesticide use given widespread failures in public reporting. We discuss the benefits and limits of these methods and the politics of knowledge production at the global level. We conclude with some preliminary reflections on the lessons for understanding chemical geographies.