The Global Pesticide Market: Value of Life and Exemption

This chapter considers the politics, the power, the violent and more gradual death of human bodies that belies production, trade and consumption of hazardous substances in our globalized grain and food systems. “Imagining politics as a form of war”, Achile Mbembe asks, “What place is given to life, death, and the human body?[…] How are they inscribed in the order of power?” 133 In a year in which protestors gathered outside Monsanto headquarters in Buenos Aires and Bayer offices in Sao Paulo, the Pesticide Atlas (2022) exposed an almost doubling of pesticide use in just 20 years, and conservative estimates of annual poisoning accidents reached 255 million, it is pertinent to ask, how does the right to life differ across the global pesticide market? Who determines exemption from the right to life in the global political economy of pesticides?