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Agribiopolitics: The health ! The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0263775820912757
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Kregg Hetherington
Concordia University, Canada

Abstract
The well-known story of biopolitics tells us that as Europe urbanized, security was increasingly
linked to human well-being. What the story tends to leave out is the way that biopolitics also
depended on the expansion of monocrop agriculture: the thriving of human populations was
enabled by the thriving of non-human food crops, especially grains. As a result, new human
diseases were also shadowed by new plant diseases, and a whole other, parallel governmental
apparatus built to manage the crop health in rural Europe. During the great postwar development
initiative known as the Green Revolution, plant health techniques would be expanded to the
Global South in a massive realignment of biopolitical relations. Though the core tradition of
biopolitical thought rarely made it explicit, biopolitics was always, in other words, agribiopolitics,
a political technique that made certain populations of humans thrive alongside companion crops.
Using Paraguay as a site of genealogical engagement, this paper explores agribiopolitical relations
through three phases of the Green Revolution, culminating in the current age of monocrops.

Keywords
Paraguay, monocrops, regulation, biopolitics, human–plant relations, Green Revolution

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, agrarian politics in Latin America was
focused on rectifying the grossly unequal distribution of land that predominated in the
region. When new ‘Green Revolution’ technologies became available after WWII, leftist
political movements and international development experts offered surprisingly similar
arguments that the benefits of these technologies should be widely distributed to rural

Corresponding author:
Kregg Hetherington, Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, Quebec H3G 1M8, Canada.
Email: Kregg.hetherington@concordia.ca
2 EPD: Society and Space 0(0)

smallholders. With the end of the Cold War, however, this unlikely coalition fractured,
beginning what critics called a ‘neoliberal counter-reform’ and later a ‘global land grab’
to reconcentrate control of increasingly industrialized crop production (Kay, 2002). Over
time, many of the rural movements that had fought for land reform also refocused, con-
cerned not just with the distribution of resources, but also with the environmental and
public health problems related to large-scale farming. They argued that in addition to
being unjust, expanding monocrops destroyed forests and posed health risks to the indig-
enous and campesino farmers who lived nearby.
Eastern Paraguay offers an instructive example of these shifts in the past three decades.
Once a Green Revolution success story, Paraguay slowly repealed policies promoting small-
holder agriculture, leaving the colonies that had flourished during the Cold War to be taken
over by giant soybean farms. By 2002, nationalist campesino movements had joined global
campaigns against pesticide use, deforestation and genetically modified organisms (the first
of which was the Roundup Ready soybean that facilitated the regional boom). In short
order, a movement focused on who owned land became focused how crops were grown, and
on the health and environmental costs of particular monocrops (Hetherington, 2013).
I argue in this paper that these emergent concerns of agrarian activists are part of a
global realignment in the relationship between human health and agriculture. It is telling,
for instance, that in the fight for and against large-scale soy farming in Paraguay, both sides
use arguments framed by the concern for human biology. Soy farmers and lobbyists are
quick to repeat the Green Revolution mantra that they are ‘feeding the world’ (see
Cullather, 2010), claiming that banning or seriously restricting the use of a chemical like
Roundup would have devastating consequences for the global food supply. As a result, they
argue for greater governance intervention on the health of plants: phytosanitary measures,
including pesticide use, that enable farmers to further intensify the production. Meanwhile,
antisoy activists argue the opposite, that the phytosanitary measures themselves pose a
threat to life, to consumers of new, untested food, to neighbours exposed to pesticide
drift, and to ecological systems as a whole (e.g. Harrison, 2011; Schurman and Kelso,
2006; Whatmore, 2002).Each of these arguments brings with it national and governmental
apparatuses that promote the spread of monocrops on the one hand, and that monitor
pesticide hazards, environmental impacts and food safety on the other, apparatuses that
are increasingly in conflict with one another.
The realignment reminds us that agriculture has always, to some extent, been biopolit-
ical.1 And yet this simple fact about the relationship between the governance of human
health and plant health received surprisingly little attention in the cannonical biopolitics
literature. By recasting the biopolitical genealogy around “agribiopolitics,” this paper shows
how unusual this silence around agriculture really is. I argue that the disappearance of
agriculture from biopolitical thinking in the late 20th century is an artefact of the post-
war taboo against reducing human life to its biology. Prior to the war, agribiopolitical
thought was much more common. But agrarian and biopolitical thinking diverged after
WWII because it became politically problematic to think about governing human biology as
analogous to governing plant biology. Today, the discipline of plant health is, to a large
extent, devoted to the protection of plant genetic purity and vigour through controlled
reproduction and the elimination of non-viable lines from the national stock. From the
perspective of public health, then, some phytosanitary practices recall practices of the
turn of the last century which we now mostly consider abhorrent, at least in relation to
humans. This divergence in disciplines was exacerbated as plant biology became increasingly
specialized and applied, and corporate agriculture fought to minimize public discussion of
the relationship between public health and pesticides.2
Hetherington 3

But my argument is less about biopolitics per se than about the history of agriculture, and
how particular ways of thinking about the relationship between the governance of plant
health and human welfare brought us to our current conundrum. The method here has two
components. First, following writers such as Patel (2013) and Moore (2015), I set the Green
Revolution against a longer genealogy that accounts for shifts in the way agrarian sciences
have been brought to bear on the question of human welfare. Second, I also decentre it,
setting the genealogy not in Europe and North America, but in a country that was a prime
target for Green Revolution technology but which is rarely considered a producer of bio-
political theory. It turns out that Paraguay has a rich tradition of biological thought, and an
exploration of how it changed with agrarian policy offers a novel perspective on the relation
between plant health, human welfare and environmental politics in the age of monocrops.3

Green Revolution biopolitics

In the mid-1940s, the US government and American philanthropists began a series of
programs aimed at modernizing global agriculture. The excellent histories we have of this
period tend to focus on the accumulation of capital in global agriculture, and the ways that
technological advancements have facilitated this accumulation (e.g. Kloppenburg, 2005;
McMichael, 2009; Moore, 2015; Patel, 2013). My paper draws substantially on these histo-
ries, but here I want to highlight the role of biological thinking in this project. One of the
primary sources of funding came from the Rockefeller Foundation, which had, until then,
dedicated its efforts mostly to disease eradication (Cullather, 2010). As Marcos Cueto (1994)
shows, the Foundation came to see agricultural development as a greater boon to human
health than its previous fight against ringworm and yellow fever. By systematically focusing
technical expertise on increasing crop yields, early Green Revolutionaries believed they
could not only end famine, but end poverty itself. It was, in short, one of the most ambitious
welfare programs ever conceived, and because it built its understanding of welfare around
notions of population health, it was a quintessential example of what Michel Foucault
(1978, 2009) famously called ‘biopolitics’.
In Foucault’s version of this story, the rise of health clinics in the 18th and 19th centuries,
along with dietary movements, new labour regimes and sexual mores, were implicated in the
emergence of ‘population’ as a new political object which could be known and improved.
For Foucault, if sovereignty in the classic sense was the capacity to ‘kill and let live’,
biopolitics was a subtle inversion, allowing the state to ‘make live or let die’ human pop-
ulations. From this arose not only epidemiology, eugenics and public health, but also the
welfare state generally. Yet for all of his sophistication about human health care, Foucault
had little to say about the plants on which human bodies depended, and that blind spot
remained entrenched in the literature on biopolitics until quite recently.4 It is not that
agriculture was entirely absent from the story. Foucault in fact began his lectures on the
topic with the story of recurrent grain scarcity in France, when the state had to intervene in
the distribution of grains to avoid famine and urban revolt (Foucault, 2009: ch. 1). In other
words, human well-being was regulated through the regulation of non-humans as well. And
yet even the story of grain scarcity prefigures a lack of interest in plant life per se. For
Foucault and most other commentators on this period, the main biopolitical techniques
deployed to deal with famine were price controls to stabilize the swings of a newly liberalized
grain markets (Kaplan, 2016; Miller, 1999; Nally, 2011). Grain is already an abstraction in
the story, already translated into an economic variable bearing very little relation to the
stalks and roots of wheat, barley and rye, and the fields in which they grew.
4 EPD: Society and Space 0(0)

In fact the new urban biopolitics of the period was dependent on a revolution not just in
how food was distributed, but also in how crops were grown. It is in this early modern
period that we see the emergence in Europe of the monocultures that will become a ‘defining
mark of Anthropocene ecologies’, including the new biological problems that would shadow
them (Brooke and Otter, 2016: 285). Monocrops are fragile assemblages, their uniformity
rendering them vulnerable to the life projects of other living beings, and maintaining these
populations of plants requires significant government intervention (Besky, 2019). The grain
scarcity that led to price controls was often a consequence of crop failure due to black stem
rot in wheat, and as a result, this period also saw the emergence of the first phytosanitary
measures to protect the expanding wheat fields on which cities depended (Ebbels, 2003: 8).
Following closely the discipline of public health, plant health regimes began by separating
healthy populations from sick ones (using barriers, buffers and quarantines), then tried to
maximize the healthy populations by developing the pesticides and fertilizers that, like
modern medicines, would promote certain organisms and suppress others. By the late
19th century, most European states had begun inspecting imported plant material for unde-
sirable companions like the phyloxera aphid (responsible for France’s Great Wine Blight)
and the Colorado beetle (that ravaged Germany’s potatoes). Soon, phytosanitary regulators
were growing to keep up with a dizzying number of biological agents that threatened crops,
while government geneticists sought to create plants that would produce higher yields in
monocropping environments (Harwood, 2009).
Part of the reason for the underdeveloped analysis of crops in the biopolitics literature is
simply the era and the place in which it was written, when human life was considered
categorically different from other life processes. As Roberto Esposito (2008) points out,
the term ‘biopolitics’ had already been in use before Foucault came along, but the Swedish
and German philosophers who used it in the 1920s meant something quite different by it:
biopolitics was a way to describe the state, not as a regulator of life, but as a living entity
itself, an aggregate of organisms with its own vital force. Foucault’s primary intervention,
therefore, was not to name biopolitics, but to effect an ontological separation between bios
and politics, which not only made the politicization of bios seem noteworthy and dangerous,
but also made it a singularly human affair.
In Esposito’s reading, this is because the generation of post-war philosophers to which
Foucault belonged needed to separate themselves from fascism. But the separation also
occurred at a moment when food production was becoming further delocalized, and
Europe and the United States were increasingly looking to the colonies and post-colonies
to the south to invest in agriculture while their own countries focused instead on industrial
production. As Jason Moore (2015) puts it, Europe’s post-war prosperity was made possible
by a new phase of appropriation of natural resources, what he terms ‘cheap nature’, much of
which was happening at a remove from the centres of capitalism. It was these same ‘centres’,
which, conveniently enough, had tasked themselves with producing a new analytics of life
proper to the Cold War. If the 18th and 19th centuries had separated biopolitical and
agronomic concerns by placing one in the city and the other in the country, the Cold
War increasingly globalized this separation, building welfare states around the industrial
cities of Europe and North America while offering agricultural development schemes to
states in the South.
Just as the biopolitics literature tended to leave its agricultural roots out of the equation,
the agrarian technological vanguard of the Cold War also tended to elide its own relation-
ship with the excesses of human biopolitical thinking: eugenics and the holocaust. Green
Revolution boosters liked to think of their enterprise as completely new, a grand project of
scientific, peacetime mobilization. But as Jonathan Harwood (2012) has pointed out, they
Hetherington 5

tended to overplay the revolutionary novelty of post-war crop science, in part because its
most recent antecedents were so closely associated with fascist state projects that sought to
produce vigorous, superior crops explicitly to feed vigorous, superior humans (see also
Patel, 2013; Saraiva, 2016). All of this suggests that the relative absence of agriculture
from the classic biopolitics literature is not an oversight but a feature of the intellectual
climate that produced it. And the best way to reframe it may be to look to the frontiers that
were on the receiving end of all of that agrarian aid, and look at how these ideas played
themselves out there.

Paraguay’s vitalist synthesis (1886–1943)

The history of modern agriculture in Paraguay is usually traced to the arrival, in 1886, of an
idiosyncratic Swiss botanist to the banks of the Paraná river, on the triple border with
Argentina and Brazil and at the epicentre of what is now soy country. Like many settlers
who made it this far up the river in South America, Mois
es Santiago Bertoni was drawn to
Paraguay for its remoteness and its apparent emptiness, a place where he could escape the
stifling institutions of Europe and build a new society, beginning with an agrarian commune
he called simply ‘Puerto Bertoni’. He dedicated much of his life to the study of agriculture,
but he also published over 500 books and articles in dozens of fields. He was the first rector
of the national agriculture school, and a founding member of Paraguay’s Scientific Society
and generally sought to remake the country according to his own vision of progress.
Later in life, Bertoni made explicit that this vision of life and human advancement was
related to a popular philosophical movement known as ‘vitalism’ (Bertoni, 1927a). In its
most basic form, turn-of-the century vitalism posited that all life processes were animated by
a substance, or ‘vital force’, that transcended the ‘physico-chemical’ composition of matter.
It counted among its adherents both biologists and philosophers, for whom vital force was a
metaphysical premise that served to explain the peculiar relationship between organic matter
and time, particularly its apparent tendency to grow and dissipate, to reiterate in a linear
fashion way without ever repeating.5
Bertoni’s vitalism was always, however, about relational properties, and his agronomy
was about assemblages of organisms, collectives which would live or die on the strength of
the relationships between them. Consider one of his most important works, El algod
on y el
algodonero, ‘Cotton and the cotton grower’, a practical guide to producing cotton in
Paraguay, both for small farmers and for state institutions that can promote research and
export. It begins, however, with a manifesto. ‘The life of cotton’, he wrote,

cannot be maintained with scattered and adventurous elements, with an expensive or demanding
workforce, with flighty or mercenary personnel, and it cannot abide populations with disorga-
nized customs, restless character or industrial habits. It is a family cultivar, and demands a
family. It is a democratic plant, autonomous, requiring personal initiative, especially for agrar-
ian colonists who know how much their independence is worth. Paraguay can, and must, be a
cotton-producing nation. (1927b: 6)

While not overtly vitalist, we can see in this passage the way Bertoni thinks about the social
relationships between people and plants. His politics is both botanical and anthropological,
a call for a new kind of nation-state built around a relationship between a noble, ‘demo-
cratic plant’, and the innate characteristics of the Paraguayan race. Paraguay is not merely a
Guarani nation, but a Guarani-and-cotton nation. Indeed, the ambiguity of the Spanish
word ‘algodonero’ captures the perfect fusion of his ideas: algodonero refers to both the
6 EPD: Society and Space 0(0)

plant and the farmer. His hope was to build a nation-state imagined as a positive relation-
ship between people and plants that would thrive and occupy territory together.
Bertoni’s thinking was part of a continental struggle over how to understand post-
colonial biology. On one side were the liberal eugenicists who dominated the southern
cone and believed that whiteness needed to be preserved from contamination with indige-
nous blood. On the other were those who believed that racial purity was the sign of a
decaying, retrograde old world and who saw Latin America’s hybrid races as the beginning
of a new, universal human experience. Bertoni’s contemporary, Mexican philosopher Jose
Vasconcelos (1925), believed that Latin America’s mestizos were destined to become a uni-
versal ‘cosmic race’.6 Just as eugenics drew on agricultural analogies (like horse breeding
(Stokes, 1917)), mestizaje had favoured analogies in hybrid plant breeding techniques (see
Eddens, 2019; Hartigan, 2017). It had recently been discovered that crossing different lines
of corn (a Latin American cultivar) could produce extraordinary improvements in produc-
tivity. For humanists like Vasconcelos, the relationship between hybrid people and plants
remained largely analogical, but for Bertoni it was literal, and Paraguay’s future greatness
would be built on the improvements derived from mixes and crosses.
While Bertoni’s persona looms large in Paraguayan history, today few scholars read his
work. In my interviews with botanists and anthropologists, I was frequently told to avoid it
altogether, as though we were talking about some vaguely embarrassing, potentially dan-
gerous crank. After all, while Bertoni’s embrace of mestizaje was an argument against the
purist eugenics of European fascism, it was still a theory of racial superiority. As Donna
Jones (2010) has shown, even these sorts of anti-colonial and anti-eugenicist manifestations
of vitalism had fascist undertones. Bertoni’s cotton nation had strong resonances with
agrarian science in Germany and Italy, where ‘blood and soil’ were connected not only
metaphorically but through state investment in agrarian science. Aware of this legacy, and
cognizant of the fact that their country remained hospitable to Nazis even after the war,
Paraguayan anthropologists and sociologists repudiated Bertoni in 1950s and never turned
back (see Barratti and Candolfi, 1999).
The intellectual rejection of Bertoni was a local manifestation of an emergent conceptual
firewall between the social and the biological sciences. The discovery of the DNA under-
mined the metaphysical premises of biological vitalism, and even histories of biology and
agronomy began to expunge from their origin stories the ambiguous traces of vitalist
thought.7 Vitalism was relegated to the spiritual and environmental fringes of European
agriculture where it created the early models of organic and biodynamic farming (De
Gregori, 2003). Meanwhile, vitalist critical thought was also sanitized. That which survived
after the war (the most notably in the works of Georges Canguilhelm and Gilles Deleuze)
became a strictly philosophical affair, which maintained some of the aleatory possibilities of
vitalism while uncoupling it from literal biological thinking.8 This is the milieu that gave rise
to Foucault and biopolitics as a way of critiquing the regulation of human life. To put it
another way, the rise of Foucault, and the tradition he created, is the mirror opposite of the
fall of thinkers like Bertoni, who are retrospectively seen as naı̈ve because of their belief that
politics is part of life, rather than something imposed upon it.
And yet Bertoni’s peculiar position, as a botanist witnessing the beginning of the Green
Revolution reminds us that while it became increasingly difficult to talk about human
population health in terms of genetic heritage and strength, the same was not true for
plants. The basic practice of creating better and better populations through selection and
hybridization became the official motor of postwar agriculture. The analytic separation
between the humans and other creatures would make it easier to elevate the agricultural
techniques associated with fascism to an incontestable ethical plane. If Mussolini had seen
Hetherington 7

wheat breeding as an instrument of war, much of that science would now be re-cast: before
long, wheat breeders would be winning Nobel peace prizes, even as wheat growing became
increasingly destructive of non-human life forms.9

The post-war boom and the welfare state (1943–1989)

In Paraguay, the Green Revolution began in 1943 as an explicit attempt by the US
Government to woo the country away from its avowed sympathies with Axis powers
(Mora and Cooney, 2010). When the war ended, the US turned to halting the spread of
communism, the agrarian ‘red revolutions’ underway in China, Vietnam and Cuba, and it
found in Paraguay one of its staunches anti-communist allies. The post-war version of
agrarian development was decoupled from blood and soil and other nationalist idioms,
and instead became a technical fix to a universalist humanitarian problem (Otter, 2020).
‘Feeding the world’ would be accomplished through a dietetical science based on calories
that abstractly expressed the relationship between agricultural production and the subsis-
tence of the universal human body. The Green Revolution was also therefore biopolitical,
but territorialized differently, connecting an abstract “welfare” of the global human popu-
lation to the imperial security of the United States (Cullather, 2010).
The ideological usefulness of the story of fighting famine notwithstanding, much agrarian
development had little to do with food production per se. In Paraguay, where an abundance
of cassava and maize meant that food security was not an immediate problem, the key crops
of the Cold War were cotton and tobacco, and the subsequent soy boom was not about
saving humans from famine so much as making it possible for them to eat more meat.10 The
welfare imagined in agrarian development policies was a step removed from the question of
hunger: at best, it produced national economic growth which could then be partially rein-
vested in state redistribution schemes. At worst, as Moore (2015) argues, these initiatives
were only about increasing capital accumulation through the appropriation of new frontiers
and the proletarianization of the peasantry. The rapid shift towards neoliberalization of
agriculture in the 1980s showed how little the rapid expansion of mechanized agriculture
during the Green Revolution depended on a notion of human welfare (McMichael, 2009).
And yet for several decades, rural welfare was the ideological motor of agrarian develop-
ment in Paraguay as in much of the region.
Paraguay’s Green Revolution was engineered not only in Rockefeller-funded labs, but
also through colonization policies promoted by USAID to bring peasant farmers into the
formal economy. Backed by the brutal military regime of General Alfredo Stroessner, land-
less Paraguayans began to move out of the denser rural regions around the capital city into
eastern forests that the regime deemed ‘land without people’ (see Frutos, 1982;
Kleinpenning, 1987; Zoomers, 1988). There they were outfitted with the implements neces-
sary for turning the forest into profitable exports. And for a time, these ‘cotton colonies’
were a Green Revolution success story. The labour-intensive plant guaranteed a widespread
distribution of export revenue, and a whole way of life sprang into being that tied campesino
farmers and cotton plants to a centralized, authoritarian state. It had taken years to actu-
alize it, but so successful was the synergy between campesino families and Bertoni’s ‘dem-
ocratic plant,’ that within two decades, campesino farmers were not only economically
dependent on cotton but also utterly vested in it as a symbol of personal and national
identity. By the 1970s, the country was posting the highest growth rate in the region
(Weisskoff, 1992).11
As with all structural upheavals, the Green Revolution was also a violent process which
benefitted particular Paraguayan humans and plants to the exclusion, sometimes
8 EPD: Society and Space 0(0)

annihilation, of others. If most of Paraguay had, until the 1960s, been forested, the cotton
boom began a process of converting the country into the sort of simplified landscape appro-
priate to large-scale monocrops, with campesino farmers hacking their way through the
eastern forests, building colonies around a single species of cotton distributed to them by the
Institute for Rural Welfare (Scott, 1998). As Anna Tsing puts it, landscapes like this ‘kill off
beings that are not recognized as assets’ (2017: 52). This includes vegetation that cannot be
commodified and people that cannot be recognized (or disciplined) as labourers. To the
extent that Paraguay’s rural welfare program during the Cold War was about ‘making live’,
it did so by inviting the rural poor into an agrarian labour regime, and thereby differentiated
between different sorts of human beneficiaries. Redistribution was focused almost exclu-
sively on young male citizens, excluding not only women (who could not receive land) but
anyone who was incapable of ‘working the land’ in very specific ways. Those who did not fit
this regime, who could not thrive alongside the chosen plants of the Green Revolution,
became expendable (Hetherington, 2019).
Welfare therefore promoted certain forms of life at the expense of others. The most
explicitly expendable life forms were trees, whose destruction was mandated in land
reform laws (Richards, 2011). But deforestation was not just aimed at trees, and it ultimately
promoted the genocide of the Ach
e Guarani, a large group of hunter-gatherers who lived in
those forests (Arens, 1976). The Ach
e had been hunted in Paraguay for decades, long con-
sidered the most ‘primitive’ indigenous people on the eastern side of the Paraguay river. But
as the cotton frontier expanded, and their territory diminished, the violence perpetrated
against them became systematic. In 1976, in an attempt to drum up a human rights case
against the Paraguayan government, lawyer Richard Arens published a collection of har-
rowing essays by pre-eminent anthropologists and genocide scholars, including Elie Wiesel
(1976), who compared the plight of the Ach
e directly to that of German Jews in WWII.
What is stunning about the literature on this period is the degree to which these two
instances of killing remain analytically separate from each other.12 This is particularly true
of the debates about the genocide, and even Wiesel’s contribution hints at the difficulty that
was to follow: by establishing violence against the Ach
e as a decontextualized ultimate
crime, Wiesel’s account removes the appeal from the specifics of agricultural destruction.
Indeed, the primary academic effect of the campaign was a debate about whether ‘genocide’
was the right word for the violence in question. A number of US anthropologists and
lawyers argued that the violence did not technically constitute genocide since it was not
organized by a state with the ‘specific intent’ to erase a particular group.13 To them, the
plight of the Ach
e was unexceptional, similar to many indigenous societies disrupted by
agricultural advancement and peasant frontiers throughout Latin America (Reed and
Renshaw, 2012). In other words, the killing of an ethnic group did not count as genocide
if the primary reason behind it was agricultural.14
The example helps to show just how much intellectual labour went into holding the
killing of humans and the killing of trees apart. Genocide is, of course, a biopolitical con-
cept, a crime defined as the purposeful eradication of particular forms of human life, and the
definition had important stakes for the post-war liberal world order, whose morality is
principally concerned with human harm and the respect for human difference. The killing
of the Ach
e, was, by contrast, agribiopolitical, carried out with agricultural intent, but also
entangled with racism, brutality and the pleasures of annihilation. It is hard to locate the line
between state intent and the various international forces that protected Stroessner and drove
the green revolution there, just as it is hard to disentangle the specific racism against the
Ach
e from the overall thrust of agricultural violence. And yet international law requiring
specific intent requires that these two things remain separate: the death of trees and fauna
Hetherington 9

may be an environmental devastation, but genocide needs to remain a human rights prob-
lem, to the extent that in several of these articles, discussion of deforestation is presented as a
disqualifying factor in the identification of genocide (e.g. Hill and Hurtado, 2017; Reed and
Renshaw, 2012).
The lack of agribiopolitical reflection on the relationship between deforestation and
genocide also makes it hard to think these forms of killing alongside those that were to
come, like the inevitable war on new organisms that began to appear among the cotton
monocrops. The first pests to attack Paraguayan cotton were fungal infections in the seeds
and roots, and later caterpillars. These were nothing, however, in comparison to boll wee-
vils, or picudo, a voracious beetle that attacks cotton bolls just before they flower, effectively
destroying the harvest.15 In response to a weevil infestation in Brazil in the 1980s,
Paraguay’s Department of Plant Defense set up pheromone traps along the Brazilian
border in anticipation of an eventual invasion. When they did finally arrive, during the
1991 harvest, newspapers declared it a national emergency. While the banks and other
agrarian lenders profited from the sudden expansion of credit required to plant cotton
(see Areco 2001; Nikiphorroff, 1994), campesinos were not ultimately able to keep up
with the increasingly expensive killing agents required to keep cotton alive (Murray,
1994). That is, the welfare of campesinos, established at the expense of Ach
e and forests,
was now dependent on cotton, which was itself vulnerable to new life projects.
The vulnerability of cotton colonies in Paraguay in the 1990s engendered what commen-
tators called the ‘pesticide treadmill’, in which farmers and states tried desperately to pre-
serve a form of human–plant sociality by killing invading organisms. Whether one wants to
see this as a welfare project gone awry, as a successful imperial extension of US geopolitics
or as the incorporation of Paraguayan soil and forests into global capitalism, the Green
Revolution had produced a vital assemblage that most Paraguayans wanted to protect at all
costs. Campesinos themselves used the Guarani word poha, or medicine, to describe pesti-
cides, but the medicine was also structural, with the state itself increasingly dependent on
these chemicals to maintain power. But cotton pesticides were also caught up in a new
realignment of world agriculture in which the idea of using the state apparatus to promote
or protect life was becoming harder to sustain, as philanthropic organizations, development
agencies and multinational corporations abandoned their interest in state apparatuses.16
Under pressure from international lenders to stop subsidizing agriculture, and with the
United States withdrawing political support in the waning years of the Cold War, the
Stroessner regime fell apart. And in 1991, the year the bugs arrived, Paraguay was already
undergoing another agribiopolitical realignment.

The end of welfare agriculture (1989–present)

Two influential uses of the concept of biopolitics in contemporary agrarian studies illustrate
well what happened next. The first is by Tania Li (2009), who argues that populations once
enrolled in the welfare state through land reform programs have since become ‘surplus
populations’. Their labour rendered obsolete by new extensive technology and the roll-
back of smallholder support programs, peasants have been abandoned on the old agrarian
frontiers, or actively invited to migrate to cities to get away from ever-expanding plantations
of soybeans, corn, oil palm or sugar cane. To the extent that the state retains a biopolitical
need to secure spaces for human life, these spaces are no longer to be found in rural areas,
and the project of increasing agrarian production is decoupled from the well-being of
national populations.
10 EPD: Society and Space 0(0)

The second appears in an article by Julie Guthman and Sandy Brown (2016), who argue
that geographical differences in pesticide regulations sort populations into racist categories
that protect the health of some (in their case, white, suburban Californians) while allowing
others to be exposed to pesticides (particularly migrant farm workers).Their reading follows
an increasingly prevalent line in the environmental justice literature that aims to show how
class and race affect the degree to which people are exposed to toxicity (e.g. Auyero and
Swistun, 2009; Harrison, 2011). That differential effect of increased pesticide use follows the
contours of old colonial geography as well. An article in the Lancet in 2002 reported that
pesticides were now a more frequent cause of death than infectious disease in what they
called ‘developing countries’ (Eddelston et al., 2002).17
The most recent phase of agribiopolitics is the result of this double move. On the one
hand, agriculture is no longer seen as a welfare project of making certain populations live
through labour. On the other hand, agriculture has become so dangerous to human health
that if there is anything left to the biopolitical project, it is to mobilize the state to protect
people from agriculture. A complete inversion had been completed, from a phytosanitary
system devised to protect human health by protecting plant health, to one that protects
human health from the medicines of plants.
In Paraguay, this process began at the very end of the Cold War, when the state began to
divest from smallholder agriculture. Alfreddo Stroessner, the dictator who had presided
over the Green Revolution, was thrown out in a coup in early 1989. Shortly thereafter,
the Ministry of Agriculture fell into disarray, and the Interamerican Development Bank
stepped into the breach with a restructuring plan. Under its guidance, the state removed
price controls on cotton and rapidly privatized its infrastructure in the interior, reduced its
extension staff and contracted out most of its agrarian training to NGOs. One of the most
telling symptoms of this shift occurred in the Ministry’s annual reports, which, until 1990,
were divided into chapters on the performance of key national crops. From 1992 onwards,
the reports are focused on the topic of governance efficiency. For three years, while the
weevils were ravaging the eastern colonies, the Ministry managed to produce annual reports
about national Agriculture without using the word ‘cotton’.18
Campesinos suddenly found that the health of their cotton—and by extension their own
welfare—was no longer a government priority. Pesticide subsidies were withdrawn and the
cotton crop collapsed, making all those new colonies vulnerable to takeover by corporate
soy farms. Soy’s capital and phytosanitary needs had never been state-backed, but rather
met by cooperatives and multinationals. It could be planted on far larger scales, with pre-
cision equipment and pesticide cocktails that mostly obviated the need for labour in the
fields. Roundup Ready soybeans, introduced in 1999, sealed the logic of this new arrange-
ment, as Roundup herbicide could now be used repeatedly on a crop to eliminate weeds, and
thus eliminate weeders. Cotton farmers, operating at a totally different scale, and stuck in a
cycle of dependence on state protection, were shut out of the soy wave, and the cotton
colonies began to be overtaken by soybeans.
The remnants of the cotton colonies were soon awash with pesticide drift from neigh-
bouring soy farms, and as the illnesses and deaths began to pile up, campesinos now turned
to the state for a completely different kind of support. Beginning in 2003, now allied,
somewhat ironically, with environmentalists, they began to lobby the phytosanitary regu-
lator to limit the use of pesticides. The infrastructure for regulating pesticides had slowly
been built up throughout the 1990s, when international environmental consultants flooded
into Paraguay (Dinham, 1993). Meetings like the International Symposium on Insecticides,
Pesticides and Toxic Waste in Paraguay, organized by the Panamerican Health Organization
in 1994 (González de Bobeda, 1994) tried to establish new standards for pesticide use, while
Hetherington 11

the Interamerican Development Bank built a new Plant Health Agency into its plans for the
restructuring of the Ministry of Agriculture (IDB, 1994). The early effect of these was to
make cotton planting more difficult (for instance, through the ban on parathion, widely used
in cotton planting, as well as programs that required smallholders to use protective gear
when treating their cotton). But it created the bureaucratic infrastructure to which campe-
sinos would later turn when they began to be assaulted by chemical drift from soy farms.
Hence the rise of a new phytosanitary politics in Paraguay and around the world: from
campesino unions marching for access to land, the great battles of the 21st century have
mostly been about restricting agrichemicals through bans, buffers between farms and houses
or barriers to pesticide drift (Harrison, 2011). But environmental justice movements like this
always seem too little too late, since exposure to pesticide drift is only one of the effects of
becoming surplus, not only surplus labour, but surplus life (Cooper, 2011). In this formu-
lation, campesino lives are to be protected, as an ethical minimum, as a sort of bare life, but
they are not to be encouraged (Agamben, 2002).As their existence comes to be defined not
by their productive capacity but by their corporeal vulnerability to pesticides, campesinos
become at best patients of the state, at worst, pests themselves, allies of the bugs and weeds
threatening agricultural development.

Living well, thinking slowly

Two decades ago, David Goodman argued that the social study of agriculture had a blind
spot when it came to biological processes.

Engagement with the lively materiality of nature in agro-food studies has been tenuous, at best.
The main theoretical currents in the field, perhaps fearful of the taint of biological determinism,
have been reluctant to acknowledge nature as an active, relational presence in the eco-social
co-production of agro-food networks. (Goodman, 2001: 183)

I have argued here that there are good historical reasons for this agribiopolitical blind spot.
What Goodman called ‘biological determinism’ had been ‘tainted’ by its association with
war and genocide in the early 20th century. But as I hope I have shown, the taboo against
vitalism also led to blind spots in the way critics engaged with the Green Revolution.
Because right as global capital perfected the killing technologies necessary to spread mono-
crops throughout the global south (McMichael, 2009), it became impolite to think about
how those killing technologies were related to the fascist violence of previous generations.
That is now beginning to shift again with a new genre of analysis in Geography,
Anthropology and Environmental History, that takes as its object the entangled politics
of human, animal and plant life.19 But there are still important problems here for environ-
mentalists and agricultural activists who have tried to rectify environmental injustices by
demanding a fairer distribution of environmental risk. Work in this frame is essential for
revealing the inherent racism in the differential application of environmental mitigation
efforts, just as the enumeration of environmental risks associated with particular chemicals
(beginning with DDT in the 1960s, and currently being replicated with Roundup) has been
key to curbing some of the worst practices of the Green Revolution.20 And yet by operating
on the separation between the rights of people to equal treatment on the one hand, and the
damage done to the environment on the other, defensive phytosanitary politics concedes
what may be the most important point of all: that monocrops kill more than humans, and
the more they become entrenched, the more they engender more killing. The defensive
phytosanitary posture assumes monocropping as a given, leaving the state only to protect
12 EPD: Society and Space 0(0)

the health of its citizens against it. Its primary instruments, the ban, the buffer and the
barrier, all enact regulation as negative. Reduced to calculating and mitigating human
harms, and conserving some islets of remaining ‘nature’ from destruction, the agribiopolit-
ical state implicitly endorses the mass killing carried out by private parties in the spaces
beyond the barriers. But if human welfare is also dependent on plant welfare, it is incumbent
on us to think with models that do not pit one against the other.
So by way of closing I want to circle back to the first phase of agribiopolitical thinking,
and to briefly exhume another reading of Mois
es Bertoni. This is the Bertoni who was a
passionate defender of living relations in the farm field, who believed in enhancing life as a
relational property, and avoiding techniques, like the use of fire, that tended to kill indis-
criminately. He of course had no trouble with killing things. A tireless experimenter and
plant breeder, committed to the modernization of export agriculture, at no point in his
writings does he argue that one should not kill an insect that is eating one’s crops. He
even admitted that the occasional use of fire was sometimes warranted. But in several
essays that were ahead of their time,21 Bertoni argued that even though it was an easy
and efficient way to clear land, farmers should avoid burning brush as much as possible,
because the long-term effects of such indiscriminate killing outweighed any of fire’s short-
term benefits. Instead, he offered a series of alternatives to fire, including the most radical,
‘planting without cleaning’, a crop system that would today be called ‘permaculture’, or in
Latin America, agro-ecolog
ıa. Indeed, the promotion of agro-ecology by Via Campesina and
other groups or rural activists in Paraguay speaks to the continued relevance of this vision of
agrarian alternatives on the margins of, and sometimes in frontal opposition to, the expan-
sion of mechanized monocrops (Altieri and Toledo, 2011; Desmarais, 2008).
Planting without cleaning focuses on companionship between crops, trees, soils and debris.
And though it creates intensively farmed plots with a minimum of killing, it definitely takes
more time and care. As Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) puts it, it implies a completely
different biopolitics which eschews rapid solutions to agronomic problems and demands that a
farmer work at the speed of the soil. Bertoni advocated a similar, slow engagement with the
world and the creatures in it. His textbook on agronomy advocates meditation, physical self-
care and continual learning. Fire’s long-term costs included not only the loss of soil micro-
organisms and beneficial insects, but also climate stability, family well-being and social cohe-
sion (Bertoni, 1927a: 459–467). It is not clear precisely what time frame he had in mind, but this
is also Puig’s point: to adopt soil’s time is not to adjust an investment window but to slow
down such that one falls out of phase with productivist reason. Vitalism, after all, is as much an
epistemological commitment to the limits of instrumental reason as it is a speculation about the
nature of life. In the face of agriculture’s ecological destructiveness, it is not just cultivation that
needs to slow down, but thinking itself (Stengers and Del
eage, 2014). And this ultimately is
why I begin and end the story with such a character as Bertoni, many of whose views are so
clearly problematic, but who also leaves a rich sediment of alternative interpretations that
might allow us to think agribiopolitics otherwise. It is, I contend, in grappling with these
problems that we can more easily see our way out of the facile humanitarianism of the
Green Revolution, and the age of monocrops with which it has left us.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.
Hetherington 13

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
1. Scott (2017) does a lot of this work. Patel (2013) and Moore (2015) each offers genealogies that
begin with transatlantic colonialism, a tradition exemplified by Mintz’ famous Sweetness and
Power (1985). Rosenberg (2015) and Fitzgenerald (2008) show how a model of industrial agricul-
ture developed in the 1920s and 1930s United States created the model for agrarian development
of subsequent decades.
2. For a comprehensive treatment, see Russell (2001).
3. This paper is part of a larger project on the history of phytosanitary regulation in Paraguay that
included 6 months of ethnographic interviewing and participant observation in regulatory offices,
as well archival work in Paraguay’s national archives, the Andr
es Barbero museum and the
archives of the Ministry of Agriculture (Hetherington, 2020).
4. For example, Campbell and Sitze’s (2014) excellent compilation of the biopolitics cannon includes
only one essay that moves the conversation beyond its human focus. The emergent literature on
biopolitics in agriculture has tended to focus on animals, in part because, as Anand Pandian (2008)
has pointed out, Foucault himself made much of the relationship between humans and animals in
describing biopolitics, comparing biopower to shepherding and drawing an explicit Aristotelian
contrast between the ‘bare life’ of the animal body and the politically enhanced body of the human
(see also Asdal et al., 2016; Franklin, 2007; Netz, 2004; Saraiva, 2016; Wolfe, 2012).
5. I am glossing over centuries of terminological and metaphysical arguments here in which even the
word “vitalism” is very much up for debate. For a more nuanced treatment, see Grosz (2004).
6. Baratti and Condolfi (1999: 164–166) suggest that Vasconcellos was influenced by Bertoni.
7. For instance, hagiographies of the great agronomist Justus von Liebig written after the war tend to
downplay his vitalist sympathies (Lipman, 1967).
8. Deleuze is the most obvious boundary-thinker here. On the one hand, his vitalism strictly refuses
any distinction between the organic and the non-organic. On the other, he makes explicit the
relationship between Foucault and vitalism (Deleuze, 1986: 98).
9. Norman Borlaug, often named the ‘father of the green revolution’, won the Nobel Peace Prize for
his work on high-yield wheat in 1970.
10. Problems with world food supply today have very little to do with crop yields, but the justification
for any number of harms that accrue around it over the years is continually justified with reference
to the Malthusian specter of potential radical food shortages (see Patel, 2007; Sen, 1982). Soy itself
primarily goes to the production of animal feed and an increasingly diverse range of chemical
byproducts; it therefore participates in a very inefficient model of food production (Otter, 2013).
11. I am simplifying the story somewhat here. Growth was not only due to cotton, but also included
the beginnings of the soy crop, and the construction of the massive Itaip
u hydroelectric dam.
12. Paraguayan analysts have more often treated these processes as related to one another, coupling
‘ecocide’ and ‘genocide’ (e.g. Chase-Sardi, 1987; Fogel, 1990).
13. On the Paraguayan side, the argument was made most forcefully by Melia and Munzel (1978). In
the United States, the most prominent genocide sceptics were Maybury-Lewis and Howe (1980),
and later Reed and Renshaw (2012) and Hill and Hurtado (2017).
14. See Hitchcock (2017) for an overview of the debate that is generous to both sides. This debate
about the relationship between genocide and settler colonialism has been taken up more generally
by Wolfe (2006) and Short (2016). de Waal (2017) examines the same debate in relation to mass
starvation.
15. The boll weevil was only the most important of a whole range of creatures that attacked
Paraguay’s cotton crop in the late 1980s, including aphids.
14 EPD: Society and Space 0(0)

16. Indeed, all of these actors, who had worked so hard to build up the agrarian state apparatus
during the Cold War now became major promoters of devolving these responsibilities to civil
society and the private sector (see Hetherington, 2020; Li, 2009).
17. This number in part reflects the fact that pesticides are often a preferred vehicle for suicide in rural
areas, but to do justice to that datum would require a whole other agribiopolitical analysis (see
Stone, 2007).
18. The Ministry, to be fair, did create a program for weevil mitigation, which left its own reports in
the archives.
19. The pioneers in thinking more broadly in ways that include plants have been geographers (e.g.
Essex 2009; Lorimer and Driessen 2013; Nally 2011; Whatmore 2002), and environmental histor-
ians (e.g. Cronon, 1991; Moore 2015; Otter, 2013). For recent work on the anthropology of plants,
see Tsing (2015), Hartigan (2017), Lyons (2020), Myers (2019). See also the work on human–
animal biopolitics cited in Note 6.
20. Roundup, a popular herbicide, has always been promoted as safe to human by its manufacturers,
despite considerable skepticism. In 2015, the World Health Organization listed it as a ‘likely
carcinogen’, and beginning in 2018, courts in Europe and North America began finding
Monsanto’s parent company Bayer responsible in a variety of cancer deaths.
21. See especially Bertoni 1926, 1927a.

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Kregg Hetherington is an Associate Professor of anthropology at Concordia University in

Montreal, and director of the Concordia Ethnography Lab. He is the author of Guerrilla
Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay (Duke, 2011), The
Government of Beans: Regulating Life in the Age of Monocrops (Duke, 2020) and the
editor of Infrastructure, Environment and Life in the Anthropocene (Duke, 2019).