Coping Climate Risk, Coping Chemicals and the “Stupid Farmer”

Anupriya Pandey, SUNY Buffalo

Across agrarian regions of the Global South, climate change is increasingly experienced not through singular catastrophic events but through the gradual destabilization of seasonal rhythms. Farmers describe delayed monsoons, extreme heat waves, erratic rainfall and unanticipated flooding that disrupt cropping cycles and transform pest ecologies. These shifts intensify pest outbreaks and often lead to increased pesticide application, generating new forms of uncertainty for smallholder farmers. This paper examines how climate volatility becomes materialized through the everyday chemical practices of farming. Drawing on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork among smallholder farmers engaged in rapidly commercializing vegetable cultivation in eastern India, the analysis shows how climate uncertainty interacts with agrarian market pressures to intensify reliance on pesticides. Vegetable crops require visually unblemished produce for market sale and are highly susceptible to pests, making chemical inputs central to production. Under increasingly unpredictable climatic conditions, farmers respond to sudden infestations and unusual weather by increasing spraying frequency, combining multiple formulations and purchasing costly inputs on credit from agrochemical retailers. I conceptualize this dynamic as the chemicalization of climate risk: a process through which farmers attempt to manage ecological uncertainty through intensified pesticide use even as these inputs generate new ecological and economic risks. While farmers possess detailed ecological knowledge and are aware of the dangers of excessive chemical use, they often describe themselves as “stupid farmers,” a reflexive expression that reveals the constrained choices shaping agrarian livelihoods. By foregrounding pesticide use as an everyday response to climate volatility, this paper demonstrates how global environmental change becomes embedded in mundane agricultural practices and cycles of risk.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 134. Comparative-Historical Environmental Sociology Part Two: Modernity and its Others