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Abstract
In March 2015, Sri Lanka’s then-President Maithripala Sirisena launched the Toxic Free Nation Movement as a long-term solution to a mysterious form of kidney disease (CKDu) now endemic in the island’s dry zone. As part of this strategy, in 2016 the movement worked with farmers in north-central Sri Lanka to cultivate indigenous rice varieties without agrochemicals. Yet, within a year, 80 percent of farmers who experimented with indigenous and organic rice farming had switched back to some form of agrochemically intensive cultivation. In this article, I examine farmers’ narratives of why this happened, demonstrating how the movement’s conceptualization of agricultural harm often missed the forms of accounting most salient for residents themselves. Instead, through their testimonies, residents track how polyvalent relationships with agrarian toxicity mediate (1) vulnerabilities to simple reproduction squeezes, (2) reliance on grain fungibility, and (3) strong but bittersweet attachments to dry zone agrarian landscapes. As a consequence, I document how residents respatialize their knotted relationships to agrarian toxicity to include moments of what I call “agrichemical kinship.” I argue that this optic helps us grasp the ways in which agrochemicals simultaneously erode and enable modes of social reproduction against a backdrop of rural stagnation. Following feminist scholars of toxicity, this article not only reveals intimate, yet undertheorized, connections between the field of toxic geographies and the concept of social reproduction but also dashes hopes of any simple equation between banning agrichemical inputs and enacting health in the wake of CKDu.
2015年3月, 作为一种神秘的肾病（CKDu）的长期解决方案, 时任斯里兰卡总统Maithripala Sirisena发起了“无毒国家运动”。CKDu目前流行于该岛国的干旱地区。2016年, “无毒国家运动”与斯里兰卡中北部的农民合作, 旨在培育不含农药的本地有机水稻。然而, 尝试本地有机水稻种植的农民, 80%在一年之内重新采取了农业化学密集型种植。在这篇文章中, 我探讨了农民们对发生这种情况的解释, 揭示了这场运动对农业危害的理解常常忽略了居民自身。在证词中, 居民们追踪了农业毒性的多价关系如何影响了（1）简单再生产榨取的脆弱性, （2）对谷物可替代性的依赖, （3）对干旱农业景观的强烈而苦乐参半的依附。因此, 我记载了为接纳“农药亲缘关系”, 居民们如何针对居民与农业毒性的复杂关系而对空间进行了重组。我认为, 在农村停滞的情况下, 这一观点有助于了解农业化学品既侵蚀又促成社会再生产模式的途径。根据女性主义者对毒性的研究, 这篇文章不仅揭示了有毒地理学与社会再生产理论之间密切但尚未得到理论化的联系, 而且也粉碎了发生CKDu时简化禁止农业化学品与保障健康之间关系的所有可能性。
En marzo del 2015, el entonces presidente de Sri Lanka, Maithripala Sirisena, lanzó el Movimiento de la Nación Libre de Tóxicos como solución a plazo largo de una misteriosa forma de enfermedad renal (CKDu), que se tornó endémica en la zona árida de la isla. Como parte de esta estrategia, en 2016 el movimiento trabajó con agricultores de la parte norcentral de Sri Lanka para cultivar variedades indígenas de arroz, sin la aplicación de agroquímicos. No obstante, en el curso de un año, el 80 por ciento de los agricultores que experimentaron el cultivo de arroz indígena y orgánico habían retornado a alguna forma de cultivo agroquímicamente intensivo. En este artículo examino las narrativas de los agricultores sobre por qué ocurrió tal cosa, demostrando cómo la conceptualización del movimiento sobre los daños agrícolas a menudo dejó de lado las formas de contabilidad más destacadas para los propios residentes. Al contrario, en sus testimonios los residentes tratan de percatarse del modo como median las relaciones polivalentes con la toxicidad agraria, principalmente (1) las vulnerabilidades a los apretones de reproducción simple, (2) la dependencia en la fungibilidad del grano, y (3) el fuerte, aunque agridulce, apego a los paisajes agrarios de la zona árida. Consecuentemente, yo documento cómo reespacializan los residentes sus relaciones ligadas a la toxicidad agraria para incluir los momentos de lo que yo denomino “parentela agroquímica”. Sostengo que esta óptica nos ayuda a entender las formas en que los agroquímicos erosionan y habilitan simultáneamente los modos de reproducción social con un telón de fondo de estancamiento rural. Siguiendo a estudiosos feministas de la toxicidad, este artículo no solo revela las conexiones íntimas, aunque sin ninguna teorización, entre el campo de las geografías tóxicas y el concepto de reproducción social, sino que también echa por tierra las esperanzas de cualquiera ecuación sencilla entre la proscripción de los insumos agroquímicos y el enaltecimiento de la salud a raíz de la CKDu.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to the residents of Sri Pura who graciously opened up their homes and shared their insights with me. Their accounts of struggle and resilience are the beating heart of this article. My writing process was helped along by myriad conversations with colleagues over many years. I am especially grateful for the incisive and thoughtful comments of two anonymous reviewers, as well as for constructive feedback from Ingrid Behrsin, Brian King, Nick Lally, Carrie Mott, Priscilla McCutcheon, Carly Nichols, Aparna Parikh, A. Marie Ranjbar, Jen Sedell, and Elizabeth Williams. Thanks to all of you for pushing me to clarify and sharpen my ideas. Finally, my gratitude goes to Katie Meehan for her guidance, encouragement, and constructive feedback during the revision of the article.
Notes
1 My broader research includes additional interviews and household surveys in the neighboring agricultural settlement scheme of Padaviya. Although the trends I discuss here are consistent across schemes, for this article I focus on the data collected from Sri Pura to better situate moments of agrochemical kinship within social, ecological, and historical context.
2 All of my translations were double-checked by a certified Sinhala–English interpreter.
3 According to Chandrajith et al. (Citation2010) the recommended amount of application is 270 kg per hectare (109 pounds per acre) of urea, triple superphosphate, and Muriate of Potash combined, per season.
4 According to the Centre for Environmental Justice (Citation2006, 4), “All pesticides used in Sri Lanka are imported costing about 1,350 million rupees annually.”
5 In Sri Pura, 27 percent of households derived their main source of income from government employment (mainly clerical).
6 Although on average the north-central dry zone receives 1,500 mm of rain during the northeast monsoon, annual rates of precipitation mask significant variability in inter- and intra-annual rainfall (Bansil Citation1971). Indeed, according to the Department of Meteorology (Citation2014), in some years, areas of the dry zone receive most of their annual rainfall in relativity short and dramatic episodes.
7 This is also consistent with the views of farmers in the area as reported in the local news media (see, e.g., Dissanayake and Wipulasena Citation2014).
8 Sri Lanka is home to four main ethnic groups. The Sinhalese constitute 74.9 percent of the total population and are predominately Buddhist (70 percent). The rest of the island’s population is divided among the Sri Lankan Tamils (11.2 percent), Indian Tamils (4.2 percent), and Sri Lankan Moors (9.2 percent; Department of Census and Statistics Citation2012). The census enumeration reveals that certain parts of the country are relatively ethnically homogenous. In particular, over 93.3 percent of the population of the Northern Province are Sri Lankan Tamil and in the Southern, Western, North Western, and North Central Provinces between 80 and 90 percent of the population are Sinhalese (Department of Census and Statistics Citation2012).
9 The FDP was a program of training and exchange of rice varieties between the International Rice Research Institute and Sri Lanka's Department of Agriculture, funded by the Sri Lankan government and the Ford Foundation.
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Nari Senanayake
NARI SENANAYAKE is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research bridges geographic work on health and disease, agrarian environments, and scholarship on the politics of knowledge, science, and expertise. In particular, her current research project focuses on everyday encounters with a severe and mysterious form of chronic kidney disease in Sri Lanka’s dry zone.