PRN hosted its third workshop on January 27^th featuring a paper co-authored by ICTA-UAB PhD candidate Sole Castro and UB faculty member Marion Werner titled Pesticides and Food Regimes: A view from Costa Rica. The paper drew on Castro’s long-term fieldwork in Costa Rica to consider the legacies of decades of pesticide use — in soils, human bodies and social relations — for agrarian livelihoods. Fourteen scholars from five countries attended the workshop. Fernando Ramírez (IRET, Costa Rica) and Lucía Argüelles (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) offered comments, followed by a lively discussion. We welcome participants to our next paper workshop in May 2023. 

Pictured above, an ex-banana plantation worker shows the drainage and irrigation infrastructure used by the United Fruit Company over the course of the last century in the Pacific region of Costa Rica. UFCo divested from banana production on this plantation in the 1980s but this infrastructure, synthetic twine and copper sulfate pesticide persist in the soil and continue to condition livelihoods for the parceleros (farmers of small plots or parcelas) who now work this land. Photograph by Soledad Castro.