Regulatory risk and farmers' caution with pesticides in Costa Rica

In a globalizing economy, agri-food regulation in the industrialized world increasingly affects food-producing industries and farmers in developing countries. Discussions of these transformations remain mostly disconnected from the literature on pesticide use in developing countries, which emphasizes widespread pesticide misuse and abuse. Previous attempts to consider the relationship between agri-food regulation and farmers' pesticide use are found lacking because they do not situate it deeply enough within the social relations of exchange in contract farming. Using a political ecological approach attentive to this relationship, I found many farmers exercising considerable caution in their pesticide use vis-a-vis residues on mini-squash and chayote, the main export crops in Northern Cartago and the Ujarras Valley, Costa Rica. Exporters' mediation of regulatory risk - conceptualized as the possibility that an actor's behaviour will be subject to state regulation and that out of compliance behaviour will result in negative consequences that impact the actor - largely explains why this type of caution occurs. A gap between regulation and practice persists, however, because of the local history of residue violations and a related misinterpretation of pesticides' colour bands. The conclusion critiques the first world/third world binary that is mapped onto pesticide use research as preventing advancements in understanding farmers' pesticide use, shows the applicability of political ecology's chain of explanation to the local consequences of agri-food regulation from afar and proposes further engagement between agri-food studies and political ecology to better theorize local-global interactions between land users and the new spatiality of economic governance in agri-food networks.