The “Pesticide Chip”: Chemical Legacies and Agrarian Futures in Costa Rica

Abstract For decades, agro‐industrial capital has adopted cascading chemical and biotechnical interventions, or fixes, to secure accumulation through the cultivation of monocrops. We develop a framework that centres on how monocrop‐induced susceptibility to pests and pathogens—and the patchwork of fixes to address these—produces uneven chemical geographies. These uneven geographies are not produced by capital alone, but rather they are co‐constituted through social struggles over working conditions, chemical exposures and land. Our framework is developed in dialogue with the aspirations and obstacles faced by parcelerxs , worker‐peasant farmers, to forge livelihoods in former plantation lands in the southern Pacific region of Costa Rica. We identify three intersecting challenges: contemporary low‐cost pesticide commercialisation, pathogen and chemical inheritances, and subjective attachments to pesticide use, or the “pesticide chip”. The possibility for less chemicalised futures thus relies upon a combined strategy that addresses the material and institutional legacies of monocrop plantations and related subjectivities.