Maintaining monoculture: Tea plantations and everyday forms of agronomic violence

This paper addresses the day-to-day work to maintain monoculture in the context of tea plantations in former British colonies. In doing so, I seek to bring modern agriculture pursuits in conversation with research and policy work concerning biodiversity. While land-use change through intensive, industrial agriculture is identified as a major driver of biodiversity loss, the ongoing, everyday forms of elimination built into the plantation form is less discussed. Monoculture is not a natural state, but something that is achieved through control of pests, weeds and diseases. The plantation carries a dark history of exploitation of people, many of whom have been brought as slaves or indentured laborers to produce sugar, tobacco or cotton for the world market. Recent scholarship has also begun to explore the multispecies violence perpetuated by the plantation system. I will discuss this in terms of routinized forms of “agronomic violence”, where the care for the cultivated crop, tea, builds on the elimination of insects and plants that thrive in the open monocultural landscape. This is mainly done through massive application of synthetic pesticides and herbicides; toxic substances that enters the bodies of laborers and contaminate the environment. It is these wider forms of plantation necropolitics that the paper explores.