Knowledge Work as a Condition of Accumulation in the Pesticide Industry: Syngenta's Defence of Paraquat

ABSTRACT What do pesticide companies do to keep their products on the market despite strong societal and scientific critiques of their environmental and health risks? This paper examines the herbicide paraquat, one of the most controversial pesticides, from the early 1960s to the present. It investigates what the legacy company Syngenta and its predecessors have done to keep paraquat on store shelves even as social movements and regulators have sought to ban or restrict its use. To analyse these efforts, the paper introduces a particular conceptualisation of knowledge work to capture how the industry develops and integrates a wide range of knowledge practices, including, among others, conducting replication studies to counter public research, producing supposedly safer formulations and co‐constructing international standards. Although some business activities can be described as greenwashing, for example, the website paraquat.com and the company's safe use programmes, much of the identified knowledge work consists of internal scientific and organisational practices. The paper argues that critical agrarian political economy must conceptualise knowledge work more fundamentally as a core condition of capital accumulation. Insights from the political sociology of science and the political economy of science offer important resources for enriching agrarian political economy and understanding how agrochemical firms sustain controversial products.