Food Systems in an Unequal World: Pesticides, Vegetables, and Agrarian Capitalism in Costa Rica

2. Socioeconomic Differentiation and Geographies of Nature

Nelson, the farmer who first described the cloud belt to me (chapter 1), is the largest farmer of minisquash in my survey. He resides and owns agricultural land in Cipreses but refuses to plant his vegetable crops in the Cipreses area because of the large quantities of pesticides needed. Instead, he plants export minisquash and other minivegetables in the distant fields of other farmers with whom he works a medias, a relationship in which Nelson is an off-site manager and provider of most of the capital. Nelson farms in the much drier and less cloudy area west of Cuesta La Chinchilla (see figure 1.1) and notes that he is able to substantially reduce pesticide use relative to growing in Cipreses. Nelson’s plantings further afield range from Alajuela Province (west of San José, to the west of the study site) to Santa Cruz de Turrialba (to the east of the study site). Nelson’s land-use arrangements are what I call a spatial strategy—intentionally shifting production from the cloud belt to areas better suited to vegetable production. This is an important dimension of agriculture in the study site and one that intersects with processes of socioeconomic differentiation and the intensity of pesticide use. The minisquashes—the backbone of the local minivegetable export sector—were originally introduced into and tested in the Cipreses area in the 1980s (Breslin 1996) as Costa Rica was incentivizing export-oriented production through externally imposed structural adjustment programs (Edelman 1999). Finding the conditions of production challenging, wealthier minisquash farmers from Cipreses eventually experimented with growing the vegetable in other locations and learned that Cipreses is a relatively poor location for minisquash because of the cloud belt. One of the two minivegetable exporting companies located in Cipreses now prohibits its farmers from growing minisquash in the area because of the heavy spraying required, which might translate into high levels of 2 Socioeconomic Differentiation and Geographies of Nature 68 Chapter 2 residues that foreign inspectors would detect (see chapter 4). Thus, like Nelson, minivegetable export farmers who can afford to do so shift production to sunnier and warmer areas to the south and west of Cipreses, since this leads to reduced plant disease pressure and allows them to spray less. This chapter examines these social and ecological dynamics of agriculture by focusing on pesticide use and socioeconomic differences of farm households living in the cloud belt. The focus is on those households growing minisquash and potato. I take the understanding of the area’s physical and pest geography developed in chapter 1 and relate it to household resources to examine the interrelationships between political economic and ecological processes in Northern Cartago, including the likely consequences for differential capital accumulation, social inequality , and environmental pollution. Socioeconomic differentiation in the area has occurred, and will continue to occur, through the complex interaction of climate, plant diseases, access to resources, and competition. Let’s look at these interactions. Socioeconomic Differentiation in Agriculture Social and economic differentiation among groups of relatively homogenous agrarian landowners is a standard outcome of the development of capitalist agriculture (Goodman and Redclift 1981). Cochrane’s (1979) landmark study, highlighting the treadmill of production in U.S. agriculture as discussed in chapter 1, shows that on-farm capital accumulation “is likely to be a socially and economically uneven process. Some farmers are more successful in accumulating capital so that the process becomes marked by increasing stratification or differentiation among farmers” (Buttel 1983, 111–12). This leads to what Cochrane calls cannibalism: “larger, more aggressive farmers outcompeting and purchasing the lands of their less successful neighbors” (Buttel 1983, 112). The specific trajectory of differentiation in agricultural production has been debated since Lenin and Kautsky’s exchange about the peasantry’s fate with agrarian capitalism’s expansion. Lenin argued for a traditional trajectory of concentration following Marxian thought in which capitalist farms would outcompete and eventually eliminate the peasantry as Socioeconomic Differentiation and Geographies of Nature 69 simple commodity producers (social units of production organized by households). This would create a rural bourgeoisie and a rural proletariat , which might still have a small plot of land but whose social relations would be more that of a worker (de Janvry 1981, 99). Kautsky disagreed based on empirical evidence and noted that the peasantry, despite being economically inefficient, continued to persist for a number of reasons (Banaji 1980). Kautsky’s argument was prescient: while in most other...