ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

US Agricultural Assistance and the Politics of Pesticide Management in Post-Soviet Ukraine

• In Event: Shaping Nature 2: Insects 20thC

English Abstract

In 1994, Ukrainian and US officials agreed that USAID-supplied American agrochemicals would generate agrarian productivity and capital for the newly independent nation of Ukraine. This paper traces two USAID-funded projects that sent an assemblage of “plant protection” products – that is, pesticides – and experts to Ukraine between 1994 and 1999 with the aim of expanding agribusiness markets and encouraging economic reforms. US land-grant university entomologists organized integrated pest management workshops and created a Ukrainian Crop Protection Association to represent the interests of the private pesticide industry on the national stage. Meanwhile, the Washington, D.C.-based organization Citizens’ Network for Foreign Affairs established and monitored pesticide distribution warehouses for its industry partner, Monsanto. When both groups of international development agents arrived, they encountered a pest-management arena already populated by Ukrainian entomologists and pesticide companies. Foregrounding the multiple and sometimes conflicting agendas of Ukrainian and American government officials, plant protection experts, and industry representatives, I illuminate how global pest management frameworks, including the regulation of pesticides, were contested and reconfigured under local conditions. Examining the regional materialization of transnational pesticide and pest management knowledge exposes uneven distributions of power as well as alternative ecological imaginations. Situating the Ukrainian pesticide projects of the 1990s within longer histories of international development, Ukrainian and US pest management, and public-private sector collaboration also reveals continuities with contemporary agricultural assistance programs and global agrochemical regimes.

Author

• Samantha Eve Lieberman, Georgia Institute of Technology