Mutagenic Residues of Senegal’s Peanut Export Economy

• In Event: Mutagenic Legacies and Future Living

Abstract

In 1960, when Senegal’s colonial independence was celebrated, about a hundred thousand turkeys died near London. Senegal’s first development plan traced an ambitious program to transform the groundnut from a force of ruination, whose colonial exploitation impoverished soils, ecologies, households and diets, into one that would fuel the emergence of a new national society, landscape and citizen-peasant. The turkey outbreak was soon traced to fungus-contaminated groundnut-based feed imported from Brazil. Over the next decades, layers of animal-experimental, epidemiological and genomic evidence and uncertainty were produced about the hepato-carcinogenic effects of toxic metabolites – called aflatoxins – of groundnut (and other crop)-colonizing fungus.

This paper examines how this evidence and its uncertainty played out alongside the high political-economic stakes of Senegal’s groundnut economy and of its successive reforms. I combine three strands of analysis: 1) A historical examination of aflatoxin research and regulatory control in Senegal, in which projects to specify and manage field and food contamination have been stifled, and investments made in exit-point measures to meet importers’ standards arising from precautionary responses to evidentiary uncertainty. 2) A historical examination of the effects, on domestic groundnut commerce and consumption, of the liberalisation of the groundnut sector. 3) An ethnographic approach to enduring doubts and suspicions about the intentions driving characterisations of aflatoxin carcinogenicity, and emerging hopes in entrepreneurial techno scientific solutions. I thus consider how both embodied exposure and epistemological uncertainty can be conceptualised as mutagenic residues of the global political economies of agricultural commodities and scientific research.

Author

• Noemi Tousignant, University College London