** With apologies for cross-posting **
DEADLINE EXTENDED *Call for Papers:* American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting (AAG) 2020, April 6-10, Denver, CO, USA. *Session Title:* Geographies of the bioeconomy: Agricultural commodity chains, agrichemicals and uneven development *Session Organizers:* Christian Berndt (University of Zurich), Marion Werner (University at Buffalo, SUNY), Becky Mansfield (Ohio State University) The biotech revolution in agriculture – including GMO seeds, intensive pesticide and fertilizer use, and digital platform technologies – is transforming agrifood production in increasingly dramatic and uneven ways. Long considered the domain of industrial agriculture in the Global North, the biotech-agrifood complex is undergoing important geographical shifts that throw into question the long-standing directionality of agrifood commodity chains analyzed in economic geography, political ecology, and environmental studies. In addition to the rollout of advanced production technologies (e.g. digitalization) in key southern countries, Global South agribusiness corporations are playing larger roles in the global production, trade and use of pesticides, fertilizers and other advanced technology inputs. These sociospatial shifts occur in tandem with major institutional restructuring of top-tier firms, evidenced by the mergers of Syngenta with ChemChina, Bayer with Monsanto, and Dow with Dupont in just the past five years. A “double movement” reaction to unprecendented corporate consolidation and chemical intensivity is underway as regulatory struggles break out unevenly over a multiscalar field. Consumers, workers, and scientists are challenging not only the use of known toxic pesticides, but also the legitimacy of the State to determine the safety of pesticides, biologicals and other inputs under monopoly corporate conditions. Beyond these struggles in North America, Europe, India, Argentina, and elsewhere, China is pursuing an aggressive policy of upgrading in the agrichemical industry, while mainstream development agencies and their philanthropic partners are seeking to extend the biotech-agrifood complex to smallholders under the sign of ‘climate-smart agriculture.’ Inspired by recent work on south-south value chains (e.g., Horner and Nadvi 2018), commodity chain socionatures (Bakker and Bridge 2006; Baglioni and Campling 2017), the political ecology of industry (Huber 2017) and off-farm capital (Galt 2014), and emergent research on the racial, gendered and colonial constituents of “chemical geographies” (Romero et al. 2017; Mansfield 2018; Williams 2019), this panel seeks to foster critical conversations on the chemicalization and digitalization of global agriculture. We are motivated by a concern for the uneven geographical distribution of the social and ecological gains and costs of agribiotech, as well as its intrinsic limits (e.g., incalcitrant socionatures, depletion of ecological surpluses) and social resistance. Who profits from the ongoing transformation of agrichemical commodity chains? How are profits distributed and captured? Who loses out in the uneven distribution of the gains and burdens of the chemicalization of agriculture? How can we take account of socionatural limits (e.g., ‘weed’ and ‘pest’ resistance to biocides) and human resistance? How to conceptualize the relationship between the two? We welcome a range of papers that address one or more aspects of the following themes: § *Human Labor/Development/Work of Nature:* How is the chemicalization of agriculture affecting rural economies and ecologies? In what ways are new production technologies implicated in the global land rush and the dispossession of traditional peasants and farmers? What are the implications for labor relations and rural natures? How is resistance shaping labor relations and alternative agrochemical solutions? § *Global value chains, agrochemical commodities and de/marketization:* What do global agrochemical commodity chains look like? What are the regulatory, technological and social shifts that make agricultural input markets work? What are the regulatory implications of the changing dynamics of these global commodity chains? How can social movements and/or the state intervene to (at a minimum) partially demarketize an increasingly chemicalized and digitalized global agriculture? § *Toxicity, Exposure and Health: *How has the agrochemical industry shaped regulatory knowledge about risk, health and agrochemical commodites? What can be learnt about changing notions of risk and safety from the recent, controversial debates in the US, Canada, Vietnam, India, Argentina, Costa Rica, the European Union and (surely) elsewhere over chemicals such as glyphosate and chlorpyrifos? How are these regulatory struggles interacting with the changing geographies of agrichemical input commodity chains? Interested participants should send expressions of interest, questions and/or an abstract of 250 words (maximum) to Christian Berndt ( christian.ber...@geo.uzh.ch) or Marion Werner (wern...@buffalo.edu) by *October 21, 2019*. Works Cited Baglioni, E., & Campling, L. (2017). Natural resource industries as global value chains: Frontiers, fetishism, labour and the state. *Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 49*(11), 2437-2456. doi:10.1177/0308518x17728517 Bakker, K., & Bridge, G. (2006). Material worlds? Resource geographies and the ‘matter of nature'. *Progress in Human Geography, 30*(1), 5-27. doi:10.1191/0309132506ph588oa Galt, R. E. (2014). *Food systems in an unequal world: Pesticides, vegetables, and agrarian capitalism in Costa Rica*. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Horner, R., & Nadvi, K. (2018). Global value chains and the rise of the Global South: unpacking twenty-first century polycentric trade. *Global Networks, 18*(2), 207-237. doi:10.1111/glob.12180 Huber, M. T. (2017). Hidden abodes: Industrializing political ecology. *Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 107*(1), 151-166. Mansfield, B. (2018). A New Biopolitics of Environmental Health: Permeable Bodies and the Anthropocene. In T. Marsden (Ed.), *Sage Handbook of Nature* (pp. 216-235). Los Angeles: Sage. Romero, A. M., Guthman, J., Galt, R. E., Huber, M., Mansfield, B., & Sawyer, S. (2017). Chemical Geographies. *GeoHumanities, 3*(1), 158-177. doi:10.1080/2373566X.2017.1298972 Williams, B. (2018). “That we may live”: Pesticides, plantations, and environmental racism in the United States South. *Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 1*, 243-267. doi:10.1177/2514848618778085
