“We Spray So We Can Live”: Agrochemical Kinship, Mystery Kidney Disease, and Struggles for Health in Dry Zone Sri Lanka

In March 2015, Sri Lanka’s then-President Maithripala Sirisena launched the Toxic Free Nation Movement as a long-term solution to a mysterious form of kidney disease (CKDu) now endemic in the island’s dry zone. As part of this strategy, in 2016 the movement worked with farmers in north-central Sri Lanka to cultivate indigenous rice varieties without agrochemicals. Yet, within a year, 80 percent of farmers who experimented with indigenous and organic rice farming had switched back to some form of agrochemically intensive cultivation. In this article, I examine farmers’ narratives of why this happened, demonstrating how the movement’s conceptualization of agricultural harm often missed the forms of accounting most salient for residents themselves. Instead, through their testimonies, residents track how polyvalent relationships with agrarian toxicity mediate (1) vulnerabilities to simple reproduction squeezes, (2) reliance on grain fungibility, and (3) strong but bittersweet attachments to dry zone agrarian landscapes. As a consequence, I document how residents respatialize their knotted relationships to agrarian toxicity to include moments of what I call “agrichemical kinship.” I argue that this optic helps us grasp the ways in which agrochemicals simultaneously erode and enable modes of social reproduction against a backdrop of rural stagnation. Following feminist scholars of toxicity, this article not only reveals intimate, yet undertheorized, connections between the field of toxic geographies and the concept of social reproduction but also dashes hopes of any simple equation between banning agrichemical inputs and enacting health in the wake of CKDu.