The project ‘Chemical Crossroads: Agrarian Transitions, Pesticide Controversies and International Governance, 1940-1970’ started in February 2025 and is funded for three years. The project design comprises three sub-projects, each based on one of three UN specialized agency – the International Labour Organization, the World Health Organization, and the Food and Agriculture Organization.
MOre About the project
The overall objective of the project is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the knowledge and expertise on pesticides that existed within the three organizations and to examine their interactions as well as collaborations and tensions between different groups of experts and between experts and other international, non-governmental interest groups. The project revisits the longstanding narrative that identified the 1960s as a turning point in the rise of environmental awareness about the dangers associated with the use of agricultural chemicals. Instead it argues that UN organizations showed concerns about the labour, food, and health risks related to the use of pesticides long before the environmental turn of the 1960s, but that these concerns did not necessarily lead to practical steps in reigning in the uses of chemical products. The project will contribute to the ongoing historical scholarship on how institutions shape the domains of agriculture, the environment, and development. It will also reveal to a broader public the deeply rooted features of current debates on the social and economic impacts of agricultural chemicals and unpack long-term trends in the conceptualization of the risks and benefits assigned to their use.
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About Amalia Ribi Forclaz
Amalia Ribi Forclaz is the Principal Investigator and an Associate Professor in International History and Politics. She holds a DPhil in Modern history from Lincoln College, Oxford (2008), where she was a Berrow Scholar and has held fellowships at the Oxford Modern European History Research Centre, the Excellence Cluster Asia and Europe in Heidelberg and as an SNF Ambizione Fellow at the Graduate Institute. Her areas of expertise include 19th and 20th century internationalism, the history of slavery and abolition, and the global history of agriculture and rural development. Her project collaborative partner is Corinna Unger, Professor at the European University Institute.