Navigating compounding uncertainty: Farmer strategies amid biosecurity crises in western Uganda

In western Uganda, state biosecurity measures designed for the elimination of uncertainty through monitoring, control, and eradication of plant disease merely offload responsibility for uncertainty, placing it elsewhere, often in the arms of farmers. In this paper, I explore the ways in which uncertainty is operationalized and challenged by farmers in the face of banana Xanthomonas wilt (BXW), a deadly plant disease causing widespread losses across East Africa. Farmers negotiate differing claims to certainty regarding the disease and availability of agricultural extension from multiple actors, often through improvisation and experimentation. These practices highlight how knowledge networks between the state, farmers, and scientists are reshaped due to biosecurity and disease. The findings suggest the potential for a deeper entrenching of inequality as the improvised knowledge networks follow familiar patterns of state investment and social difference. Farmers with the social and economic capital to manage uncertainty are able to do so, while resource-poor farmers face a compounding uncertainty stemming from multiple sources which build on each other. On the other hand, compounding uncertainty may also produce space for strategic alliances between farmers and other actors as it draws multiple concerns together. Overall, these results reflect the importance of attending to the political ecology of knowledge in biosecurity regimes and in environmental governance more broadly.