Enacting and resisting biosecurity citizenship: More-than-human geographies of enrolment in a disease eradication scheme in Scotland

Highlights

• An animal disease eradication scheme can be seen as a form of biopower to enrol farmers as biosecurity citizens.
• Farmers may privilege their own knowledge of an animal over knowledge mediated through the disease eradication scheme.
• The scheme was subject to acceptance and resistance based on farmers’ location and the markets they were embedded in.
• The scheme created Scottish animal ‘citizens’ known through their administrative record of geographical relationship to Scottish national territory.
• The paper highlights a new type of interaction between biosecurity and trade as the scheme overlapped with ‘quality’ value chains.
  Declaration of conflict

Abstract

This paper explores farmers’ responses to a cattle disease eradication scheme in Scotland by examining geographies of biopower and biosecurity citizenship. Biosecurity citizenship is a project to enact disease control for the good of a particular community. The paper uses the concept of biosecurity citizenship to explore how successful the scheme was at enrolling farmers as ‘Scottish’ biosecurity citizens with a sense of responsibility to the national territory. It explores the kinds of relationships the scheme created between farmers and animals and the kinds of animal ‘citizens’ created.

The scheme was found to be partially successful in fostering a sense of biosecurity citizenship among farmers. Points of tension were the replacement of farmers’ own ways of assessing the value of their animals with an epidemiological lens that framed value in terms of the presence or absence of the bovine viral diarrhoea pathogen. These animals were constituted by the scheme as anonymous non-human citizens who became known through their administrative record of geographical relationship to Scottish national territory. The logic of the scheme differentiating Scotland as a distinct epidemiological space was variously accepted and resisted by farmers based on distance from the English border, and how ‘Scottish’ associated economic supply chains were. The paper thus highlights a new type of interaction between biosecurity and trade, showing how epidemiological initiatives can entangle with ‘quality’ supply chains that differentiate produce based on cultural links with a national territory. This in turn underlines the importance of understanding the dynamics of biosecurity citizenship in creating particular geographies of human–animal relationships and supply chains.