Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia's Oil Palm Zone

Recent scholarly and media attention on palm oil has documented widespread negative social and environmental consequences of its production. In this book, anthropologists Tania Li and Pujo Semedi, in collaboration with a team of Indonesian and Canadian graduate and undergraduate students, draw attention to the increasing presence of both state-owned and private oil palm plantation companies in a specific community in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. They demonstrate how corporate influence has dramatically transformed the lives of residents who remain reliant on land for their livelihoods and survival. Using both political technology and political economy as analytical lenses, they show how plantation companies (Natco and Priva) have been able to structure economic, cultural, and political lifeworlds in ways that prevent meaningful agroecological alternatives from being imaginable, let alone realized. By focusing on the productive effects of developmentalist discourses, corporate promises, cultural and nationalist narratives, as well as legal and state infrastructures, the book highlights formal and informal mechanisms and practices that seek to legitimize highly inequitable relations of dependence.Over five chapters, the book successfully shows how the entrenched forms of social, economic, and cultural hierarchy characteristic of contemporary Indonesian agrarian capitalism stem neither from the absence of state regulation nor solely from the deployment of overt violence and coercion. Rather, the authors suggest that the persistence of unequal distributional outcomes resulting from oil palm production relies on active state institutions at all scales to privilege corporate plantation interests, especially in terms of land access. It also requires various individuals to be either “willingly” co-opted into the expansion of the crop's production or complicit in “stealing” monetarily and materially from an infrastructure that ultimately, despite its seeming totalizing character, is not led by state or private elites able to know all, see all, and control all. The book's insights regarding not only the petty involvement of even the most impoverished or marginalized in the “mafia system,” sometimes for the purposes of basic subsistence, but also its elaboration of the myth of the autonomous “independent” outgrower, point to the difficulty of identifying clear victims and villains.The authors' ethnography articulates the heterogeneity of views, fates, and perspectives among different state officials, outgrowers, brokers, foremen, harvesters, laborers, and “locals,” allowing readers to appreciate the complexity of structural realities and situated contingencies faced by different actors as they respond to discourses, incentives, and risks linked to oil palm development specifically and economic development more generally. Such analytical moves demonstrate the need to question dichotomies of state-market, consent-coercion, legal-illegal, and ethical-corrupt as ways to adequately describe or judge the actions and decisions of those implicated in the realities the book discusses.In this regard, the book offers excellent insights into the predicaments faced by those who gain little or lose out from the expansion of oil palm. The authors valuably criticize existing vocabularies and approaches espoused by human rights organizations and environmental initiatives to make plantation oil palm more just and sustainable. More broadly, they convincingly argue for ambivalence toward liberal reformist frameworks, based on more “accurate” maps and land use classifications and “better” implementation of laws and regulations. For example, the heterogeneity of positions of different state officials would suggest that vague invocations of “good governance” would not be very effective in contributing to substantive change in economic and political arrangements. Relatedly, their elaboration of the contentious relationships between “local” Dayak and Malay communities and transmigrant laborers/farmers from other Indonesian provinces would suggest the difficulty of realizing alternative land tenure arrangements primarily based on indigeneity or custom.These complexities do not mean that the authors believe that genuine alternative moral economies are not thinkable or possible. Importantly, they are not inherently against cash crop production. They recognize that the region has had a long history of livelihood strategies that in part involved market-oriented agriculture. Rather, the authors emphasize a qualitative shift beginning in the 1980s when Natco and Priva began to establish themselves as corporate occupiers of the region, catalyzed in part by concomitant shifts in land and labor regimes. In addition, the authors repeatedly link the inability of collective action to act as a countervailing force to the continued vilification of organized left politics in Indonesia, especially of unions that were robust up until the 1960s. As such, the book's attention to the lingering specter of authoritarian and paternalistic rule during President Suharto's rule during 1966–98 is especially notable.The book should be of interest to agricultural historians, especially those grappling with how to periodize plantation histories in the Global South and understand resistances to its persistence from the colonial era onward. Especially with its multiple references to Ann Stoler's theoretical work on “imperial debris” and her historical anthropology of Sumatran plantations, the book's argument that plantation histories in their continuities and ruptures are simultaneously political histories of a heterogeneous Indonesian state is one that can also apply in various other contexts.

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