After the land grab: Infrastructural violence and the “Mafia System” in Indonesia's oil palm plantation zones

By T. Li. Geoforum, 2017

201 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Plantations are back. Colonial-style large scale corporate monoculture of industrial crops on concession land is again expanding in the global south. The biggest expansion is in Indonesia, where oil palm already cover 11 million hectares, and 10–20 million more hectares are planned, most of it in plantation style. The land dimensions of renewed plantation expansion were thrust into public debate in 2008–9, when there was a spike in transnational land-acquisitions widely described as a global land-grab. The polemical term “grab” usefully drew attention to what was being taken away: customary land rights, diverse farming systems, and ecological balance. Drawing on ethnographic research in the oil palm zone of West Kalimantan, Indonesia, this article examines what happens after the grab, highlighting the violence embedded in the material, social and political infrastructure that plantations install. Promises to reform plantations through regulation and certification ring hollow as law, government, and livelihoods are subordinated to plantation logics; a trajectory that worsens over time as plantation zones expand and become saturated, and everyone is locked in. Indonesia's plantations cannot be redeemed, hence they should not be expanded.

Subfields: Ecology, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f0d9d24c9edf27072660a2b5f9d74f2a75c204a0

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

1. Kibrom T. Sibhatu
2. I. Grass
3. M. Qaim
4. Hermanto Siregar
5. Seth Schindler
6. J. Kanai

In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

1. Kibrom T. Sibhatu
2. M. Qaim
3. Hermanto Siregar
4. Seth Schindler
5. J. Kanai
6. Glenn Stone
7. Arjunan Subramanian
8. M. Maertens

In Global and Planetary Change

1. Kibrom T. Sibhatu
2. I. Grass
3. M. Qaim
4. Hermanto Siregar
5. Seth Schindler
6. J. Kanai
7. Marije Schaafsma
8. Benis N. Egoh

Citations in the corpus

• Getting the territory right: infrastructure-led development and the re-emergence of spatial planning strategies (2019, background): “Corporate-run transnationallyoriented regional economies tend to subsume local economic activity and ways of life (Li, 2018; Perreault, 2018), and as shown by collapsed dams in Laos and Brazil in recent years, poor oversight of shoddy infrastructure can have deadly consequences.”
• Towards sustainable palm oil production: The positive and negative impacts on ecosystem services and human wellbeing (2021, background): “In 2013 Indonesia alone produced about 50% of global palm oil (FAO, 2019) in mostly large state plantations (Li, 2018).”
• Environmental, Economic, and Social Consequences of the Oil Palm Boom (2020, background): “Li (2018) reported about issues of child labor on oil palm plantations in Kalimantan, Indonesia.”