Envisioning agribusiness: Land, labour and value in a time of oil palm expansion in Indonesia

by

Jean-François Bissonnette

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Geography University of Toronto

© Copyright by Jean-François Bissonnette 2012 Envisioning agribusiness: Land, labour and value in a time of oil palm expansion in Indonesia Doctor in Philosophy - 2012 Jean-François Bissonnette Deparment of Geography, University of Toronto

Abstract

The thesis examines the social and economic implications of large-scale

agribusiness expansion in Indonesia by analyzing how this economic system, as it is envisioned and materialised, reshapes livelihood possibilities. Based on original

interviews with oil palm plantation workers, plantation company officials, smallholders,

and on secondary research, this thesis scrutinises the forms of knowledge and practices

that constitute large-scale oil palm agribusiness.

While oil palm agribusiness produces economic opportunities for groups of individuals from certain social categories, it constrains the prospects of others in systematic ways. Oil palm agribusiness, as a project and as a set of practices, is deployed

by a broad range of economic actors at different scales in an attempt to govern access to

resources. However, the power of oil palm companies and investors over land, labour,

and value is contested and negotiated by workers and smallholders who engage creatively

with this economy.

The thesis shows that oil palm agribusiness forms a field of power that produces

specific subjectivities which transform the meanings and constraints related to this mode

of production. The first part of the thesis (chapters 2 and 3) identifies the objectives

pursued by those who plan and envision oil palm agribusiness. I emphasise that oil palm

agribusiness serves a number of often competing and shifting aims that range from

capital accumulation to welfare provision. The second part of the thesis (chapters 4 and

ii 5) demonstrates how the modes of visioning examined in the first part of the thesis produce a broad set of material conditions for populations. I analyse the ways in which these conditions are constantly reshaped by everyday power relations and articulated around the value of labour and land. Based on ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in

West Kalimantan, Lombok, and Nias, these chapters shed light on the lived geographies of labour and the livelihood strategies used by individuals and social groups in the space of oil palm agribusiness.

iii Acknowledgements

This project would not have been possible without the guidance and support of

many people. I hope that all those who have contributed to this research find in these

pages the expression of my most sincere gratitude.

First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to all the members of my

thesis committee. My sincerest gratitude goes to Rachel Silvey, my supervisor, whom

over the years during countless hours of meetings and correspondences, has been

providing encouragements, intellectual stimulation and guidance, crucial networking

opportunities and emotional support. I am also infinitely grateful to Tania Li, who has

consistently provided thoughtful consideration of my work and precious advices, and

who has on many occasions, graciously invited me to join her field courses and seminars

in Indonesia. I would also like to thank Katharine Rankin, for her encouragement,

challenging comments, and sustained engagement with my project. I am obliged to

Matthew Farish for his sage advice, intellectual openness, and enthusiasm in supporting

me through this project. And finally, I am grateful to Johan Lindquist for his engaging

and considerate evaluation of my work in his role of external appraiser.

Carrying out this project was also made possible by the assistance of those who helped me conduct fieldwork in Indonesia. Thank you to Pujo Semedi at the University of Gajah Mada, who welcomed me in Indonesia and provided institutional support for fieldwork activities at different stages of the project. During my trips into the rural areas of Indonesia, I greatly benefitted from the support and assistance of graduate students,

Fuad Abdulgani and Frans Prasetyo. I would also like to thank Trisnu Brata Nugroho from the Universitas Negeri Semarang, and Odit Budiawan from the Universitas Gajah

iv Mada; working closely with these individuals greatly enhanced my research opportunities

and insights in West Kalimantan. I must also thank some of the organisations that

generously opened their doors to me and helped me with my work, including Sawit

Watch in Bogor, Akatiga in Bandung, and Institute Dayakology in Pontianak. I also wish

to express my gratitude to all the informants who participated in my research and openly

shared with me their views, life stories, and work experiences. Their stories of life and

work in oil palm plantations form the basis of this project and have never ceased to

inspire me. All remaining mistakes or inaccuracies are mine.

This project has been funded by the Fonds québécois de recherche sur la société et

la culture (FQRSC) and subsequently by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research

Council of Canada (SSHRC). Additional funding for fieldwork was provided by the Dr.

Chu Scholarships in Asia Pacific Studies and the Challenges of the Agrarian Transition

(ChATSEA) project. The funds provided were crucial in aiding the completion of this

study.

Finally, this project would not have been possible without the support, love and

encouragement of my partner, Vivien Lee, and of my parents, Nicole and Robert, as well

as my sisters Joëlle and Élise who have been present throughout the process.

v Table of contents

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: VISION AND POWER IN A TIME OF OIL PALM EXPANSION 1

Introduction 1 Beyond the state 3 Vision and power 9 Life, labour and power 15 Geographies of oil palm agribusiness 24 Outline of the thesis 30

CHAPTER 2. A CROP FOR THE FUTURE: PLANNING FOR OIL PALM AGRIBUSINESS 36

Introduction 36 Envisioning plantation agriculture 39 Oil palm as a plantation crop 43 Malaysian oil palm agribusiness 49 The plantation model in Indonesia 54 Envisioning sustainable palm oil 59 Conclusion 63

CHAPTER 3. THE GOVERNMENT OF POPULATION, TERRITORY AND WEALTH THROUGH OIL PALM AGRIBUSINESS 66

Introduction 66 Governmentality and political economy 68 Colonial and post-colonial political economies 71 Shifting postcolonial political economies 74 Oil palm smallholding shcemes as a development device 79 Smallholding schemes in the New Order 79 Subjects of agribusiness in the post-New Order era 87 The political economy of possibilities 93 Conclusion 101

CHAPTER 4. SUBJECTS OF AGRIBUSINESS: VALUING LAND AND LABOUR 104

Introduction 104 Reshaping land and labour markets 107 Social and technical experiments 107 The Social contours of land accumulation 117 Valuing labour in oil palm agribusiness 126 Questions of gender 126 Changing labour regimes, strategies and tactics 134

vi Questions of status 141 Conclusion 144

CHAPTER 5. MIGRANT PLANTATION WORKERS: TENSIONS OF MOBILITY AND IMMOBILITY 148

Introduction 148 Recent and ancient histories of migrant plantation labour 151 Spaces of coercion and welfare 151 Making use of mobility 160 Migrant plantation work in Lombok 165 Searching for labour 165 Merantau and limits to mobility 171 Placing home in plantation work 176 Plantation work and mobility in Nias 182 Conclusion 186

CHAPTER 6. CONCLUSION: THE CONTOURS OF OIL PALM AGRIBUSINESS 189 Introduction 189 The dynamic field of oil palm agribusiness 190 Scales of visions of agribusiness 194

BIBLIOGRAPHIE 199

vii

List of Tables

Table 1: Oil palm area (ha) by type of ownership in Indonesia, 1980-2008 85 Table 2: Work status official terminology in two estate companies, 2011 134

List of Figures

Figure 1. Fieldwork site locations in Indonesia 27 Figure 2. Aerial view of an oil palm plantation 55 Figure 3. Current oil palm monoculture areas and concessions in Indonesia 94 Figure 4. Potential land for oil palm expansion in Indonesia 99 Figure 5. Representation of the PIR oil palm smallholding scheme 113 Figure 6. Representation of the PIR oil palm smallholding scheme and perimeter of expansion fo independent smallholders 123 Figure 7. Plantation labour migration patterns 167

List of Appendices

Appendix 1. Glossary of Indonesian terms 217 Appendix 2. Glossary of acronyms 219 Appendix 3. Basic characteristics of respondents by geographical location 220 Appendix 4. Population characteristics of Desa Sola, East Lombok 223 Appendix 5. Population characteristics of Nias, North Sumatra 224 Appendix 6. Population characteristics of Desa Buaya, Kalimantan Barat 225

viii 1

Chapter 1

Vision and power in a time of oil palm expansion

Introduction

The environmental changes caused by oil palm agribusiness expansion in

Indonesia in the past decades are unprecedented in speed and scale in the history of the

country. From 2000 to 2011, the area allocated to the sole cash crop of oil palm has more

than doubled from 4 million to 9 million hectares. Many Indonesian government officials

plan that oil palm agribusiness will spread over 20 million hectares in the near future,

forming the basis of a vast agro-industrial sector. Oil palm agribusiness has been

deployed by political and economic actors as a technique to produce specific economic

and social conditions in Indonesia. A number of programmes have been designed by the

colonial and post-colonial governments of Indonesia which have allowed large

populations of smallholders and workers to take part in the oil palm economy. There

were over 500 000 households participating in oil palm smallholding schemes in 2010,

and up to one million permanent or temporary workers on oil palm plantations across

Indonesia 1. This does not include the independent smallholders growing oil palm outside

estate schemes which account for 250,000 hectares and include up to 100,000

households. Large populations have become subjects of agribusiness in Indonesia,

whether as workers or landowners. These figures reflect complex and often contingent

power relations that determine the possibilities of large populations and territories.

1 Tania Li (2011, 284) discusses these numbers. Numbers provided directly or indirectly in Barlow, 2003; Zen et al. 2006; estimate corroborated by World Bank 2011; Rist et al. (2009) state the number of 4.5 million jobs for the oil palm industry at the scale of Indonesia.

1

2

The expansion of agro-industrial monoculture constitutes a radical territorial transformation which causes environmental destruction and social conflicts as access to agrarian resources is thoroughly reshaped in the process. Despite punctual opposition against specific large-scale oil palm schemes, the profitability of the crop and the economic possibilities it grants leads large populations to engage in this economic activity under a various conditions. In this regard, the opposition of some environmentalist movements to large-scale agribusiness often fails to capture the complexity of visions that contribute to the endurance and expansion of large-scale agribusiness.

In this account, I seek to complicate a traditional question of agrarian studies – who benefits and who loses from large-scale oil palm agribusiness?– by attending to the ways in which a wide range of people engage materially and discursively with this complex geography. In this account I work toward an understanding of large-scale oil palm agribusiness as part of a broader transformation of social relations formed around land and labour. As oil palm agribusiness reshapes territories, I ask who is governing what and whom, whose vision is at work and how? Answering the question of who benefits and who loses from large-scale agribusiness leads to think about how this economic activity governs livelihood possibilities and constraints, produces norms of success and ways of understanding value, in other words, subjectivities. Throughout the chapters of this thesis, I argue that oil palm agribusiness constitutes a set of practical knowledge that provides means for experts such as colonial officials, contemporary state bureaucrats or agribusiness planners to practice visioning of a future. That moment of planning and intervention articulates possibilities which engage a spectrum of subjects,

3 bureaucrats, investors and land owners from a wide range of geographies. Oil palm agribusiness in Indonesia consolidates the access of groups and individuals to exclusive techniques of production and capital accumulation. The economic system that takes shape provides the state, large companies and investors of all sizes with the means to enact power over labour and land. This economic system produces practical modes of operations and labour use that reinforce the power of specific categories of workers and reshapes livelihood strategies of populations.

Beyond the state

The post-colonial state of Indonesia, its officials and some of its ministries have

played an important role historically and contemporarily in the expansion of large-scale

agribusiness schemes. In this regard, post-colonial officials have pursued the aims the

Dutch Netherland Indies’ colonial administration to increase revenues through resource

extraction, namely plantation and mining activities. Post-colonial Indonesia under

President Suharto was ruled by a militaristic centralised authoritarian regime which has

allowed oligarchic conglomerates close to political power to take over large territories for

agricultural schemes or extensive logging in outer islands. The regime significantly

expanded the scale of radical territorial transformations through plantation agriculture

started by the colonial regime. The authoritarian regime that ruled Indonesia also

intensified programmes of transmigration to seek to re-engineer the distribution of

population over the national territory. Especially since the 1980s, the Indonesian

government, with financial and technical support from international institutions such as

the World Bank, has aggressively promoted and enabled the expansion of cash crops such

4 as oil palm (Durand 2000). Indonesia’s New Order bureaucratic state (1965 - 1998) generalised forms of controlled and surveillance while it pursued the function of the colonial state as it sought to classify population and reengineered the distribution of populations through such things as large-scale agrarian projects in the outer islands.

However, conceptions of the New Order regime as exerting “totalizing hegemonic control over society” has been increasingly questioned in the past years (Barker and van klinken 2009, 22). The vision of industrial farming which has enabled large-scale land schemes to expand did not only emanate from the bureaucratic centers of power in

Indonesia. Beyond the state, oil palm agribusiness and other large-scale cash crop schemes have enrolled an important number of institutions, investors and smallholders, agents that conceive agro-industrial production model as a basis for material success. For people from different backgrounds, large-scale cash crop schemes increasingly represent an economic system that yields predictable material achievements for large groups of smallholders and larger land holders.

Although the authoritarian regime of Suharto collapsed in Indonesia in the wake of the financial crisis of 1997, large-scale enclosures have continued apace, albeit in a new political and social context, under the modalities of decentralised governance.

Nevertheless, the democratic renewal of post-1997 Indonesia has allowed a growing number of Indonesian non-governmental organisations to voice concerns raised by the deforestation and the displacement of peasant communities by large-scale agribusiness schemes. Many of these organisations have targeted the state of Indonesia and conglomerates as responsible for the current oil palm boom and the environmental destruction and social conflicts it has caused before and after 1997. The rhetoric and

5 metaphors of many social and environmental NGOs have provided an important critical stance about the shortcomings of large-scale agribusiness schemes. However, environmental organisations have created a dualistic discourse that creates rigid boundaries between on the one hand the state along with oil palm companies and on the other, populations of workers and smallholders involved in agribusiness. The dualistic conception of agribusiness occludes the important diversity of subjects participating in oil palm agribusiness and the dynamic ways in which participation in this form of highly capitalised agriculture is negotiated, desired, refused or questioned. Such conception fails to capture the complexity of relations that sustain oil palm agribusiness and that transcend pre-defined categories of workers and land owners. The way in which oil palm agribusiness is deployed by a broad range of subjects in provinces and districts of

Indonesia is often part of broader strategies of power and capital accumulation that blur dualistic distinctions between state and society. In this regard, the account of Barker and van Klinken (2009, 10) on class and power in Indonesia is representative of the complexity of power relations that enable the expansion of large-scale oil palm agribusiness:

“the loose political alliances that have been busily deploying strategies are today also forming dynamic centers in the provinces and districts […]. Urban bureaucrats, business entrepreneurs, and NGO activists sometimes resemble a social class that cultivates networks, seizes available rents, excludes or patronizes the poor, and deploys authoritarian ideologies.”

To conceptualise the power relations that sustain oil palm agribusiness in

Indonesia, I look at the multiplicity of visions of agribusiness and pay attention to the

optic of state and plantation officials and the practices it gives rise to. To avoid the

dualisms, I seek to complicate visions of oil palm agribusiness articulated by high

6 political and economic officials by looking at the everyday engagement of plantation workers and smallholders with the material reality produced by this mode of production.

Although I recognise the productive and creative nature of activism against oil palm agribusiness, I seek to complicate the narratives of campaigns against oil palm in

Indonesia. I wish to move beyond dualisms between on one side, instigators of agribusiness endowed with the power to envision large-scale schemes of regimented space and on the other, populations who labour as wage workers or smallholders. To do so, I adopt a broad conception of vision, referring to both the action of representing specific objects of knowledge such as populations or territories, and as the forms of calculations or strategies that economic agents engage in. The capacity of envisioning agribusiness is not the sole privilege of state planners or plantation officials, but takes place in diffuse ways as subjectivities emerge and lead to the valuation of practices and forms of socioeconomic organisations related to agribusiness. Envisioning agribusiness is far from monolithic and encompasses a wide spectrum of attitudes and practices toward large-scale agribusiness which transcend coercion and consent.

I emphasise the tensions between large-scale agribusiness as an envisioned project and as a lived reality in which livelihood possibilities derive from the engagement of subjects with shifting modalities of power and capital accumulation. The project of agribusiness envisioned by economic and political actors of Indonesia has plural and contested aims which are mediated by everyday strategies of workers, smallholders and investors who become active agents in large-scale oil palm agribusiness. I attempt to reconcile forms of exclusion and dispossession associated to the extraction of surplus labour in agribusiness with such conceptualisation of power, to apprehend forms of

7 labour alienation through shifting social relations. I look at the ways in which oil palm plantation agribusiness governs populations, territories and wealth in complex and diffuse ways that encompass but go beyond the relationship between the state and its subjects, or companies and their workers.

Large-scale oil palm agribusiness in Indonesia raises questions about the modalities of power which govern the reproduction and expansion of agribusiness schemes. The institution of large-scale standardised agribusiness that relies on hierarchical organization of space and labour can be better understood as part of a manifestation of specific forms of power over humans and non-humans. The seminal work of James Scott (1998) Seeing like a state constitutes a landmark contribution to debates on the forms of modernist planning and visibility underlying large-scale schemes, whether rural settlement, urban organisation or agricultural production. The processes described by Scott highlight the forms of knowledge and operations deployed by state actors that rely on a synoptic and aerial view of a reality to produce simplified and legible objects amenable to transformations for specific aims of control or improved efficiency.

Scott’s project provides important conceptual tools to examine high-modernist large- scale agribusiness schemes in Indonesia. It allows to critically analysing the implications of the state and large companies in pursuing forms of calculability and control through large-scale standardized agriculture. For Scott (1998, 8) “large-scale capitalism is just as much an agency of homogenization, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state is, with the difference being that, for capitalists, simplification must pay.”

According to this argument, the radical simplification of production systems through large-scale monoculture renders legible labour and energy inputs and outputs in terms of

8 tons of palm oil and its equivalent in money. Large-scale oil palm agribusiness schemes allow the state to reengineer relations of production, rural settlement, and land use to increase calculable value. But Scott’s argument is that large schemes fail as they are transformed through everyday practice infused with localised knowledge. Nevertheless,

Scott (1998) seems to entertain the idea of unilateral agency in the state and large-scale capitalism, without paying attention to more diffuse ways in which specific modes of production articulated around labour and land spread and reshape social life.

As Tania Li (2005) highlighted, in Scott’s accounts, the boundaries between what is know by the state or planners and what falls outside the gaze of the state appear somewhat stable and rigid. Mitchell (1990) argued that Scott (1985) identified a specific locus of resistance in peasant societies and ascribed consciousness and autonomous agency to peasant classes. In this regard, to inquire into the effects and implications of agribusiness schemes, Tania Li hints toward a conceptualisation of power that goes beyond the dualisms of the planning entity endowed with the power to see, and the humans and non-humans who are being seen, fall into or resist the plans. The transformation of space for production purposes as is the case with oil palm agribusiness increases “the power to see, the power to make visible (as) the power to control” (Levin

1993, 7). However, according to Tania Li’s theoretical insights, the power to control is not only exerted from the state level down, but takes diverse forms as it produces new subjectivities and livelihood strategies that take place beyond the binaries of acceptance and resistance or consent and coercion.

Vision and power

9

The operations of power that create legibility in Scott’s account can be further nuanced by Foucault’s theorization of power which seeks to explain the same kind of modernist rationality. Scott (1998, 23) distinguished his project from Foucault’s which he contends, attends to the ways in which state regulatory power manifests at the scale of the body. However, despite Scott’s contention, Foucault’s work has important theoretical implications for the understanding of the implications of large-scale agrarian transformations such as the one prompted by agribusiness and industrial monoculture. In

Discipline and Punish (1975) Foucault characterised modern modalities of power which he located the start of in the 17 th century. The theoretical insights in his study of the

punitive systems in modern Europe provided a renewed conception of power which

captures an individualising form of discipline that acts first and foremost on the body.

The forms of power Foucault attended to both in Discipline and Punish and subsequently

in The History of Sexuality revealed meticulous forms of control exerted on the body by

the active configuration of space and time in which the subject takes part. The historical

moments of disciplines as Foucault states “is the moment where an art of the human body

was born, which does not only target the growth of its capacities, neither an increase of

its subjection, but the formation of a relation within which the same mechanism renders

the body more obedient as much as it renders it more useful and conversely” (Foucault

1975, 162). The machinery of production and power described by Foucault calls into

attention the particular institutions and the spatialisation through which the modalities of

modern power emanate, are reproduced and transformed. I understand body politics as a

scale of analysis deeply embedded in spatialised institutions that govern labour.

10

Foucault (1975) identified Bentham’s panopticon as the paradigmatic architectural figure to capture the modalities of modern power, its diffuseness and capillarity. Foucault

(1975, 239) used Bentham’s panopticon to capture the modern mode of power in its ideal form, which constitutes a “figure of political technology that must be detached from all specific uses”. Metaphorically, each cell of the panopticon forms an individualised spatial unit that can be seen uninterruptedly from a central point. Panopticism, in the broad sense in which Foucault used it, refers to operations related to disciplinary schemes in which vision expresses the capacity to enumerate and classify objects (230-232). “Disciplines, by organising ‘cells’, ‘places’ and ‘ranks’ produce complex spaces: at the same time architectural, functional and hierarchical.” (173). Panopticism appears in Foucault’s writings in an attempt to unveil conditions of normalization and control that enable forms of differentiation and classification of people which became widespread in colonial institutions (Mbembe 2003, 25). Foucault extended the significance of panopticism to

“the system of administrative institutions and disciplinary practices organised by the conjunction of a universalized rationality and advanced technologies for the securing of conditions of visibility” (Levin 1993, 7). With the emergence of the modern state and institutions such as the army and schools, discipline becomes permanent and indeterminate as subjects become part of the machinery of power and economic processes formed around it (Foucault 1975, 253).

In light of Foucault’s metaphorical use of the panopticon, I analyse large-scale oil palm agribusiness as a mode of production which manifests the imposition of specific parameters to economic and social possibilities to produce matrices of meaning and action. Far from being totalising, especially in the case of oil palm agribusiness,

11 panopticism describes the normalisation of disciplinary relations which eventually lead to the validation of certain ways of being, of certain practices, and the discrimination of others. As Kaplan (2008, 87) notes, the interpretation Foucault (1975) makes of the concept of panopticism as a paradigmatic shift in power, is rather broad and refers to an investment of attitudes, dispositions and technologies by modern forms of visibility and normative or prescriptive control. This understanding of power provides a theoretical framework applicable in geographical and historical contexts not taken into account by

Foucault himself. According to Barker and van Klinken (2009, 21) the principle of panopticism has had an important methodological impact in Indonesian studies as scholars sought ways to interpret bureaucratic forms of control especially during the New

Order (1965-1997). The architecture of prisons, aspects of urban planning (Kusno 2000,

187) and large-scale agribusiness smallholding schemes (Dove 2011, 27) in post-colonial

Indonesia were interpreted as forms of hegemonic power. Especially since the fall of the

New Order regime, authors in Indonesian studies have questioned these conceptions of power to move beyond totalising gaze of the bureaucratic state to attend to specific figures of authority and localised forms of power in contemporary Indonesia. The recognition of specific subjectivities that define normative behaviours and attitudes alludes to modalities of power different from the hegemonic centralised model and more in tune with what appears to be Foucault’s conception of power in The history of sexuality (Barker and van Klinken 2009). As Olssen (2004, 458) states, for Foucault power is constantly mobilised by peoples, groups or institutions, in this regard, relations of power are played, and therefore games of power must be studied in terms of tactics and strategies diffused across a wide range of geographies. The geographies of oil palm

12 agribusiness produce a set of livelihood conditions and institutions that reframe the ways in which power is deployed and acts on conduct.

Shortly after the publication of Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault broadened his theorization on the modalities of modern power in the lectures he delivered at the

Collège de France (1977-1978), later published under the title of Sécurité, territoire et

population . In this account, his perspective moved away from effects of power on the body to look into the art of government, work in which his attention shifted away from specific institutions such as the prison and the army, to undertake a close analysis of the emergence of modern power through political philosophy and economy. This new field of inquiry allowed Foucault to further explore the origins and effects of the epistemic shift brought about by the emergence of modern power. To understand the implication of large-scale agribusiness in Indonesia, it appears important to respect Foucault’s intellectual trajectory and to attend to modalities of power that produce the oil palm agribusiness sector by moving between the institution of plantation agribusiness itself and the broader system of government in which this institution is located.

It is in the lectures at the Collège de France that the art of government becomes an important analytical focus for Foucault. Those writings were largely associated to the lecture on governmentality, where he locates a shift from centralised power captured by the figure of the sovereign that precedes and is integrated in the modalities of power that form the modern art of government. In the writings on government, Foucault develops a framework that prevents locating the production of conditions of visibility or discipline solely in the state. Although he recognises the role of state institutions in the constitution of objects of knowledge such as population in France, he constantly reframes the problem

13 of power in a fluid and dynamic framework of interpretation which avoids ontological dualisms. What he refers to as the governmentalization of the state is that which allows the constant redefinition of the competence of the state and its field of intervention amidst a larger assemblage of possibilities and constraints that influence and shape the disposition of men and things.

The nexus of power-knowledge Foucault attends to does not necessarily originate from the state but derives from a large set of subjects that influence the ways in which population, territories and wealth are known and made into an object of intervention

(Foucault 2004, 111). Governmentality involves the development of extensive forms of knowledge which inquire always further into human societies and their physical or natural conditions of reproduction, or what emerges as the economy (Foucault 1991, 92).

Governmentality is formed by institutions, procedures and reflections, calculations and tactics that allow exerting a form of power that targets populations in their relations with things conceived as resources, means of subsistence (Foucault 1991, 102). Foucault’s concept of governmentality provides a critical stance to interpret the practices and discourses that produce a vision of agribusiness as a viable method to realise socioeconomic and technological aims and that lead to a specific disposition of humans and non-humans in space. A given disposition of humans and non-humans does not exist in pure idealised form, but emerges through tactics and strategies of both workers and plantation officials (Mitchell 1990) who pursue different aims that include securing conditions of life for some and capital accumulation for others.

The concept of governmentality allows thinking of oil palm agribusiness as a

technology of government, a device that acts on conduct in subtle and effective ways. Oil

14 palm is a cash crop that offers virtually endless expansion possibilities to investors and state planners given that palm oil is an extremely versatile commodity suited to a large array of food and non-food uses. By radically transforming the very conditions of life of large populations, oil palm agribusiness acts at the level of desires and also on the ways in which possibilities are envisioned and power is accessible. Nicolas Rose provides a compelling definition of technologies of government, which he exemplifies by information technologies, but which also applies to large-scale agribusiness:

Technologies of government are those technologies imbued with aspirations for the shaping of conduct in the hope of producing certain desired effects and averting certain undesired events. I term these ‘human technologies’ in that, within these assemblages, it is human capacities that are to be understood and acted upon by technical means. A technology of government, then, is an assemblage of forms of practical knowledge, with modes of perception, practices of calculation, vocabularies, types of authority, forms of judgement, architectural forms, human capacities, non-human objects and devices […] traversed and transacted by aspirations to achieve certain outcomes in terms of the conduct of the governed (which also requires certain forms of conduct on the part of those who would govern). These assemblages are heterogeneous, made up of a diversity of objects and relations linked up through connections and relays of different types. They have no essence. And they are never simply a realization of a programme, strategy or intervention: whilst the will to govern traverses them, they are not simply realizations of any simple will. (Rose, 1999, 52)

Oil palm agribusiness as a technology of government or a disciplinary institution appears more clearly through the evocation of a space thoroughly covered by oil palm monoculture where economic opportunities and ways of life are reshaped by this industry, although in ways that could not have been envisioned or imagined by any single planning authority or company. In fact, strategies and tactics of subjects emerge in the matrices produced through large-scale agribusiness and the ways in which life is governed through the process.

15

Labour, life and power

In the case of large-scale oil palm agribusiness, the disciplinary practices and forms of visibility that Foucault brings attention to are structured around labour.

However, labour does not constitute a central analytical category in Foucault’s writings which instead focus on the more holist notion of the body or life itself. I contend that the question of labour remains central in a geographical account on ways in which oil palm agribusiness is envisioned and experienced. The field of meaning in which games of power unfold in an agrarian economy necessarily brings back the labouring subject in focus. In this regard, Foucault’s epistemology falls short of providing the tools necessary to attend to the everyday life on a plantation which necessarily includes production and reproduction, concepts associated to Marxian literature. Panopticism, although it does not refer to a totalising system in practice, appears in some regards overly flattening as an analytical tool for grappling with the complex social, family relations through which oil palm agribusiness articulates with workers’ lives in the assemblage that emerges through capitalist agribusiness. Instead of being antithetical, Foucault and Marxian literatures create an important theoretical tension which I exploit to constitute an analytical toolkit.

As Barker and van Klinken (2009, 41) emphasise “before Foucault, Marx and Weber had written about the impersonal forces of capital and the state that were creating new human subjectivities”. This analytical toolkit provides both a conception of power or impersonal forces that reshape human life and a critical attention to the everyday reproduction of labour in a system of capital accumulation and the forms of mobility it entails.

Without focusing on labour as a central analytical category, Foucault shows the convergence between capitalism, a system structured around the extraction of surplus

16 labour, and disciplinary powers over the body and human life. Foucault emphasised two related forms of power over life that have contributed to the emergence of capitalism, but which encompass modes of production and spatial organisation. He highlights that relations of power represent a level of reality relatively independent from relations of production (Foucault 2001b, 629). The first form of power emerged in Europe in the early 17 th century is the discipline exerted over the human body as a machine, aimed at the extortion of its forces, the extraction of time and at the increase of its aptitudes; the second emerged in the mid 18 th century is centered around the human body as a species,

the intervention over the biological mechanisms and the natural conditions that regulate

the population (Foucault 1976, 182-183). In his account on biopower, Foucault

recognises the constitution of systems of control which are economical and further points

to the link between biopower and the development of capitalism, which offers insights

into human life as labour:

Biopower has been, without a doubt, an indispensable element for the development of capitalism; capitalism could only be secured at the cost of the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes [...]; the adjustment of accumulation of men to the accumulation of capital, the articulation of the growth of human groups to the expansion of productive forces and the differential distribution of profits, for a large part, were rendered possible by the exercise of biopower under its modalities and multiple processes. The investment of the living body, its valorisation and the distributive management of its forces became at this time indispensable (Foucault 1976, 185 cited by Kempeneers 2006, 79).

Despite the recognition of the parallel transformation of disciplinary and production systems, Foucault had an ambivalent relationship with Marxism. He shared theoretical aims with authors associated to Western Marxism, especially those of the

Frankfurt School such as Lukács, insofar as he provided an account of history driven by a critical analysis of social structure. However, Foucault’s project diverges from Marxism

17 most notably by the rejection of Hegelian conceptions of history and teleology that revolve around the role of economic development and the proletariat or other subaltern groups (Olssen 2004). Foucault located Marx within the discursive formation of 19 th century classical economics as one interpretation of history and politics among others. He stated that “Marxist economics – through its basic concepts and the general rules of its discourse – belongs to a type of discursive formation that was defined around the time of

Ricardo” (Foucault 2001a, 269 cited by Olssen 2004, 454). In Discipline and Punish

(1975, 192) Foucault quotes Marx on the forms of disciplines through which workers are disposed in factory space and how time is planned to maximise the productivity of the whole machinery of production. Once more it replaces specific institutions such as the factory or the plantation within the economy of control and surveillance that emerges in

18 th century Europe and provides insights into the techniques through which oil palm

agribusiness exerts power by reshaping space. The project of Foucault provides an

analytical framework sensitive to power in specific institutions and social structures

without presuppositions about the central role in history for labour performed by

subaltern groups as Marxist praxis does.

In contrast with Marxism, Foucault (1994) started questioning the importance of

modern humanism in historical change. He proposes a starkly different point of departure

in this regard by providing an understanding of power that rejects the Marxian dialectical

between consciousness and material condition as presented by Loftus (2012). In this way

Foucault shifted his attention away from the material conditions that render possible the

emergence of revolutionary subjects to propose a holist theory of power that discards

modernist dualisms between idea and practice of the labouring human being to bring the

18 body at the center of theoretical discussions. Writings on the production of the labouring body bring Foucault and Marx in a conversation over the mechanisms by which discipline is exerted through capital accumulation. For Harvey (1998, 101), who seeks to engage with Foucault, the body is positioned in relation to capital circulation and

accumulation. Labour is understood as a form of mediation between the human body and

its environment with which metabolic exchange take place. In a capitalist system, labour,

the act which insures the reproduction of life, is exchanged in a relation governed by

imperatives of capital accumulation. In this regard, Melissa Wright (2006, 13) is right in

pointing out that “the labouring body, under capitalist conditions, emerges as an

embodied site of exploitation and accumulation”. She goes further by reminding the

critical relation that takes place between the production of commodities and the continual

reproduction of the body of vulnerable workers in factories. According to Marx (1975,

324 cited by Loftus 2012, 31) labour, human life itself, is objectified in capitalism, as

labour is appropriated as a power independent of the producer. In the study of oil palm

agribusiness, labour and land are objects of accumulation which become the locus of

control and appropriation as the human body and its environment become part of a

specific machinery of production.

The meanings attached to work and livelihoods by workers are central to

understand the complex formation of labour regimes in oil palm agribusiness. The

workers’ tactics and strategies to subvert forms of valuation of labour become crucial to

draw the contours of the possibilities and limitations of oil palm agribusiness. Marxian

critical insights into the formation of labour regimes and appropriation of objectified

labour are fundamental to attend to the empirical nature of plantation work. The

19 framework provided by Foucault does not rule out the importance of processes of capital accumulation, but appears useful in disrupting the posited agency and determinant historical role of capital. The analytical framework that emerges out of the tensions between Foucault and Marx is a framework in which workers take active part in mechanisms of power that govern life, even if it is under conditions where workers’ labour is objectified. Moreover, the tension between Foucault and Marx calls into question discussions around embodied forms of domination in a system of production and a given socio-cultural space. This framework provides tools to analyse the complex spatial processes that produce forms of agencies and subjectivities in a space that is shaped by agribusiness which is both universal and geographically specific.

Visions and practices underlying oil palm agribusiness produce conditions of life, or livelihood as geographically situated practices and knowledge. The plantation, the institution of standardized agricultural production through which large-scale oil palm agribusiness has been spreading in Indonesia, produces a field that governs conduct through technical means. In Capitalism and confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt ,

Ann Stoler (1985) examined the effect of power that plantation economies produce in the region of Deli, North Sumatra, Indonesia. She provided an analytical model to understand how the constitution of a captive pool of plantation labour is attempted by plantation companies but never fully achieved. Plantation companies and the state engage in continual manipulation of space to regulate companies’ access to labour according to shifting economic and political imperatives. Stoler (1985, 35-38) identified the critical transition in colonial history in the 1920s from temporary male contract labour regime to the constitution of permanent labouring populations of workers and their families on

20 production sites. The attention to the strategies of plantation companies backed by the colonial state allows identifying enduring forms of knowledge targeting territories and populations and modes of intervention designed to insure a constant supply of labour to plantation companies. Stoler (1985, 39) clearly stresses the attempt of state actors and plantation companies to adjust the phenomenon of population to the requirements of production by the creation of agrarian colonies within Indonesia. Peasants from densely populated areas of the country would be resettled to sparsely populated plantation areas where they could be easily controlled and coerced to work. At the center of specific visions of this order of production, we find the labouring body of people with capacities or habituation to work and the population of workers:

In the 1920s and 1930s numerous commissions investigating colonization possibilities all came to the same conclusion: however colonies were to be created, the ‘colonists’ must be coolies first and foremost, accustomed to estate work, and subject to stipulations which would assure that they remained economically dependant on, and available to, the estates. A scheme outlined in 1910 stipulated allotting minuscule plots to married workers who would live in estate ‘villages’ under the company supervision for the duration of the worker’s contract.

The colonial state and plantation companies consistently attempted to constitute a

labour reserve through the configuration of the space of production and reproduction in

the plantation economy. The specific organisation of the plantation economy implies that

the labour force is embedded in the geography of production and economically dependant

on plantation activities. This tactic of labour control remains at play contemporarily,

however workers themselves deploy tactics to maximise benefits and livelihood

possibilities. The imperatives of production in plantation agriculture produce specific

categories of workers based on gender, age and physical strength which endure until

nowadays. Stoler (1985, chapter 5) also demonstrates that groups of workers have been

21 able to transform conditions of production, to actively engage and subvert plantation agriculture to increase their benefits especially during moments of political shift.

However, she also shows that the means of coercion and violence deployed by the state have consistently produced specific configurations of labour and conditions that enable capital accumulation for political and military elites of Indonesia. The centrality of capitalism in Stoler’s account and the analytical focus on resistance downplays the agency of workers. I suggest that workers’ resistance to capitalism, can be reinterpreted as livelihood strategies that take place in complex assemblages where possibilities and constraints are continually reshaped by power relations as produced by the material conditions in plantation economies.

The theoretical abstraction of ‘capital’ hardly provides an analytical category to interpret social change, and the problematic transformation of livelihood brought about by large-scale agribusiness. Mitchell (2002, 51 cited in Li 2009, 71) emphasises, that “a term like ‘capitalist development’ covers a series of agencies, logics, chain reactions, and contingent interactions, among which the specific circuits and relations of capital form only one part”. In this regard I address oil palm agribusiness as a manifestation of processes of capital accumulation which take place in relation to a broader set of contingent interactions and assemblages of humans and non-humans 2. Although the imperatives of capital accumulation actively shape the geography of oil palm production, it does so in contingent ways as specific subjects achieve different positions in a field of

2 Timothy Mitchell (2004) in a chapter entitled Can the mosquito speak? , provocatively situated non- human agents such as mosquito-born malaria outbreak within the history of colonisation in Egypt. He was able to demonstrate the root causes of the outbreak in water management and the chain reactions it spurred as part of networks of codetermination produced by assemblages of human and non-human agents. This was a response to debates on the historical role of the subaltern in history. In this fashion, he showed the unpredictable, far-reaching and contingent implications of forms of modern rationality underlying capitalist-driven colonial interventions.

22 power. Tania Li (2011) argues that the imperatives of capital accumulation that govern large-scale agribusiness schemes reproduce patterns of poverty and vulnerability in the

Global South. Her argument highlights clear continuity between colonial and post- colonial techniques of population management to insure constant labour supply to plantations. She argues (p. 291) that “an impoverished population surrounding a plantation is the ideal situation for maximum profit. The last thing a plantation company needs is for the surrounding population to prosper.” This observation points to what is identified as the central contradiction of capitalist agrarian systems, which is the “failure to adequately reproduce its labour force” for land owners to secure access to proletarian or semi-proletarian populations dependant on wage, insufficient as it may be (McMichael

2007, 33). Although I acknowledge that profit-driven large-scale agribusiness may contribute to structural vulnerability and impoverishment of specific populations and social groups, I contend that large-scale agrarian schemes rearticulate social relations in ways which are not predetermined and that force to examine the population of workers and ways in which power circulates within this specific population.

Social relations reshaped by new patterns of access to resources form complex geographies of power where ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ are not predefined by categories of exogenous investors and endogenous populations. An attention to the specificity of the geography of production brings attention to often unforeseeable implications of large- scale schemes and the ways in which it contributes to differentiate populations. Specific geographies of production are sites where tactics articulate around the differential access to land and jobs for different populations and peoples as Ann Stoler (1985) and Tania Li

(2011) have shown. As groups of workers become central to the functioning of plantation

23 operations given their embodied labour capacities, others are seen as disposable by plantation officials. However, the strategy of land accumulation on the part of a plantation company in Indonesia is often mediated by populist state programmes for smallholders. The smallholding schemes expand the populations able to derive power and wealth from their engagement with the new agrarian economy, yet within a system that reproduces specific patters in the distribution of opportunities and limitations.

In many accounts, plantations were analysed as enclaves, largely exogenous to

local economies. For Pierre Gourou (1965, 47), the colonial plantation is primarily

characterized as “something foreign introduced into the geographical environment”. In

the same vein, Courtenay (1980) adopts the center-periphery framework, arguing that the

plantation occupies the periphery of the world order and fuels global imperial systems of

accumulation by dispossession. These statements capture central characteristics of the

colonial plantation economy in the tropics which was set apart from local peasant

economies by colonial authorities. Even in the post-colonial era, ongoing large-scale

enclosure of land and mobilisation of labour for agribusiness maintain an exogenous

character in the countryside of Indonesia. However, notably through smallholders’

involvement in oil palm agribusiness, forms of technical knowledge and managerial

rationality associated with oil palm agribusiness in contemporary Indonesia have been

widely appropriated and transcend the dualism between exogenous and endogenous.

Access to forms of technical and managerial knowledge is embedded in localised

assemblages formed of humans and non-humans. Although dependency and exogeneity

are still experienced in oil palm agribusiness contemporarily, they are not presupposed by

any given geographical scale of interaction or conception of history. I seek to transcend

24 these dualisms to address the unequal access to capital, knowledge, force and political power that often take shape in local geographies and invite the practice of ethnography.

An analysis not constrained by dualisms unfolds in a system of actors organised by relations of power that take place at the level of individuals and populations.

Geographies of oil palm agribusiness

Large-scale agribusiness governs by transforming territories and reshaping

conditions of existence of populations. As oil palm agribusiness spreads, relations of

power articulate around the differentiation of populations according to forms of access to

land and the value of labour. Large-scale oil palm agribusiness constitutes an assemblage

of forms of practical knowledge deployed by subjects to achieve outcomes in terms of

conduct. For instance, plantation officials seek to secure continual access to a disciplined

labour force. To answer the question, how does large-scale agribusiness govern

livelihood possibilities for populations, I seek to draw the contour of this technique of

government which appears analytically as an assemblage of knowledge and practices. I

engage with the tactics of power deployed by oil palm companies and state

administrations in the attempt to control land and labour under technical imperatives of

production specific to the oil palm crop. I seek to locate in space and time through

secondary documents the emergence of these tactics and the practices that have

consolidated in the formation of contemporary large-scale oil palm agribusiness. I then

turn to the practice of ethnography to engage with the forms of engagement of workers

with labour and livelihood conditions produced by specific oil palm companies and

smallholding schemes. The practice of envisioning oil palm agribusiness only makes

25 sense through the concrete everyday practices of workers and smallholders who actively engage with the conditions of production that emerge in this economic system.

To map out the contours of oil palm agribusiness in Indonesia, I conducted fieldwork in different regions of Indonesia during eight months between 2008 and 2011.

Methodologically, I relied on mixed methods to deal with the complex territorial and deterritorialised aspects of this economy. Although oil palm agribusiness is primarily a territorial process of value formation, it is not strictly bound by the territoriality of production itself. Oil palm agribusiness forms a space with fluid boundaries, where capital, ideas, humans and commodities flow 3. As I started my first round of fieldwork,

my aim was to carry out multi-sited ethnography that would allow me to capture the

diffuse and multiple meanings of oil palm agribusiness for different groups of workers.

The multi-sited ethnography 4 provides a broad understanding of the complexity of

experiences and contexts of plantation workers and smallholders. I sought early on to

collect narratives and conduct observations in different geographical sites, but also across

class and institutional levels. This work can be best described as what Abu-Lughod calls

“ethnography of the particular which is simultaneously localized and global” (2000, 97-

98 cited by Wolford 2010, 31). The unpredictability of fieldwork constrained the choice

of the voices that contributed to my understanding of oil palm agribusiness as a field of

knowledge and practices. However, the voices that speak are often blended with my own,

as I recognise the relational process of knowledge production through ethnography. I was

3 As defined by De Certeau (1984, 117 cited by Gustavson and Cytrynbaum 2003), “space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it”. 4 The notion of multi-sited ethnography itself derives from methodological discussions on conversations about the subjectivity and the role of the ethnographer in the practice of ethnography. It seeks to create awareness about relations of complicity and shared imagination between the ethnographer and informant that produce a space that reaches beyond the confines of the specific site where ethnographic work is conducted (Gustavson and Cytrynbaum 2003, 254).

26 frequently struck by the diversity and contingency of experiences of work on oil palm plantations, which I attempt to capture by careful conceptual engagement with stories and events. The narrative I have crafted emerged through recognisable patterns and relationships with macro-level events and theoretical insights. I can only claim to have achieved a partial representation of the great diversity of actors underlying oil palm agribusiness in Indonesia.

This research brought me to different parts of Indonesia in search of informants and documents. I worked with graduate students from the University of Gajah Mada and from the Pajajaran University who were also involved in a research project on oil palm agribusiness. I visited many training and research institutions on oil palm agribusiness to gather documents and conduct participant observations in Yogyakarta, Jakarta, Pontianak and Bogor. In those urban locations, I was mainly interested in the production of knowledge on oil palm agribusiness. I paid particular attention to the ways in which technical and managerial knowledge is disseminated through presentations, training manuals and consultant meetings. Moreover, I examined the ways in which the oil palm economy is represented in circles of plantation officials and investors. By engaging with institutional ethnography and by analysing the artefacts of these institutions, I attempted to gain a better understanding of the assemblage which is oil palm agribusiness in

Indonesia.

27

Figure 1 . Fieldwork sites locations in Indonesia. 1. Nias; 2. West and Central Java; 3. West Kalimantan; 5. Lombok. Source: Adapted from the Digital Chart of the World

With the support of Indonesian graduate students, I carried out over 80 interviews

(appendix 3) with plantation workers, managers and recruiters in three different regions

of Indonesia. I conducted some interviews with plantation workers in villages

geographically distant from the plantation belts and other interviews directly on oil palm

plantations. To attend to forms of mobility, interviews were conducted for nearly six

weeks with circular migrants to the oil palm plantations in their villages of origin in

Lombok and Nias (Figure 1). Lombok and Nias are resource-strapped islands of

Indonesia where many communities have strong links with the oil palm plantations

located in Borneo and Sumatra. Other interviews and participant observation took place

directly on oil palm plantations of West Kalimantan on the island of Borneo (chapter 4). I

was able to make different trips to this province and to spend one continuous month on

oil palm plantations in the province of West Kalimantan with a research team led by

Professors Tania Li from the University of Toronto and Pujo Semedi from the

Universitas Gajah Mada. In all sites I used a similar template for questions and focused

28 on life stories in relation to work in oil palm agribusiness while adapting questions to local circumstances and recent events. These three sites have provided access to a broad range of narratives and experiences of work in oil palm agribusiness.

Throughout my different research fieldworks, I have been provided with logistical support and information by a large number of social and environmental NGOs concerned with different aspects of the oil palm boom in Indonesia. In this regard I have found great support from the civil society organizations that have mushroomed since the Indonesian

Reformasi in 1998. The civil society movement has allowed the mobilization of politically driven groups and manifestations of dissent with mainstream policies. Many civil society organizations in Indonesia are involved in debates on human and labour rights in relation to oil palm agribusiness. Members of organizations such as Sawit Watch in Bogor, WALHI, Institute Dayakologi in Pontianak and Akatiga in Bandung have become key informants and in some cases friends in the research process. I benefitted from the generosity and openness of members of these organisations that provided crucial contacts in order to conduct fieldwork in different parts of the country. Notwithstanding my sympathy for the causes defended by members of these organizations and the political nature inherent to a scholarly praxis such as the one I seek to provide, I have maintained a clear focus on my own research objectives which emerged from a socially embedded research process.

I conducted fieldwork in rural communities with Indonesian graduate students.

Some students, who were engaged in academic work on oil palm, I paired with, while others were recruited and remunerated as research assistants. In each location, the graduate student and I took notes during the open-ended interviews with plantation

29 workers, which often took the form of a conversation. Some of the interviews were recorded and transcribed. In most sites where we talked to a large number of plantation workers, we used a snowball method. We would first follow a key informant, usually recommended by someone affiliated with an NGO, in the streets of the village in search of more informants. Throughout days and weeks, we would progressively expand our network of informants until we became known and gained easier access to people. I also collected information in between interviews, as I interacted freely and engaged in participant observation with informants in these communities. I would explain the purpose of my visit in simple words, mention that I was a researcher from a Canadian

University and guarantee anonymity to all informants. Despite the uncomfortable position of constantly asking people for information, my requests were generally met with great openness and generosity. I hoped that my genuine interest in the lives of the informants provided some compensation for their time.

An account on methods calls into question notions of reflexivity and positionality as I ventured into parts of Indonesia where my presence did not go unnoticed. As a white person new to villages in Indonesia, I always attracted attention and curiosity at least in the first days or weeks in a community 5. Therefore, the choice of working with

Indonesian graduate students was reflexive, as I sought to formalize the fact that I was

conducting work, as opposed to just visiting. Being part of a research team had the

benefit of creating an event where my colleague(s) and I were mobilized to learn, which formed a space conducive to sharing stories on oil palm. Many interviews and discussions took place in public spaces, on peoples’ doorsteps or outdoor shelters and

5 The experience of whiteness for expatriates that Fechter (2005) describes largely applies to white researchers in Indonesia who experience large social attention due to embodied difference although in a context of privileged mobility and access to resources and experiences.

30 often attracted a large number of neighbours of all ages. This would provide an occasion to be known and to plan future interviews. Being a white person from Canada in

Indonesia conferred on me a special status. I am aware that in the eyes of many

Indonesians who live in rural areas, I appeared as a manifestation of privilege and global mobility. Being a relatively young male did in some way facilitate interviews with other young males, but did not prevent me from interviewing females and males of all ages.

This research provides situated knowledge based on equally situated narratives related to oil palm agribusiness in Indonesia.

Outline of the thesis

This account articulates around two intricately related but yet distinct research objectives. The first objective I pursue is to outline what emerges historically as the oil palm plantation model as a specific institution which constitutes a set of practices and representations deployed as a technique of government. And by the identification of a set of key characteristics I do not mean to formally identify a plantation model that would be unilaterally imposed on a plane field. Rather I draw the contours of the forms of power relations at play and the objectives pursued among those who envision plantation agriculture in Indonesia and beyond in the moment of planning. I emphasise that oil palm agribusiness does not only serve the aims of state social control or corporate capital accumulation but rather a number of often competing and shifting aims taken on by actors beyond the state and conglomerates. The second objective is to demonstrate the ways in which the model highlighted in the first section produces material conditions for populations which are constantly reshaped by everyday power relations that articulate

31 around the value of labour and land. The grounded lived geographies of labour show the mechanisms at work in the differentiation of the population through oil palm agribusiness. These two research objectives show that the plans of labour control and discipline designed by states and corporations, although they impose limitations to livelihood possibilities of workers, they are negotiated and often defied. Large-scale oil palm agribusiness leads to specific material realities and forms a matrix of power that produces distinct labour subjectivities.

In the first part of the thesis (chapters 2 and 3) I draw the contours of the oil palm plantation or large-scale agribusiness model as a field of knowledge and practices. I emphasise that the most reductive visions of plantation agriculture have never played out as simply as their proponents intended, but have nevertheless provided a set of techniques, planning practices that inform the discourses and decisions of state and corporate officials who seek to expand oil palm agribusiness. After showing the contours of the practices that constitute oil palm agribusiness as a model with specific modalities of intervention and representation, I examine the agrarian history of Indonesia and situate the role of state and corporate actors in the emergence of oil palm agribusiness. I investigate how large-scale oil palm agribusiness schemes were deployed in Indonesia as a technique of government through different mutations of the state, and successive transformations of the aims of actors, and of methods used to achieve these aims. This shows the ways in which oil palm agribusiness was successively deployed as an instrument of government constantly tributary of specific political calculations and forms of knowledge on population and territory.

32

The second part (chapters 4 and 5) is based on empirical observations and focuses

on the subjective experience and cultural texture of modes of discipline and control

related to this economic system. These two chapters emphasize the ways in which

subjects of oil palm agribusiness make sense of the power relations in which their life

unfolds. The production of meaning and social relations through agro-industrial work

defines the field of labour subjectivities. Social conceptions of surplus labour and scarce

job opportunities lead to practices of labour exploitation in large-scale agribusiness. In

Indonesia, oil palm agribusiness mobilizes important populations of workers, many of

which are recruited from distant areas. Unspecialized workers that live below the poverty

line and experience high levels of socioeconomic vulnerability deploy livelihood

strategies based on heightened mobility in Indonesia 6. In this regard, value depends on

the conceptions of labour availability and the social value of work in large-scale

plantations. The labour market in large-scale agribusiness is mediated by conceptions of

labour value and contingent forms of control and discipline.

In more details, the second chapter adopts a historical perspective to look at the

formation of oil palm plantation agribusiness. It does so by identifying the technologies

of power that are deployed through plantation agriculture and how plantation agriculture

is used as technical and social experiments on territories, crops and populations. This

leads to an investigation of the context in which oil palm from a crop embedded in agro-

ecological systems in West Africa was turned into a commodity accessible to European

consumers and integrated with transnational networks of investments and technical

knowledge production. From the European colonies of the Congo to Malaysia, the

6 As Dhanani et al. (2009, p.123) express the need for analytical caution as economic growth is generated in Indonesia –notably through agribusiness– leads to rising inequality that “can impair the capacity of growth to reduce poverty”.

33 chapter offers a narrative of the progressive development of oil palm agribusiness as a locus of technical power and capitalist investment involving specific mechanisms of power and discipline. Then the legacy of colonial oil palm plantation formation is analysed in the contemporary context of Indonesia. This section highlights the space formed by norms and standardized technological and labour procedures that constrain forms of value formation and ultimately limits the potential of large-scale oil palm agribusiness for livelihood improvement.

The third chapter addresses policies and the political rationalities underlying the contemporary vision of development that relies on oil palm agribusiness expansion in

Indonesia. It shows how oil palm agribusiness is embedded in Indonesian agrarian politics. Looking back to the early 1960s, it traces the continuity of the state’s reliance on agribusiness to respond to issues ranging from state financial limitations to popular desire for socioeconomic improvement. It looks at shifting economic principles underlying agrarian development programmes based on oil palm agribusiness in Indonesia and the political context in which it happened. This chapter focuses on the progressive and partial integration of oil palm agribusiness into state development policies. This is achieved by paying attention to state discourses and representations of oil palm agribusiness as a device for national development. It addresses representations that claim oil palm is a panacea for a number of problems of government such as security, job provision and infrastructure provision. It also examines how these discourses legitimize rapid expansion of oil palm agribusiness in the country despite widespread problems inherent to that process of radical economic change.

34

The fourth chapter investigates the labour regime on two plantations of West

Kalimantan through the formation of a socioeconomic field that reshaped markets for

land and labour. It analyses processes of social differentiation through social and

technical experiments carried out by the Indonesian state and an oil palm corporation in

the region. The accumulation of oil palm plots by smallholders and exclusion from

networks of accumulation are analysed in the light of historical and geographical factors.

I investigate questions of livelihood possibilities in plantation belts by looking at the

operations of power through which labour is valued according to conceptions of gender

and status. Subjective experiences of work of landless people faced with volatile labour

regimes on the oil palm estate are also an object of investigation. I analyse strategies

utilized by workers faced with limited livelihood alternatives to plantation work in a

given territory. I also investigate changes in the symbolic value of education along with

patterns of consumption as markets for land and labour are consolidated through oil palm

agribusiness. Labour practices in oil palm agribusiness articulate with socio-cultural and

economic systems of Indonesia. The oil palm plantation economy reinforces and is

tributary of gender conceptions and modes of family organization that largely rest on

patriarchal systems 7. Moreover, the oil palm plantation economy reinforces and is tributary of corporate modes of value formation and agrarian institutions rooted in historical practices.

The fifth chapter addresses the question of labour mobility in the oil palm agribusiness economy of Indonesia and specifically focuses on the subjective experiences of migrant workers from the islands of Lombok and Nias. I first discuss current

7 See Boellstorff (2004) for an account on the discursive formations of gender norms in Indonesia and reinformcement of patriarchal systems in the New Order regime.

35 plantation labour migration practices within a broader history of labour mobility in

Indonesia and Southeast Asia. By paying attention to forms of coercion and immobilization enforced upon workers through debt bondage and how these practices have been reproduced in the present day. I focus on the recent events of the plantation sector in Indonesia, which has increased the mobility of labour in a context of labour regime volatility and loose enforcement of labour regulations. I then turn to the narratives of workers themselves and analyse through specific notions the ways in which plantation work is experienced. The cultural capital of risk and adventure along with requirements of marriage and social reproduction explain the integration of large populations of

Lombok in the oil palm industry. Although these notions are also important in Nias, they play out in a different way as a large population in Nias is integrated in the plantation economy of Northern Sumatra and provides well-established kin networks to those in

Nias who wish to access this economy.

36

Chapter 2:

A crop for the future: Planning for oil palm agribusiness

“The bio-politics of food provisioning is…a lens to think about how the management of food maps onto strategies for the management of life, a synergy that becomes more pronounced as agrarian structures are transformed to suit commercial interests rather than human needs.” – Nally 2010, 38.

Introduction

I met Pak Surijo, the director of a prominent oil palm agribusiness training school

for plantation managers in Medan during fieldwork activities. The discussion I had with

him was exemplary of the ways in which power is envisioned through forms of technical

knowledge in oil palm plantation agribusiness. I met Pak Sujiro in the hostel of a state

plantation company in West Kalimantan after he participated in a consultation workshop

that was held by the plantation officials on management practices. Pak Surijo, who

trained in Australia in industrial engineering, said he was easily able to apply his

engineering knowledge to plantation operations, as both are about industrial management.

During our conversation, he especially criticised the high degree of laziness and

inefficiency in the management structure on the plantations in Indonesia, compared to

most plantations he visited in Malaysia. He expressed having learned a great deal from

his trips to Malaysian plantations, where he saw clean, efficient, ordered and highly

productive estates. His vision ( visi ) for the future of oil palm agribusiness in Indonesia, as

he described it, depends on increased time discipline, flexibility and rationality in

practices from planting, harvesting to fruit transportation to the mill.

37

Pak Surijo had no doubt that efficiency on an oil palm plantation lies solely in managerial and technical practices which can be engineered and deployed on the ground according to a vision. As he narrated, plantations officials in Indonesia often explain relatively low productivity by the lack of rain and poor soil quality, but he insisted that these are simply no excuses for poor management: “Everything is about the people”. Pak

Surijo dismissed the role of ecological conditions to explain low productivity on oil palm plantations. He proudly stated that his oil palm agribusiness school instils military discipline, leadership, and provides practical training to future oil palm plantation managers. But he also stressed the importance of the vision that must underlie all aspects of plantation management which he inculcates in his school. A vision that insures coherent planning and that ultimately refers to heightened forms of control of plant and labour productivity. In this narrative, profit maximization in oil palm agribusiness depends strictly on the people, their discipline and experience.

Attempts to engineer specific conditions of production for large-scale oil palm cultivation have started more than a century ago in European colonies of Africa, where the crop originates from. Since then, after further technological innovations, the crop has been conceived by states, corporations and plantation officials like Pak Surijo in different parts of the world as an important instrument to achieve commercial and political aims.

The economic possibilities granted by the crop lead a large number of investors and state planners to envision the future of vast territories and populations through this economic system. The conception of oil palm agribusiness as a technique of government of life, or biopower fosters critical attention to the range of objectives pursued through the spread of this economic activity and most importantly by whom and for whom these objectives

38 are pursued. Before examining the role of oil palm agribusiness in the social and political context of Indonesia in chapter 3, I address the forms of power that arise in the moment of planning for oil palm plantation agribusiness generally. This brings into light ways in which the institution of plantation agriculture is conceived by those in position of envisioning different elements of a production system as exemplified by Pak Surijo.

The vision of oil palm agribusiness at the stage of planning does not necessarily translate on the ground as envisioned. However, the moment of planning constitutes an operation which distributes power, where those in positions of power perform valuation of practices and types of labour. From a planning perspective, oil palm agribusiness appears historically as a coherent set of practices, knowledge and forms of representation.

In this chapter I attend to the moment of envisioning or planning, where oil palm agribusiness takes a largely abstract form for a range of experts such as investors and colonial and post-colonial state planners as well as plantation officials. I this way I seek to draw the contours of the field of knowledge and expertise in which oil palm agribusiness takes form in Indonesia and reshapes livelihood conditions. Oil palm agribusiness emerged historically through different political contexts in which it was privileged and enabled by state and corporate powers. In this regard, I look at the moments where the knowledge and practices identified as oil palm agribusiness have emerged, in relation to the broader history of colonialism in the tropics and the development of plantation agriculture. This allows locating oil palm agribusiness as a mode of visioning within a history of colonial conquest and imperial corporate networks.

The practices and representations that emerge at the stage of planning large-scale oil palm agribusiness articulate around specific strategies for the control and

39 administration of land and labour. First, I identify theoretical principles underlying the emergence of plantation agriculture as a form of visioning. I scrutinize the logic and operations that were designed to develop knowledge and power over the conditions in which cash crops are produced in the history of colonialism. Then, I look at the transformation of oil palm from a crop integrated to local ecological systems to a plantation crop reliant on capital-intensive technical innovations. I pay attention at plantation agriculture as an envisioned project and the ways in which it intersects with different institutional contexts and political-economic projects. In chronological order, I locate the emergence of the oil palm plantation in the Congo and its subsequent spread to

Southeast Asia, in Malaysia and Indonesia. Third, I look at different forms of visioning in the contemporary deployment of oil palm agribusiness as a field of practice and knowledge. I identify forms of visibility and control sought in the stage of planning for labour and land in oil palm production in Indonesia. This is followed by an examination of projects that seek to reshape practices and representations of oil palm agribusiness through discourses and regulation frameworks based on principles sustainability.

Envisioning plantation agriculture

The plantation emerged in specific territories of European colonies in the tropics as an institution characterised by a large-scale unit of standardized agriculture 8 based on

the bureaucratic management of labour. Although oil palm plantations were developed in

the late phase of formal colonialism in Central Africa, they were tributary of the previous

modes of colonial intervention on territories and populations in the development of

8 This definition is derived from the elements of definition provided by Thompson (1959), Goldthorpe (1987) and Courtenay (1980) as each provide a historically informed descriptions and typologies of plantation agriculture through that also takes into account the geographical diversity of practices.

40 plantation agriculture. The plantation economy takes place within broader strategies of control of populations that were deployed through colonial interventions. The plantation emerged within a continuum of colonial interventions on agrarian systems 9 which involve

different levels of socio-environmental transformations. The plantation represents the

most radical intervention as it involves the creation of a new space of production. On the

other end of the spectrum, the distribution of specific cash crop seeds, such as rubber, by

colonial administrations to entice local populations to grow a crop valuable to a colonial

administration was an intervention that worked through pre-existing livelihoods (Dove

2011, 73-100). The range of geographical and historical contexts in which plantations

were produced is too complex to be addressed here with due consideration for the

specificities of region, crops cultivated and labour systems in place. However, based on a

number of important writings on plantation agriculture, and in light of Foucault’s insight

on power, I wish to stress theoretical principals that traverse plantation agriculture

through time as it was envisioned by planters, investors, colonial and post-colonial

administrations. These theoretical principals highlight the general modalities of power

deployed through oil palm plantation agriculture historically and their implications for

large-scale oil palm agribusiness.

First, the plantation, as an institution that was envisioned under European

colonialism, proceeds through models that radically simplify reality. In this regard,

plantation agriculture appears as a central moment of colonialism that takes place within

9 In colonial Java in the 19 th century, where a dense peasant population existed, the Dutch colonial authorities engineered a “monopoly” system of production in situ for sugar cane cultivation. This system was conceived to force or entice peasants to allocate a certain portion of their land and labour to export commodities such as sugar cane in order for them to honour colonial land taxes and access the monetized economy. Peasants in Java were therefore confined to their villages through a system of penalties and further controlled through agrarian processes of capitalist surplus extraction (Li 2007, 34-40).

41 broader strategies of control. Michel Foucault (2004) described the modernist principles applied in economic planning from the 18 th century onward which, according to David

Nally (2010), captures the modalities of intervention that characterise plantation agriculture at least from the 18 th century onward. For Foucault, the attempt of different

powers to achieve order, the “careful elimination of everything that is now deemed

aberrant or undesirable”, is a central principle in the government of populations and

territories (Foucault 2004, 45-46). In the same way, the models of economy that emerged

during that period were described as an attempt to “organise a multiplicity, to give

oneself an instrument to glance through it and master it; …about imposing an order upon

a multiplicity” (Foucault 1975, 174). According to this theoretical perspective, I argue

that the plantation is conceived by economic and scientific authorities as an intervention

upon a multiplicity of social and ecological systems to achieve a specific conception of

order through the regulation and dispositions of humans and non-humans. In this regard,

this production system requires forms of knowledge that isolate and classify elements of

a multiplicity. Plantation agriculture is planned through the epistemological

simplification of environments encountered and appropriated by colonial powers 10 .

Historically, large concessions in conquered territories provided European planters with

the capacity to envision and attempt to implement new principles of spatial organisation

to achieve optimal production and profit maximisation.

10 Driver and Martins (2005: 14) examine representations of environment in the phase of colonial encounter in the Caribbean and South America and state that “from Columbus onward, the contrast between the productivity of tropical nature and the supposed absence of enterprise among its original inhabitants” served colonial ends of domination and radical transformation through plantation agriculture. In the same vein, Cleary (2005) examines colonial discourses and modes of intervention through valuation and devaluation of practices of categories of agrarian populations of French Indonchina, especially in the forestry sector.

42

Second, the plantation is conceived by planters as a field of experimentation for

continual development and refinement of technical and managerial knowledge and

practices. Planters and colonial states sought to transform complex spaces into a field for

technical and managerial experiments in search of optimal forms of production. In

association with other colonial institutions, planters engaged in social and agro-economic

experimentations entrenched in specific requirements of profitability 11 . In this regard,

David Nally (2010, 42) argues that colonial plantations were historically constituted as field-trials, extra-territorial laboratories of Europe “for new forms of agricultural production and labour control […]”. The radical transformation of space for plantation or estate agriculture increased the power of planters over the populations of waged of forced workers. As Dove (2011, 25) puts it, “by creating a completely new and alien environment, the colonial estate had… a much more privileged position for future experimentation and construction of new regimes of knowledge.” The new regimes of knowledge were based on modernist agrarian principles that subjected labour and life to imperatives of profitability. The experiments and new regimes of knowledge target not only the techniques that increase the crop yields and labour productivity, but the social and biological parameters through which labour reproduces itself. In this regard, Ann

Stoler (1985, 30-35) emphasises estates’ strict regulation of ratios of male and female workers in oil palm and rubber plantations of North Sumatra in early 20 th century to prevent family formation on estates and the costs it involves.

The plantation involved the visioning of labour regimes by plantation officials based on hierarchical and bureaucratic organisations according to industrial modes of

11 The case of tea plantations in Ceylon during British colonialism studied by Duncan (2007) demonstrates the contingency and experimental nature of practices of investors and planters seeking to achieve profitability in a very volatile economy as it emerged in the 19 th century.

43 labour discipline. Sugar cane, as the main plantation crop of the Caribbean was studied extensively by Sidney Mintz, it provides an important comparative basis to examine the general principals of oil palm plantation. It allows examining the way in which industrial modes of labour discipline are entwined with ecological specificities of crops. Because sugar cane, like oil palm fruits, desiccates quickly, it requires that the cutting, milling and boiling occur within 48 hours of harvesting (Moore 2000, 415). Historically, the processing requirements of sugar cane in plantations and the fact that it was geared toward exports implied time-sensitive labour process. Highly rationalized forms of management pervade all phases of sugar plantation activities in the Caribbean, as is the case with oil palm. The sugar plantation economy as it developed on a large scale in the

Caribbean during the 17 th century prefigured forms of capitalist discipline and labour

management used in factories of Europe (Mintz 1994). “The specialization by skill and

jobs, and the division of labour by age, gender, and condition into crews, shifts and

gangs, together with the stress upon punctuality and discipline, are features associated

more with industry than with agriculture […]” (Mintz 1985, 47 cited by Moore 2000,

415). In this account, Mintz identifies the emergence of the plantation economy as an

early form of industrial process that introduced tighter forms of time-sensitive labour

control. Sugar, just like oil palm later in history, became entwined with industrial labour

processes based in part on its specific maintenance and processing requirement as a crop.

Oil palm as a plantation crop

To address the oil palm plantation model envisioned contemporarily in Indonesia, it is necessary to examine the specific historical and geographical conditions in which it

44 emerged. Through places and times, I locate forms of simplification and experimentation which contributed to the constitution of oil palm plantation agribusiness as an assemblage of knowledge and practices. Before oil palm became a plantation crop in the first half of the 20 th century, it was incorporated to African and European trade networks. Oil palm is

native to West Africa, where it has been integrated into agro-ecological systems of

subsistence and traded at different scales since 3000 BC. By the mid 19 th century, small oil palm growers in West Africa supplied a part of the demand for vegetable oil necessary to soap, candle and steam engine lubricant created by the British Industrial Revolution

(Berger and Martin 2000). West African brokers in palm oil trade were able to impose their own commercial modalities to British traders during most of the 19 th century until

further regulation of the trade through treaties and colonialism (Lynn 1997, 164). At this

stage, palm oil produced in West African peasant economies for the European markets

extended the reach of regional trade systems. Oil palm could be accessed 12 through

traditional trade networks without the formation of plantation economies. The European

conquest of Africa pushed aside West African and especially Nigerian palm oil brokers.

The growing demand for oils and fats in industrial societies and large companies’ search

for capital outlets at the turn of the 20 th century (Polanyi 1944, 221), triggered important

investments in plantation agriculture in European colonies. If British colonial authorities

could access large amounts of palm oil from peasant systems in Nigeria, colonial

governments in Central Africa were actively seeking to engineer oil palm production

systems so as to intensify capital formation in conquered territories.

12 Total palm oil traded by British amounted to 30 000 tons in the 1960s according to Corley and Tinker (2003, 4)

45

The intervention on oil palm as a crop were located into broader strategies undertaken by European colonial powers to identify and select crops with high potential for plantation agriculture. Oil palm plantation agriculture as it developed under colonialism at this time was related to concomitant technological advancements in production, transformation and transportation of an ever expanding number of cash crops.

As Brockway (1978) pointed out, the phase of plantation expansion which took place at the turn of the 20 th century was characterised by the mobilization of scientific knowledge and corporate-government investments. Important resources were deployed by colonial administrations to enumerate and classify tropical plants according to principles of scientific botany that often served commercial interests of commodity production. The colonial administration of the Belgian Congo conducted experiments on oil palm varieties at the Yangambi botanical research station in the first decades of the 20 th century (Berger & Martin 2000). Networks of researchers and investors played an important role in the dissemination of oil palm in Southeast Asia. The botanical garden of

Buitenzorg (Bogor) in the Netherlands Indies had received oil palm seeds from West

Africa in 1848 as part of its inventory of tropical plant species. The relations between agricultural engineers and investors from the Belgian Congo and Southeast Asia were personified by Belgian agricultural engineer Adrien Hallet 13 . Hallet who founded the

Socfin Group had worked previously in rubber production in the Congo and pioneered oil palm cultivation in Northern Sumatra and indirectly in the Malay Peninsula. In 1911 he established a plantation in Sumatra from the seeds of the specimens at the Buitenzorg

13 SOCFINAL, the conglomerate entity which evolved from Hallet’s Socfin owns a large number of plantation estate companies in numerous countries of Africa as well as Indonesia, where it remains one of the main players (Socfinal-Intercultures-Socfinasia, Assemblée Générale des Actionnaires, Luxembourg 27 mai 2009).

46 botanical garden. That same year, Adrien Hallet sold oil palm seeds to Frenchman Henri

Fauconnier, who from his rubber estate in British pioneered palm oil production in 1917 when the first mill was built in the state of Selangor, Tennamarain Estate, Batang

Berjuntai. Over the first half of the 20 th century, a wealth of scientific and technical knowledge on oil palm circulated across tropical empires 14 .

The colonial administration of the Belgian Congo facilitated investments in palm oil mills ( huileries ) while it allocated free concessions to investors. A number of large

private companies engaged in speculative investments and land surveys to exploit palm

oil in the Congo at the turn of the 20 th century. The colonial administration granted multiple concessions to William Lever, founder of Uniliver, in 1911. Lever established the company Huileries du Congo Belge (HCB) through which he was provided with a monopoly over wild oil palm fruits. The oil palm supply remained problematic for

Unilever who in the first phase refused to set up costly plantations. HCB instead relied on its monopoly over wild oil palm fruits harvested by local peasants through a system of labour tax recognized by historians for its extreme brutality (Fieldhouse 1978, 505). The labour tax led peasants to planting more oil palms on their plots to increase production.

However, this system provided only partial control over the production process. Wild palm oil produced within peasant economies granted variable vegetable oil qualities and yields, and the transportation of fruits to the mill before desiccation remained problematic. In the newly established concessions, resources available and profits were not fully visible and calculable by the investors.

14 Along the Institut Royal Colonial Belge and the Belgian Institut National pour l’Étude Agronomique of Yangambi, specialized journals such as the Bulletin agricole du Congo Belge actively disseminated the findings on palm oil production.

47

Edmond Leplae was general director of Agriculture at the Ministry of Colonies in

Belgium; he strongly supported research initiatives for palm oil production as part of a general strategy of agricultural intensification through plantation development (Leplae

1938). According to Hatungimana (2005), Leplae was motivated by the belief that

Africans were unable to engage in profitable intensive agriculture on their own. In parallel with Yangambi researchers, the innovations made by HCB in planting materials eventually led to the isolation of high yield standardized palm oil varieties in the 1920s.

The seeds selected in controlled conditions were more suitable for large estates, which proved important for the expansion of oil palm as a plantation crop in the Congo.

Furthermore, key innovations in the industrial processing of oil palm fresh fruit bunches were made by HCB. The extraction was carried out through centrifuge and press machinery in large mills (Corley and Tinker 2003, 7). These innovations allowed oil palm processing to be brought within an industrial production system. Despite the large investments required to set up oil palm plantations, the estate structure allowed better calculability through direct managerial control over the entire production process. The plantation model for palm oil production sought to minimize the social and cultural limitations to capital accumulation and circulation.

Under the impetus of large estate companies’ investments, plantation production surpassed that of peasants in the Congo in the 1930s (Berger & Martin 2000). Although oil palm plantations were located in their original habitat of Central Africa, the plantation model entailed the systematic substitution of previous agro-ecological systems with radically simplified monoculture that sought maximal legibility and control over production. Legibility and control were maximized through plantation agriculture that

48 took place in a contained space with clearly demarcated boundaries; the crops were planted in straight lines / grids which made counting quicker and more efficient; labour focused solely on production rather than also their more complicated subsistence needs.

Consumer demand of industrial societies in the post-war context of the 1950s fuelled the rapid expansion of oil palm plantations in the Belgian Congo which reached 147 000 ha in 1958 15 . The potential for control of production that oil palm plantations provided in the

Congo exceeded the perceived value of oil palm production through existing agro- ecological systems as Baumann (2000, 10) sums up:

“Oil palm was part of subsistence based production systems as food, cash, medicine, construction, soap, and fuel. A genetic breakthrough changed palm oil from a low yielding but integrated crop into a high yielding commercialised crop. Modern oil palm production lends itself to estates because of its positive response to weed and bush control, regular employment of labour force and the need to process soon after harvesting.”

Once oil palm became a plantation crop, securing access to sufficient labour remained a practical problem in the Congo, which showed the limitations of the production model and required further social experiments. Oil palm as a perennial tree crop depends on intensive and continual manual labour investments for maintenance, harvests and transportation tasks. Oil palm plantation companies in the Belgium Congo remained concerned about labour scarcity, as large mining and plantation companies had allegedly emptied out whole regions of the Congo’s men through labour ‘recruitment’.

Indentured and forced labour arrangements were the norm on plantations. Companies tried to tie male workers into extended contract periods of four to seven years, and these systems were officially regulated by the colonial administration through a law passed in

15 At the same time, 98 000 ha were also under smallholders’ cultivation (Hartley 1988: 30), partly as a result of the development of the oil palm plantation industry and partly because pre-colonial importance of palm oil in local diet.

49

1922 (Dresh 1947, p. 80). Estates sought to create pools of captive labour through coercion and incentives. Plantation companies during this period enjoyed a large degree of autonomy regarding labour rights and wages on their concessions over which they had exclusive powers, only shared with the social and ecological dynamics which were never captured in planning. The emergence of oil palm plantation agriculture is entrenched in a history of violent mechanisms to insure labour control and land appropriation. It laid the groundwork for what became a fully fledged agro-industrial plantation model with specific procedures and requirements in the administration of land and labour.

Malaysian oil palm agribusiness

A limited number of estates started growing oil palm in the state of Selangor after

the initial success of Henri Fauconnier who established the first mill in 1917. It is only

after the Second World War that oil palm production expanded significantly in Malaysia.

From the 1960s onward, corporate and government actors based in Malaysia

progressively reached a dominant position in global technical and managerial innovations

in oil palm agribusiness. In 1966, Malaysian palm oil exports had already surpassed the

exports of the Congo and Nigeria, while the production in Indonesia remained marginal

(Martin 2003, 158). Preceding the rapid emergence of the oil palm plantation economy in

Malaysia, the plantation research infrastructures of British Malaya were gradually geared

towards oil palm as part of a strategy to diversify the plantation economy that had been

heavily reliant on rubber production (Tate 1996, 51). At the moment of Malaysian

independence in 1965, oil palm was integrated to institutionalised practices of the

plantation economy developed under British colonialism for rubber production. The

50

British colonial administration had established a land tenure system highly favourable to

European investments in Malaya which defined categories of colonial subjects referred to as natives or Malays. 16 Moreover, networks of labour recruitment were already extensive in the British Empire and provided workers from resource strapped regions of South

India and Southern China and later on from Indonesia, to plantation companies in

Malaysia through contract arrangements (Ramasamy 1994).

In Malaysia, oil palm became the object of an integrated political and economic strategy for agro-industrial expansion planned at the state level 17 . In part to address social

inequalities created by colonial policies, considering the growing demand for vegetable

oils globally, the post-colonial Malaysian government articulated a socioeconomic

development strategy based on oil palm. The plantation model developed through

colonial experiments was redeployed for populist objectives according to new modalities

around smallholding contract farming. In the early 1960s, the Federal Land Development

Authority (FELDA) was empowered by the government to open large agro-industrial oil

palm schemes. Impoverished Malay smallholders would be resettled to newly planted oil

palm schemes in the hinterland and integrated into the production system.

Public investments in oil palm in Malaysia for social purposes also fostered the rapid expansion of private estate companies. Under the impulse provided by FELDA

16 The colonial administrations had circumscribed Malay landholding communities to native reservations while facilitating the investment of plantation and mining companies over the remainder of the land (Ong 1987, pp. 12-22). The colonial policy towards Malay people sought to legally enshrine native land rights while preserving native Malay land rights from speculative investments. The situation varies greatly between Peninsular Malaysia and Sarawak where native customary land rights produce a more complex and ambiguous land tenure system. 17 In 1965, the Vegetable Oils Committee was created and the first International Conference on Oil Palm Cultivation was held (Tate 1996: 582-3). Oil palm further benefited from the efforts of the Malaysian Agricultural Research and Development Institute (MARDI) established in 1969 to promote plantation crop diversification in a context of dependence on rubber. The nascent institutions expanded the core knowledge subsequently mobilized for large-scale palm oil production.

51 between 1965 and 1970, Malaysia became by far the world leading producer of palm oil. 18 Between 1965 and 1990, FELDA alone accounted for a third of all newly planted oil palms in the country (Gustafsson 2007, 66). In tandem with FELDA’s large-scale investments, private estates fell in behind by engaging in massive oil palm plantation expansion. With extensive integration between government and private investments,

Malaysia became the cradle of technical innovations for oil palm production, where continual expansion of production was envisioned. This economic context led to the formation of large Malaysian conglomerates backed by a public-funded agro-industrial research complex. These conglomerates dispose of large capital investment capacities and have achieved dominance in global oil palm agribusiness. The largest plantation companies – Uniliver, Socfin, Kumpulan Guthrie and Golden Hope – set up their own research facilities and have been involved in important scientific innovations to increase oil palm yields from the 1960s onward. These corporations have notably improved planting materials through breeding research and developed chemical technologies for fertilization and pest control. In 1977, Uniliver sponsored the Commonwealth Institute of

Biological Control (CIBC) based in England to import the West African insect that naturally pollinates oil palm to Malaysia which provided significant improvements in yields (Tate 1996, 584). The field of experiments through which plantation agriculture is constituted continually attracted new institutions and reworked the assemblage of humans and non-humans.

18 FELDA investments in oil palm schemes intensified after 1969 and the ethnic riots which prompted the implementation of the New Economic Policy (NEP) according to which the Bumiputera – those considered as the indigenous populations of Malaysia – were to benefit in priority from economic development in Malaysia, to create conditions conducive to the emergence to the emergence of a Bumiputera business élite.

52

Along with efficient land and labour markets, palm oil production in Malaysia was constituted as a field of intensive capital investments in knowledge production and diffusion. Through these investments oil palm became further entrenched in networks of capital-intensive private knowledge and technologies. The creation of the Palm Oil

Research Institute of Malaysia (PORIM) 19 by a governmental decree in 1979 sought to

centralize research to improve the dissemination of findings among Malaysian

companies. It was designed to address a large spectrum of issues among which potential

shortage of labour and land along with communication of information to consumers and

buyers (FAO/ UNDP 2001). The research institute took on the role of promoting palm oil

as a global commodity against other competing vegetable oils such as soybean oil 20 .

PORIM contributed to the development of oil palm clones with higher yield and shorter

height to increase harvest efficiency. It has been at the forefront of research in

biotechnology and genetically modified seeds to obtain better plant varieties. Moreover,

PORIM has been a decisive factor in the diversification of palm oil downstream activities

by investing massively in oloechemicals, for the production of biodiesels and

development of integrated agrochemical complex 21 . The establishment of the Advanced

Oleochemical Technology Center in 1994 by MPOB (PORIM) constitutes a landmark in

the first stages of energy production from palm oil (Yusof & Simeh, 2005). Through

these various technological innovations, oil palm plantation agribusiness as an economic

and political project consolidates a regime of knowledge along with practices of

19 PORIM is now merged with the Palm Oil Registration and Licensing Authority (PORLA) to form the Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB). 20 The centralised research capacity of PORIM has provided this institution with a key role in producing and disseminating scientific nutritional information during the anti-palm oil campaign of the American Soybean Association which detracted the industry over health issues in the 1980s (Gustafsson 2007, 114). 21 Gustaffson (2007, p.123) states PORIM’s numbers according to which 80% of the R&D carried out on palm oil’s oleochemical technologies in the late 1990s to early 2000s carried out in Malaysia was public.

53 plantation agriculture regarding land and labour, which bear implications beyond

Malaysia.

From the mid-1990s onward, Malaysian oil palm companies launched an important expansion phase in Indonesia after further liberalization of laws on foreign direct investments in this country. Malaysian investors were attracted by large land concessions rendered available by the Indonesian government, lower currency rates, weak environmental regulations and minimal wages that enabled low production costs 22 .

Concomitantly, private Indonesian companies invested massively in oil palm agribusiness

starting in the 1990s. Although the palm oil production in Indonesia surpassed the

production in Malaysia in 2006, a large proportion of Indonesian crude palm oil

production is exported to Malaysia for further processing (Gustafsson 2007, 68).

Moreover, the seeds planted by Indonesian oil palm plantations are often imported from

Malaysia which reflects the fact that technical expertise remains highly concentrated in

Malaysia. The Indonesian-Malaysian Palm Oil Group (IMPOG), led by Malaysian

conglomerates, accounts for the strong integration which exists between actors of the oil

palm industry in both countries 23 .

22 According to current legislations in Indonesia, a plantation company which operates in one province is allowed to own 20,000 hectares of land according to regulation No. 2/1999, and 100,000 hectares throughout the country according to regulation No.26/PermentanOT.140/2/2007 (Directorate General of Plantations 2007). 23 The two most prominent Malaysian conglomerates involved in palm oil production among other activities being Sime Darby, renamed in 2007, Synergy Drive Sdn Bhd (a merge between Golden Hope Plantations Bhd, Kumpulan Guthrie Bhd, Mentakab Rubber Company (Malaya) Bhd, Guthrie Ropel, Highlands & Lowlands Bhd) and Industrial Oxygen Incorporated Sdn Bhd (The Star, Post-Merger Strategy for Sinergy Drive, May 7 2007).

54

The plantation model in Indonesia

Since colonial times, principals of plantation agriculture have been consolidated

through the continual expansion of production across a large number of geographies.

Technical innovations achieved in Malaysia and Indonesia have further rooted palm oil

production in agro-industrial structures entwined with profit-driven large-scale

monocultures dependent on intensive chemical inputs. The commercialization of palm oil

requires vertical integration of operations around a processing mill which depends on

important and sustained capital investments 24 . Only companies with important investment

capacities are able to set up those agro-industrial infrastructures. The formation of large

conglomerates that absorb oil palm companies contributes to the high level of uniformity

of industrial practices in oil palm agribusiness in Malaysia and Indonesia. These

corporations have consolidated a regime of knowledge along with practices of plantation

agriculture regarding land and labour. Consultants trained in major oil palm corporations

and public/private research centers travel around the tropical belt 25 to sell information

about the most efficient ways to organize territory, labour and agro-chemical inputs in the

pursuit of ever-increasing profits. As a rule of thumb among plantation officials, a mill

requires approximately 5000 hectares of oil palm monoculture to secure the level of

profits deemed reasonable according to market norms. The norms spread by international

consultants to improve the competitive potential of plantation companies consolidate the

existence of a dominant model of industrial oil palm agribusiness.

24 For this reason, some argue that the market structure of fresh fruit bunch of oil palm is monopolistic Loosing ground, Report by Friends of the Earth, LifeMosaic and Sawit Watch, February 2008. 25 The case of Bek-Nielsen involved in United Plantation (UP) in Peninsular Malaysia is particularly eloquent in regard with highly skilled consultants able to provide advices to oil palm plantation companies about the best way to reorganize their operations (Martin 2003).

55

Figure 2 . Aerial view of an oil palm plantation and its management divisions and sub- divisions (blocks) in Sumatra. Source: Greenpiece 2008

Labour management on oil palm plantations is planned according to aerial modes of visibility and control of space. A plantation is divided in smaller geographical units referred to in Indonesia as divisions ( divisi ) or compartment ( afdeling ) according to the

Dutch colonial heritage. To maximize the efficiency and control of labour deployment,

each division which stretches over 700 to 1000 hectares is further divided in blocks of up

of 30 to 150 hectares (Figure 2). Each division, depending on its size, employs from 100

to 150 workers for manual and supervision tasks on the plantation. The operations that

sustain production on oil palm plantations require dynamic forms of labour management

that take place within top-down hierarchical structures. Most plantations are headed by a

general manager who is located at the apex of the bureaucratic structure. In most

plantations, according to the system inherited from British and Dutch colonial managerial

56 structures, each territorial division is under the responsibility of an assistant manager who is responsible for administering input and output on the territory under his governance.

The assistant manager is in charge of supervisors (mandor ) who govern work of teams of

10 to 20 workers on the ground and specialized clerks ( krani ) who record production, costs and wages of workers according to standardized operations. Each type of operation, harvesting, spraying pesticides or applying fertilizers is administered by specialised overseers. However, as plantation management structures are frequently replaced by more efficient structures to increase profitability, the units of administration are subject to change. The labour management system functions as a field of continual experimentations for the achievement of optimal profitability.

Through plantation maps and abstract visual representations, a manager or assistant manager responsible for one estate or division is able to direct the different teams of workers and keep detailed information on the areas that require harvesting, fertilization or pesticide application 26 . In planting or replanting, plantation companies follow strict rules regarding the number of oil palm trees per row and the number of rows and the space between each tree and each row. Plantation companies keep detailed information on the mineral content of the oil palm trees based on laboratory analysis and constantly adjust the composition of fertilizer to optimize fruit production. To do so, they perform yearly leaf samples in each block or resort to satellite imagery to determine the mineral requirements of trees. This information is combined with detailed models about the productivity of oil palms throughout their 25 year long life cycle. The productivity measured in tons of fresh fruit bunches in tons per hectare per year varies over years.

Productivity also varies greatly from one plantation to the other according to materials

26 Information derived from interviews with clerks at a state plantation (PTP) and a private plantation.

57 and information available, ranging from 15 tons/ ha/ year in private and state owned plantations of West Kalimantan to 35-40 tons/ ha/ year in the most productive private plantations of peninsular Malaysia 27 . In this regard, pressure is exerted on the cost of

labour in less productive Indonesian plantations to remain competitive with the most

productive plantations. According to these models based on the life cycle of the crop,

investments in fertilizer are modified and labour needs adjusted. Spatial dispositions of

crops and labour on a plantation are meant to optimize production and control of

operations. The space of the plantation is designed to be seen and known from a central

management position.

The industrial infrastructure needs for oil palm cultivation are determined by time

sensitive modes of organization that also condition the spatial deployment of activities.

Palm oil processing is a time sensitive process because the oil must be extracted from the

fruits less than 48 hours after harvest. In this regard, oil palm stands as an exception

compared to other crops as it requires close integration of production and processing.

Therefore, oil palm agribusiness requires the construction of a mill located in the zone

where oil palm is cultivated. The mill is designed according to a standard industrial

model and concentrates large facilities that can process approximately 60 tons of fresh

fruit bunches per hour 28 . Palm oil is then kept in large storage facilities before it is transported elsewhere and further processed down the agro-industrial chain. For fruits to be transported to the mill promptly, oil palm agribusiness involves the construction of reliable transportation infrastructures, roads and bridges that link all sections of the plantation to the mill. But it also requires reliable infrastructure that allows regional and

27 Information provide at the agribusiness school in Medan, Lembaga Pendidikan Perkebunan, Medan. 28 Informant from a worker at the oil palm mill, Kalimanan Barat, July 2011

58 international transportation and exports of palm oil. Each plantation company depends on an important fleet of trucks to insure timely transportation. The agro-industrial structure and investment requirements of oil palm agribusiness are dictated by profitability requirements and principles of economies of scale which are particularly important for processing, packaging and marketing stages of production. The fact that oil palm cultivated in Indonesia can only be processed in large mills implies top-down planning practices.

The large industrial infrastructure underlying oil palm agribusiness requires important investments. In Indonesia the cost of labour in agro-industrial operations accounts for a small percentage of the total value of output, usually less than 5%. In a context of capital-intensive agribusiness such as oil palm, it is estimated that industrial installations and chemical inputs represent 55% to 90% of the value of production 29 .

Chemical fertilizers constitute the largest expense of up to 50% of the total field upkeep

costs 30 . Profit maximization is largely considered as a technical issue in this regard.

However large manual labour investments remain essential in oil palm agribusiness to

maximize the return on industrial investments. To offset the risks inherent to such large-

scale investment, oil palm companies seek close control over the ways in which the

supply of oil palm fresh fruit bunch (FFB) is secured. The company in most cases

assumes direct ownership of the plantation itself where it relies on centralised forms of

labour management. In the cases where a private oil palm company takes part in a

29 Marsden, K. and M. Garzia. 1998. Agro-industrial policy reviews. Methodological guidelines. FAO. p. 18-19 30 Most tropical soils on which oil palm is cultivated are devoid of nutrients once their original vegetation has been removed. Large fertilizer inputs acts as a technological fix considering that oil palm agribusiness in the tropics is dissociated from original soil conditions. Oil palm agro-industrial practices are dependant on energy-intensive process which purpose is the ongoing reengineering of ecological conditions to sustain production (Ng 2000).

59 contract farming smallholding scheme, the private company will retain ownership of a part of the plantation to secure direct control over a portion of the palm oil FFB supply to the mill. This specific configuration of economic activities has implications for the organisation of social life among subjects of oil palm agribusiness.

Envisioning sustainable palm oil

Oil palm agribusiness appears as a distinct object of knowledge and practices for estate officials and managers in charge of planning for land and labour. Beyond the modes of visioning that take place in the organization of labour and land, oil palm agribusiness is also being represented through discourses on sustainability and environmental conservation. Discourses of sustainability in the field of oil palm agribusiness deployed on the scale of Indonesia by corporations and state actors lead to new forms of visibility in oil palm agribusiness industry. Through these devices, oil palm agribusiness appears as a complex object which is constantly being reshaped by changing discourses and imperatives that draw in new modalities of knowledge and ultimately form of planning.

Oil palm agribusiness is known by consumers through debates that traverse the field in an attempt to promote or curtail further oil palm expansion. Campaigns against oil palm agribusiness expansion in Indonesia have multiplied in the past ten years, targeting both producers and consumers. An important number of NGOs such as WALHI and Greenpeace have attempted to represent the industry through cases of labour rights violation and widespread environmental destruction. However, prominent stakeholders of the industry along with the World Bank consistently relegate the issues highlighted by

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NGOs to problems specific to the deficiencies of Indonesian institutions and therefore located outside the palm oil industry per se . Stakeholders of the industry seek to reposition oil palm agribusiness in discourses of development and modernisation. Amidst competing discursive formations, new techniques have emerged in past years to improve labour and environmental practices in the industry. These techniques put forward by both private organisations and state actors have been designed to reshape representations and practices in the field of oil palm agribusiness.

The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil is a global-scale private organisation that seeks to regulate the oil palm industry worldwide. RSPO was founded in 2004 by influential actors in the industry 31 in association with environmental organisations such as

the WWF and manifests the growing influence of private non-governmental actors in

environmental and social regulations in the neoliberal era. RSPO provides a platform of

interactions between three groups of actors: oil palm corporations, certification bodies

and socio-environmental NGOs. Roundtable discussions and company auditing processes

are designed to guide producers in the achievement of the eight principles of

sustainability of the RSPO chart which encompasses environmental, social and political

considerations.

Despite its claims to represent the whole Industry, RSPO remains an organisation with limited power over the practices and knowledge that govern oil palm agribusiness.

In 2011, seven per cent of the area of oil palm cultivation in Indonesia was producing within the certification processes that take place through RSPO. It is especially the most important companies such as Sime Darby and Sinar Mas that enjoy large investment

31 Malaysian Palm Oil Association (MPOA), Migros Genossenschafts Bund (Switzerland), Unilever NV (Netherlands), Golden Hope Plantations Berhad (Malaysia), Loders Croklaan (Netherlands), Pacific Rim Palm Oil Ltd (Singapore) and The Body Shop (UK).

61 capacities which have joined RSPO, leaving most oil palm plantations of Indonesia outside these mechanisms of control. Palm oil production destined for Indonesian consumers and for export to China and India – which accounts for over 70% of the total production 32 – is largely left outside sustainability initiatives. Through participation in

RSPO, large oil palm corporations secure access to the more strictly regulated consumer

markets of Europe and North America for controversial uses such as biodiesel. RSPO

enables the expansion of large-scale oil palm agribusiness and its modes of discipline by

legitimating the production process through discourses of sustainability 33 .

The RSPO has been the object of critiques for adopting a managerial rationality that ensures a functional governance suited to the needs of the industry, where sustainability guidelines are designed and implemented by the same organisation.

Empirical studies show that RSPO certified oil palm estates provide more comprehensive social benefits to permanent workers, but often fail to comply with strict scientific norms of sustainability 34 . According to the main critique, RSPO norms of sustainability are designed to be broad enough so that social and environmental considerations deemed unpractical can be excluded from the process of stakeholder consultation (Djama and

Daviron 2009). The consensus that RSPO seeks among the stakeholders that engage in the auditing process of oil palm companies provides ways to increase the political acceptability and credibility of sustainability guidelines of oil palm production (Cheyns

2009). According to the typology provided by Gimenéz and Shattuck (2011, 117), the regulation process of RSPO corresponds to corporate neoliberal reforms that seek to

32 See Potter (2009, 130-134) for an account on the scope of RSPO in relation to land conflicts in Indonesia 33 See Holt-Giménez and Shattuck (2010) for a comprehensive critique of biodiesel production in the world. 34 Based on extensive fieldwork observations and supported by the institutional ethnography conducted by Djama and Daviron (2009) at RSPO.

62 increase mass global consumption of palm oil by consulting selected non-governmental actors to address issues specific to targeted consumer markets.

The 2010 RSPO meeting in Jakarta was the occasion for the Indonesian government to launch its own initiative to demonstrate improvement in the regulation of the palm oil economy. The Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil or ISPO initiative is a provision adopted by the Ministry of Agriculture. ISPO derives largely from the RSPO model, although it claims to be a mandatory regulation by 2012. ISPO seeks to provide a grade certification for oil palm estates according to their level of compliance with sustainability guidelines, which would be assessed through a certification process carried out by state agencies. Through ISPO, which is a member of RSPO, the Indonesian government seeks to replicate the techniques of private industry-NGO initiatives in labour and environmental regulation in the oil palm sector. However, ISPO focuses on environmental regulations and marginally acknowledges labour issues by a traditional interpretation of sustainability. Discourses surrounding ISPO show its relationship with developmental policies to counteract campaigns against palm oil and enable oil palm expansion. Participants in the RSPO meeting of November 2010 expressed reservations regarding the efficiency of ISPO. In fact, many question the institutional capacities of participant ministries considering that regulations pertaining to the environment and labour rights remain largely unenforced in the country.

ISPO appears as a coherent set of measures to thoroughly transform representations and practices in the palm oil industry in Indonesia. However, the effective capacity of the Indonesian state to police the implementation of guidelines of sustainable production in the coming years remains hard to assess. Nevertheless, through grade

63 certification, ISPO seeks to produce disciplines through the production of zones of visibility as it seeks to classify and order the different plantation companies through the allocations of grades of compliance with the norms of sustainability. In this regard the initiative seeks a dynamic engagement with companies instead of coercive measures, as it encourages producers to improve their practices. ISPO is posited as a comprehensive strategy according to which the whole industry can be represented as being part of an ordered and uniform system of regulations informed by principles of sustainability. The state in this way attempts to integrate the palm oil plantation sector within legible structures of regulation without imposing stricter laws. As a result, both the development project inherent in the state and the palm oil industry are represented as a cohesive unit. If through initiatives such as RSPO and ISPO environmental and social considerations 35 are increasingly problematized in discourses on oil palm agribusiness, these techniques intervene largely at the level of representations.

Conclusion

Oil palm agribusiness, as a way to envision and to perform planning, is nested in a

power regime that was shaped by colonial experts and administrations along with state

bureaucracies and corporations in specific geographical and historical conjunctures. Oil

palm agribusiness emerged and is being shaped according to specific power relations, the

origin of which I traced back to colonial plantation agriculture and more specifically for

oil palm, in the networks of colonial and corporate agricultural experiments in the Congo.

From the Congo to Malaysia and Indonesia, a range of experiments and institutional

settings have allowed the spread of large-scale oil palm agribusiness. Insofar as oil palm

35 See Rist et al. (2009) on the integration of social considerations in palm oil based biofuel production.

64 agribusiness involves knowledge and practices which condition further innovation, it constitutes a model. This model exists at the level of planning, as I argued, through simplification and ordering of multiplicities, the constitution of a field for continual experimentation and the articulation of hierarchical labour regimes structured around the ecology of a crop. I contend that the principles through which oil palm plantation agribusiness is envisioned and then materialised produce parameters for livelihood practices which shape possibilities of large populations.

Planning for plantations or oil palm agribusiness is a form of power that manifests modes of visioning the disposition of humans and non-humans. In fact, contemporary large-scale oil agribusiness is no less a manifestation of an attempt to control production through top-down modes of planning than the colonial plantation was. In this regard, the radical transformation that takes place through large-scale monoculture involves a range of disciplines and control. Oil palm agro-industrial systems in Indonesia lay down a structure of production that imposes power relations through private systems of technical knowledge formation and hierarchical management practices. Oil palm agribusiness is a manifestation of a range of imperatives for profit within a specific economic field. Oil palm agribusiness shapes the future of large territories and populations, although not necessarily in the way envisioned by corporate officials, investors and government bureaucrats. An account on the operation of planning for large-scale oil palm agribusiness does not capture the complexity of subjects’ engagement with material and epistemic changes brought about by the actual conversion of territories into oil palm estates (which is attempted in the following chapters). However an account on the

65 visioning performed by experts and officials allows understanding some of the parameters and constraints in which the engagement of subjects takes place.

Although contemporary large-scale oil palm agribusiness does not function as a panopticon, the principle of panopticism which Foucault (1975, 173) identified as a paradigmatic shift in power regimes captures oil palm agribusiness as a project to produce functional and hierarchical spaces, hence to produce conditions of visibility and order, whether on the level of production or of representations of the industry in general.

Panopticism captures the fact that large-scale oil palm agribusiness contributes to the formation of new material practices and subjectivities which indicate the beginning of new rhythms of life structured around the agro-industrial production system. The notion of panopticism further points to the form of disciplines that emerge with the project of state and corporations in Indonesia to continually expand oil palm production and integrate larger populations as workers or smallholders whether through discourses of development or sustainability.

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Chapter 3:

The government of population, territory and wealth through oil palm agribusiness

“…the agribusiness systems approach is chosen with an idealistic objective primarily to protect, facilitate and promote our small family farmers for…their better livelihood along with their fellow landless laborers. Since the beginning, our primary intention is to uplift the well-being of the poorest segment of our countrymen, namely the landless laborers and the small family farmers, the majority of our people.” 36

Introduction

Oil palm agribusiness is envisioned and represented by government actors and private investors as a technique to achieve economic and social objectives. Beyond the revenues and jobs oil palm agribusiness provides, historically it has granted states with the possibility to achieve the conversion of densely forested territories which were illegible to state surveillance into rows of equidistant palm trees crisscrossed by roads, hierarchical administrative structures, government programmes and workers. In this regard, oil palm agribusiness is deployed as a way to reshape the relations between population, territory and wealth according to specific conceptions of society and economy. Ways of knowing objects such as population, territories, wealth, and the role of large-scale agribusiness are closely related to historical conjunctures and specific political projects. By looking at the constitution of large-scale oil palm agribusiness in Indonesia as a technique of government, I analyse the ways in which it was integrated in political

36 Dr. Bungaran Saragih, 2004. Agribusiness Development in the Future, Keynote Speech Minister of Agriculture, Republic of Indonesia at the BAPPENAS, FAO and UNSFIR International Workshop “ Agricultural Policy for the Future “Hotel Millennium, Jakarta, 12-13 February 2004.

67 calculations related to development and welfare provision in Indonesia. In this regard I pay particular attention to state policies, narratives and representations underlying the expansion of large-scale oil palm agribusiness. At stake in the deployment of large-scale agribusiness in Indonesia is the ways in which it shapes possibilities for human life and the emergence of economic subjectivities.

After spelling out the ways in which oil palm agribusiness fits within a regime of governmentality, I first revisit the agrarian history of the country to investigate how the relationship between population and territory was governed through transmigration programmes and then through oil palm smallholding schemes. Second, I look at oil palm smallholding schemes in Indonesia and explore their role as measures for populist development in the New Order and post-New Order eras. Indonesian governments have continually attempted to channel the oil palm boom through smallholding development programmes although within different political projects and conceptions of economy.

Third, I attend to the political rationale through which ongoing expansion of large-scale oil palm agribusiness is envisioned by government and plantation officials, as a manifestation of the current dominant political-economic project in Indonesia. More precisely, I examine the ways in which oil palm agribusiness is deployed contemporarily in discourses of government and plantation officials as the response to a number of problems related to job provision and resource management.

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Governmentality and political economy

I approach oil palm agribusiness in Indonesia as a question of political economy.

Political economy is, according to Foucault (2004, 109), the “continuous and multiple

network of relations between population, territory and wealth” that can be modified by

intervention of government. I draw on a specific definition of governmentality given by

Foucault in his lecture (1977-78):

“By governmentality, I mean the totality of institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations and tactics that allow for the exertion of this specific form, although very complex, of power, which has as its main target population, and as its main form of knowledge political economy and as essential technical instruments, apparatuses of security.” 37 (emphasis added) p.111

In this definition, governmentality encompasses extensive forms of knowledge of

political economy as the ways in which population, territory and wealth are known and

organised as they are being governed by a broad assemblage of forces within and beyond

the state. According to Foucault’s reading of agrarian history in Western Europe, the

most potent threat to state security is famine, a food crisis that triggers uprisings and

destabilises state and economic powers (Foucault 2004, 74). Therefore, the principles of

political economy that will prevail in a system of government are those that will ensure,

at least for a given time, “the optimal circulation of capital and goods” (Nally 2010, 39).

Oil palm agribusiness is closely related to questions of security. In fact, as a tool of

agrarian economic expansion, oil palm agribusiness seeks to provide ways to channel

popular desires for welfare improvement. Moreover, it achieves the safeguarding of

political and economic interests of elites by preventing an agrarian reform or by averting

37 Translation of the author

69 a radically egalitarian conception of the agrarian economy based on redistribution instead of expansion (Weis 2007, chapter 1).

Apparatuses of security as elaborated by Foucault (2004, 46-7) in his readings of

liberal economics, consist of laws, infrastructures, institutions and mechanisms of

resource access such as markets that become naturalised in practice. Therefore, the

purpose of apparatuses of security is to generate a space with defined parameters to

optimise the circulation of exchange value through the commoditisation of land and

labour 38 . Oil palm agribusiness acts as an agrarian-based apparatus of security as it provides an expanding system of production and reinforces market mechanisms that naturalise unequal resource distribution. Oil palm in Indonesia enables sustained economic growth through continual expansion of the agrarian industrial economy. This continual agrarian-based expansion is achieved through specific knowledge of political economy and representations of population and territory. The ways in which the arrangements between territory, population and wealth are influenced by experts change over time according to dominant principles of economy. The aim of experts or planners involved in development through oil palm agribusiness is to provide population in general with better and more efficient access to resources. The population is rendered visible to state officials and planners in aggregate quantitative forms that rest on specific econometric presuppositions about such measurements as income per capita and the number of jobs created. Moreover, the ways in which resources are rendered available to the population is subject to shifts in the knowledge and discourses that constitute political economy.

38 The universalised principles of improvement operate so that circulation of capital occurs in a defined and legible system as Mitchell (2002, 76-119) demonstrates in the case of colonisation in Egypt.

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The modern discipline 39 Foucault explores in Surveiller et punir sheds light on the

project of oil palm expansion in Indonesia. Large-scale oil palm agribusiness appears

here as an ongoing reorganisation of productive forces. Government through large-scale

agribusiness “produce(s) efficiency and aptitude among the producers of a product”

(1981: 1006 cited by Djama and Daviron). And this form of power acts in a way that does

not discipline primarily by negative forms of constraints but rather by positive

channelling of desires. The oil palm plantation economy, by expanding the territory of

intensive capital formation, insures the “controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery

of production” (Foucault 1978, 141). Discipline exerted on bodies through insertion in a

new political economy, according to Foucault, is coextensive with security exerted on

population (Foucault 2004, 13).

In associating oil palm agribusiness with development discourses, Indonesian

government officials represent plantation agriculture as a device that generates economic

possibilities. A device , according to Agamben’s (2007: 28) reading of Foucault, refers to

“a set of practices, knowledge, measures and institutions, the aim of which is to manage,

govern, control and guide […] the behaviour, acts and thoughts of people” (cited by

Djama and Daviron 2010, 5). Moreover, oil palm agribusiness as a device to achieve

welfare and development fits within the undisrupted continuity in the enforcement of a

“uniform code of laws, market imperatives, colonial land tenure and internalized self-

discipline” (Cooper 1980, 2). In this regard, plantation agriculture disciplines through the

productive power of real and imagined possibilities of accessing wealth. By creating

bounded opportunities in a seemingly apolitical system of resource distribution around

39 As Foucault analyses the rise of a society defined by a regime of governmentality, he insists that it does not replace discipline, but modifies its application.

71 market imperatives, oil palm agribusiness legitimises enclosure while it exerts discipline on working bodies and security on populations by providing jobs.

Colonial and post-colonial political economies

Palm oil as a single commodity has opened up vast political-economic possibilities in the recent history of Indonesia. However, before the ascendency of oil palm as a global commodity, government actors had an interest in the expansion of the productive realm through redistribution of population in Indonesian space 40 . Oil palm in

recent decades accelerated the extension of capitalist production into the outer islands of

Indonesia, where land identified as ‘idle’ was available and found suitable for oil palm

cultivation. Oil palm plantation schemes for smallholders as they started to develop in the

1970s in Indonesia constituted an efficient development strategy for state planners of the

national economy. They allowed the fusion of two objectives: 1) further capitalisation of

agriculture through agribusiness schemes and 2) redistribution of population so as to

increase the agrarian resources available. In order to analyse the integration of oil palm

into objectives of development I pay attention to the historical constitution of the relation

between population and land resources as objects of knowledge.

With the development of colonial scientific calculation techniques in the late 19 th century, the Dutch Indies government saw the relations between population and territory as problematic (Manderson 1974). The colonisation programme of 1905-1941 initiated by the government of the Dutch Indies was a response to the field of knowledge of demography as it was put to use in the colony (Booth 2001). This programme was part of more widespread development measures following the Ethical Era in the colony in 1901.

40 I use ‘space’ in this part of the article to refer to the process of cognitive abstraction of ‘territory’.

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The colonial state, concerned with security, sought to transfer population from densely populated core islands near Java to the less populated outer islands of Sumatra and

Kalimantan. The constitution of this apparatus of security was a response to the perceived threat posed by stagnation of agricultural production per capita in Java, Madura, Bali and

Lombok. It was observed that stable cropland areas in these regions were absorbing ever- increasing populations. The colonisation programme was also part of the imperative to extend the control of the colonial state to the outer islands, Sumatra, Kalimantan and the highlands of Sulawesi 41 . However, the colonization programme remained focused on

subsistence agriculture and although it created new settlements in the outer islands, it did

not substantially modify the demographics of Java, where the population continued to

grow (Pelzer 1978; Hardjono 1977).

In parallel, where territory was deemed scarcely populated, the Dutch Indies

administration encouraged private plantation agriculture through “open-door” liberal

policies. The Agrarian Law of 1870 in the Dutch Indies provided the government with

extensive powers to declare customary land which was not under permanent agriculture

as state property. This facilitated the enclosure of large tracts of land for foreign

plantation companies. The Agrarian Law paved the way for the legal foundations of

plantation agriculture expansion by which the government guaranteed plantation

companies provision of land and labour below market prices (Gordon 1982, 174-5). The

colonial administration provided favourable terms to planters and also facilitated the

recruitment of indentured semi-forced labour from Java and other central islands of

41 Kusno (2000, 135-142) elaborates on the specific conceptions of the nuclear family as the basis of social order and discipline used historically to recruit transmigrants. He also insists on the ways in which the programme as implemented by the highest officials of the bureaucracy of the New Order was used to purge central islands of unwanted individuals.

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Indonesia (Tjondronegoro 2004, 89). Plantation agriculture of tobacco and rubber and then oil palm expanded quickly from the mid-nineteenth century onward, mainly in northern Sumatra 42 .

Plantation agriculture in Sumatra evolved at this time as a capitalist enclave. As defined by Breman (1990, 73), the capitalist enclaves of the Netherland Indies were mines and plantations which had their origin in the external dynamics of capitalist investments linked directly with the world market. The capitalist enclave, although it relied on Indonesian and Chinese labour, remained only loosely integrated within the national economy. If so-called ‘native welfare’ became a growing concern of the

Netherland Indies government at the end of the 19 th century, the enclave plantation system remained separate from the objectives of redistributing populations from the central islands in the colonisation programme. In fact, the agencies of the Dutch Indies government competed with each other in Java to recruit both settlers for the colonisation programme and workers for plantation companies in enclaves of production 43 . This shows the extent to which the imperatives of capitalist growth and population redistribution remained separated but yet coincided in attempts to mobilize people, labour and peasants for the agrarian economic projects in the outer islands.

42 Ann Stoler (1985, p. 15-22) mentions that the state would give carte-blanche to plantation corporate capital within a liberal open-door policy system from 1870 onward which provided important incentives for planters to set up production in Deli, Sumatra, the main plantation belt of Indonesia. Plantation companies exercised de facto control over the territory under their authority, forming a state within a state. 43 Yayasan Agro Ekonomia, Perkebunan Indonesia di Masa Depan (1983) p.46 quote from Karl J. Pelzer (1978, 197).

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Shifting postcolonial political economies

Principles of political economy that prevail in a given conjuncture, as a form of knowledge, are constrained by shifting modes of governance on national and global scales. Principles about the most efficient way of organising political life and economy are always refractive of power relations. Indonesian post-colonial governments have had to deal with the posited problem of agrarian resources’ availability as defined by colonial expert knowledge of population and territory. Sukarno’s Orde Lama pursued an

economic agenda influenced by modernist and centralist republican ideological

considerations. The views of Sukarno’s nationalist administration in the aftermath of

independence wars against the Dutch were conditioned by the objective to create a

political economy radically different from the Dutch colonial one (Simpson 2008, 20).

Therefore, plantations and mines were nationalised under Sukarno in 1957-58. These

former enclave economies were made into a symbol of post-colonial social justice by

different labour rights groups and unions in the years following the independence of

Indonesia (Wijardjo and Trisasongko 2003). As Simpson (2008, 16) highlights,

Indonesian nationalists “hoped to take back control of the economy from foreigners and

establish a basis for national unity, development and self-sufficiency.” In this regard, the agrarian reform implemented in 1960 sought to legitimate squatting on plantations (Stoler

1985, 125-130). Sukarno’s Orde Lama was eager to break away from the tradition of extreme dependence on export markets which had characterised the colonial plantation economy and established a guided economy.

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In 1955, the colonisation programme was renamed transmigration and pursued the

redistribution of population especially considering food scarcity in post-revolutionary

Java (Tjondronegoro 2004). New legislation such as the Basic Agrarian Law (1960)

provided the state with expanded powers over the control of land resources (Durand

2000). With the Basic Agrarian Law (BAL) of 1960, modernist conceptions of the nation

were upheld and customary land rights (adat ) in Indonesia were suppressed 44 . The post- colonial government sought to accelerate homogenisation of land tenure in the country as the BAL stated that the dualistic system inherited from the Dutch “was inconsistent with nation-building and fail(ed) to provide legal certainties to autochtonous Indonesians”

(Fidzpatrick 2006, 75). All land that was not already under concession or legally recognised individual ownership was labelled as ‘idle’. 45

In this context, important resources were allocated to the transmigration programme which had sponsored over 400,000 transmigrants in 1965 at the end of

Sukarno’s Orde Lama . However, the programme had limited economic success as transmigrants were mostly involved in subsistence agriculture often on marginal lands and often in less productive conditions than those they had left (Hardjono 1977; Levang

1997). Subsistence agriculture tied to transmigration only marginally improved the circulation of capital, commodities and labour in the country. It became obvious to state officials that the security threat posed by the risk of rural revolt caused by scarce land resources and political agitation in the central islands would not be removed by the

44 The modernizing pressures were strong in Kalimantan as conceptions of longhouses as backward, terbelakang prompted Indonesian Dayak to adopt individual houses in post-colonial Indonesia. 45 The Basic Agrarian Law eventually provided legal ground for the allocation of large tracts of land to mining, cash crop and pulp-and-paper plantation companies. Indigenous populations of Kalimantan referred to as Dayak allegedly lost access and ownership of large tracts of lands which were ceded to military and oligarchic interests.

76 transmigration programme itself. Agrarian movements persisted despite transmigration, and until 1965 groups of landless farmers continued frequently to occupy tea and rubber plantation lands as forms of protest against the political economic system (Vu 2009).

The later years of Sukarno’s regime were characterised by economic stagnation, a context in which the plantation sector suffered from disorganisation and inefficiency

(Kartodirjo and Suryo 1991, 177). After the demise of the Sukarno regime in 1965, the

New Order reaffirmed the primacy of capitalist expansion over objectives of economic and political independence. Sukarno’s Guided Economy was swiftly dismantled after

1965. In the context of the ensuing political-economic and food crisis, the new President

Suharto revoked the agrarian reform law of 1960 and land which had been distributed under Suharto was reclaimed by the new military’s force. With the support of U.S. liberal economists and technical advisors, legal and administrative dispositions were taken to allow the Indonesian economy to re-engage in large-scale commodity production for the international export market 46 . As for Dutch plantations nationalised under Sukarno, without being re-privatised, they were subjected to the New Order’s authoritarian power networks and reorganised according to a corporate model as the National Plantation

Company Limited, Perseroran Terbatas Perkebunan Negara (PTPN).

In New Order Indonesia, the corporate and colonial model of the plantation economy – characterised by managerial considerations and profit maximisation of export commodities – swiftly reappeared 47 . The Basic Agrarian Law of 1960 and Basic Forestry

46 Simpson (2008) provides a detailed historical account on the relations between U.S. international actors and Indonesian governmental officials in the formation of an authoritarian government that constituted a liberal economic system. 47 In Suharto’s New Order, the unity of the Indonesian population was reasserted by the murder of groups of people belonging to heterogeneous movements identified as communists by radical paramilitary groups associated to Muslim organizations and the military.

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Law of 1967 legalised violent enclosure of communal landholding for logging concessions, mines and plantations. According to Suharto’s second Five-Year

Development Plan of 1969-74, the overt objective of the government was to integrate the transmigration programme into more general plans for the development of agribusiness.

By further liberalisation of agribusiness, state officials were allegedly seeking greater efficiency in political economic calculations for the administration of population and the creation of wealth. But through agribusiness expansion and resource extraction activities more generally, state officials were also greatly concerned with forging large economic conglomerates closely tied to political power.

The New Order era was characterised by liberal economic policies administered

by an authoritarian state. Large-scale agribusiness was encouraged and legitimised

through the liberal economic theory of wealth’s trickle down effect (B. Wijardjo & D.

Trisasongko 2003). Development projects, such as the transmigration programme along

with irrigation programmes, were part of vast infrastructural investments promoted and

channelled by the authoritarian development state. The authoritarian New Order state was

conducive to the formation of complex networks of mutually advantageous relationships

between state apparatuses and big businesses. These networks were fuelled by

international loans and private/public investments along with oil money (Tsing 2005, p.

36-38). In this way, the political class increased its grip on wealth creation and was able

to engage in the formation of clientelist networks to distribute wealth and power 48 .

Overall, both Sukarno and Suharto designed new techniques to integrate the plantation economy into political calculations for development. Sukarno sought to enable

48 Eka Tjipta Widjaja, founder of the Indonesian oil palm agribusiness conglomerate Sinar Mas, embodies the close integration of political and economic interests in New Order Indonesia in natural resource extraction.

78 the populist redistribution of plantation land through nationalisation and the empowerment of grassroots peasant and labour organisations 49 . Suharto, while upholding nationalisation, suppressed peasant and labour organisations and reverted to corporate plantation agriculture and agribusiness schemes focussed on economic growth. Suharto’s

New Order deployed military security to achieve what became conceived as a more economically and politically efficient organisation of productive forces than the system under his predecessor. However, both Sukarno and Suharto’s policies converged in their attempt to achieve the optimal disposition of a “unitary” population on a “unitary” territory. However, the New Order regime, by integrating the Indonesian economy to global capital circulation, managed to provide an economic system that produced continual growth and in which agribusiness played an increasing role. According to the modernist ideology pursued by both regimes, particularities of land tenure and economic systems were largely negated, although cultural and ethnic diversity was celebrated as a symbol of the past (Pemberton 2005, 50). Both regimes attempted to integrate plantation agriculture into development objectives according to shifting power relations both internationally and within the state. However, the authoritarian New Order regime succeeded in laying down the structures of a (neo)liberal economy in which security apparatuses sustained capital circulation and accumulation linked to the global economy 50 .

49 As Anderson (1990,105-106) highlights, this shift in political regime from Orde Lama to Orde Baru occurred through violent clashes of interests between distinct groups. The power shift led to widespread repression by the army of peasant and worker organisations. 50 See Hadiz and Robison (2005) on the numerous liberal market reforms that have been conducted in Indonesia in the New Oder which have allowed the political class to consolidate authoritarian rule over the country. It further addresses how more generally market reforms in Indonesia have successively been resisted and often hijacked to strengthen predatory state and private oligarchies, including after the 1997- 1998 crisis.

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Oil palm smallholding schemes as a development device

Smallholding schemes in the New Order

The transmigration programme of the 1970s in New Order Indonesia entailed the subordination of population redistribution to the goal of capitalist agrarian development.

As Hardjono (1977, 31) has it, from the 1970s onward, “transmigration is now seen more as a land development programme in areas outside Java rather than as a means of reducing population pressure in Java.” What is more, from the 1980s onward, the government had to deal with dwindling oil revenues 51 . As a result, the government

increased its reliance on the private sector for transmigration and rural development. A

new conception of population emerged in this political-economic era. Population’s access

to territory for productive activities was no longer directly equated with wealth, as was

believed by ancient agrarian states and during the period under Sukarno. Instead, in New

Order Indonesia, wealth emerges from the connection of population to productive

capitalist activities 52 . According to this conception of political economy, oil palm became one of the prominent devices to enhance market-based relations between people and territory in Indonesia.

As early as 1967, the Indonesian government with World Bank assistance made direct investments in large-scale oil palm schemes through state-owned companies 53 . The

government considered intensive cash crop contract farming schemes and transmigration

programmes to serve as important strategies for social and economic control in Indonesia.

The New Order Regime, obsessed with social surveillance, sought to increase power over

51 A. Steele (2008). Oil revenues in Indonesia shrank from over 50% of the total revenue in 1980 to 24% in 2005. 52 See debates of the French physiocrats as addressed by Patrice Levang, p.329 53 Timeline: Slaves, Colonials, weevils: palm oil’s historic rise. Reuters.com, September 22, 2009.

80 subjects beyond its gaze in territories of the outer islands where networks of control were less developed 54 . As discussed by Dove (1996), the decision by political elites and

oligarchs to systematically privilege large-scale agribusiness development over pre-

existing independent smallholding systems was motivated by political economic

calculations directed towards wealth appropriation for themselves and social control.

Large estates and smallholding contract schemes, as Dove (1996, 47 cited by Li 1999,

26) suggests, were better suited than pre-existing indigenous systems to the “overarching

government imperative of centralised control and extraction of resources […].”

The state sought to bring populations that occupied the margins of the mainstream

economy under its gaze through smallholding schemes. Already in the early 1970s, oil

palm, due to its profitability, started replacing rubber in transmigration schemes.

Investments in oil palm happened in the wake of the promulgation of the Foreign

Investment Law in the early 1970s (Anderson 1990, 112) which was part of a number of

new regulations to facilitate foreign direct investments in Indonesia. The crop expanded

quickly in the 1970s with a rapid surge in private investments channelled through the

PTPN (National Plantation Company Limited) in both plantation activities and smallholding programmes (Wijardjo and Trisasongko 2003). Until the mid-1980s, oil palm cultivation was mainly confined to state-owned plantations or PTPN.

The international rise in the demand for palm oil coupled with transmigration as a development device led PTPN plantation companies to implement the first smallholding oil palm agribusiness scheme programme in 1984, Perkebunan Inti Rakyat or PIR literally translated as People’s Nucleus Estate Scheme (Zen et al. 2006). According to the

54 See Barker (2005) for cultural meanings of technological tools such as telecommunication satellite that shape and define the ways in which populations become visible in the context of nation building in Indonesia.

81

New Order regime’s rhetoric, new agri-business smallholding schemes would harness international investments in agribusiness to foster the creation of a class of prosperous smallholders. The purpose of smallholding agri-business as defined by the regime was to open up the plantation economy enclave for the general welfare of the population

(Mubyarto 1992, 125). According to the World Bank, it provided a way of “creating dynamic partnerships between private capital and smallholders” to encourage

“technology transfer, innovation and market growth” (Baumann 2000, 11). Moreover, smallholding schemes and their centralised organisation for capitalist production suited the Suharto regime’s vision of modernity.

The PIR was based on principles of smallholding agri-business promoted by the

World Bank in the 1980s. This agribusiness model was founded on the agrarian argument associated with agrarian economist Chayanov, according to which the small family farm is a more productive unit than large estates (Booth 1988, 21). Chayanov along with other agrarian economists who followed argued and have demonstrated that small farms save on labour costs by relying on unpaid family members’ labour 55 . With the PIR, Indonesian

authorities and experts sought to provide transmigrants or local impoverished

smallholders equal access to 2-hectare land plots as part of modern agribusiness schemes

according to top-down planning. However, according to the belief of state agricultural

economists in the 1980s, only peasants had the capacity to succeed as smallholders in a

PIR migration scheme and pay back loans within a time period deemed reasonable.

Plantation workers (or coolies) were allegedly excluded from the PIR programme as

agricultural economists believed that they lacked the entrepreneurial spirit or the capacity

to succeed in the type of economic management required in nucleus estate schemes

55 See Harrison (1977) for a detailed account on the peasant mode of production.

82

(Sairin 1996, 17). In this regard, populations of smallholders and wage workers were seen as non-interchangeable fixed categories. The PIR programme was fuelled by government and private investment provided by the Asian Development Bank 56 and the World Bank.

As implemented in Indonesia, PIR schemes were directly influenced by oil palm cultivation resettlement schemes implemented in Malaysia by the Federal Land

Development Agency (FELDA) a decade earlier (Sutton 1989).

According to prevailing policies in line with the Perkebunan Inti Rakyat (PIR) model, the smallholding scheme entailed partnership between the state and a plantation company. The plantation company would provide the technical knowledge to develop the agribusiness scheme including all industrial processing infrastructures. In return, the company obtained exclusive concession rights over the nucleus or inti of the estate – an area that accounts for 20% of the land – and the remainder would accrue to smallholders

(plasma) (see chapter 4 for a more detailed account of the terminology of the PIR programme). However, this ratio could be variable according to local conditions.

Smallholders would be bound by an exclusive contract-farming agreement with the plantation company. However, in most cases, the plot granted in the PIR was not planted upon the arrival of smallholders. Most transmigrants agreed to work on contract on the nucleus corporate estate for two to four years or until their oil palm plot generated revenues (Levang 1997, 255). However, many accounts emphasise breach of contracts and failure of companies to provide productive oil palm plots within a reasonable period, if at all. For this reason, many observers have described the PIR transmigration model as

56 Asian Development Bank, 1995, Project completion report on the second nucleus estate and smallholder oil palm project (Loan 789-INO).

83 the constitution of a pool of captive labour for the nucleus plantation57 . Moreover, Dove

(2011, 31) states that “virtually all of the nucleus-estate (PIR) schemes have been plagued

with serious agronomic and economic problems, which Barlow and Jayasuriya (1986:

652) suggest are “inherent to the institutional structure of these schemes” and the forms

of disciplines they are embedded in (Potter and Badcock 2004, 346). (See chapter 4)

According to the PIR-Tran guidelines, the estate along with the Transmigration

Department would support newly arrived smallholders by providing training, technical

and managerial support, housing infrastructure, food staples or subsistence allocation for

the first year of transmigration, or longer. Smallholders would be granted full ownership

of their plot once the loan incurred for installation fees was completely repaid to public-

private investors 58 . Also, according to PIR regulations, plasma smallholders had to organise through a pre-defined cooperative model run by elected members who took over the provision of a number of services from the estate once the scheme is set up (Barlow et al. 2003). Palm oil production and social organisation became entangled in oil palm agribusiness smallholding schemes. The members of those schemes became part of cooperatives (Kooperasi Unit Desa), usually regrouped at the provincial level in unionised organisations. Approximately half of those cooperatives would currently be members of the Indonesian Palm Oil Producers’ Association ( Gabunga Pengusaha

Kelapa Sawit Indonesia, GAPKI ). GAPKI is a national-level organisation which brings together oil palm agribusiness smallholding cooperatives with public and private estates to promote the interests of all palm oil producers (Barlow 2003, 12). Populations engaged

57 Levang 1997, 256; McCarthy 2010, p. 837; Li (2011). 58 Deductions for payment of loans reached 35% on production income. Zen et al. (2006, p. 22) mention up to 30% and Levang (1997, p. 256) states that repayment rates between 25%-35% of income existed.

84 in plasma schemes become active economic subjects in the palm oil production order through marketing organisations and cooperatives that form hierarchical structures.

The Transmigration Programme based on oil palm agribusiness or PIR-Tran

1986-1994 merged two objectives of government: increased capitalisation through

smallholding schemes and the creation of centres of growth outside Java where the

economic activity is concentrated. The PIR and PIR-Tran programmes together from

1978 to 1997 led to the creation of over 800,000 hectares of oil palm schemes (Levang

1997, 248). Many of those schemes were designed to provide oil palm plots to local

farmers and new transmigrants or transmigrants from failed schemes. These different

groups were merged into a single population of oil palm agribusiness smallholders

exposed to market mechanisms.

The start of the PIR-Tran programme in 1986 coincided with further liberalisation

of the estate sector. The PIR-Tran programme was carried out by the Department of

Transmigration and Manpower along with the Directorate General of Estates in

collaboration with oil palm estate companies. According to researchers who worked as

foreign consultants for the Ministry of Transmigration, through liberalisation measures,

the transmigration programme became instrumental to private economic growth (Levang

1997, 248). As Tania Li (2011, 287) observes, the transmigration programme in the

1990s “repositioned itself as the partner of investors seeking free land and abundant

cheap labour in order to grow industrial mono-crops”. In parallel, the state encouraged

large-scale oil palm plantation development through access to credit at concessional rates

for both land conversion and palm oil extraction facilities (Madhur 2000, 26). In this

85 regard, development objectives were explicitly merged with objectives of economic growth.

Since the 1970s, the government of Indonesia has continuously attempted to increase the oil palm economy’s contribution to populist socio-economic development through smallholding schemes. According to many analysts, the PIR programmes, despite problems at the level of implementation, have successfully harnessed

“commercial and technical expertise toward socio-economic goals” (Zen et al. 2006, 27).

Plasma smallholding schemes have provided an expansive productive base which seems generally beneficial to the improvement of the population. In fact, plasma smallholding appears successful in development calculations which are based on conceptions of a unitary population made of discrete smallholding nuclear families 59 . Smallholding schemes are designed by experts to provide the population with direct access to modern agri-business. But access to the wealth of oil palm agri-business for smallholders is mediated by contingent market formation processes and profit-driven imperatives of estate firms and their contractors.

Table 1. Oil palm area (ha) by type of ownership in Indonesia, 1980-2008

Year Smallholders % Gov. estate % Private estate % Total

1980 6,000 2% 200,000 69% 84,000 29% 290,000 1990 292,000 26% 372,000 33% 463,000 41% 1,127,000 2000 1,267,000 30% 588,000 14% 2,403,000 58% 4,158,000 2008 2,903,000 41% 697,000 10% 3,497,000 49% 7,097,000 Source: Directorate General of Estate, Department of Agriculture 2008

59 Smallholding schemes also raise the question of gender and women’s land rights, as there is one land entitlement per household which presumably reverts to the head of the household, who is generally male.

86

Despite the large share of smallholding schemes, the dominance of private estates largely owned by a few conglomerates was clear by the end of the New Order regime and still persists (Madhur 2000, 26) (Table 1). In 1996, according to the Central Bureau of

Statistics of Indonesia, 457 oil palm companies, a large number of which from Malaysia, controlled 3.2 million hectares of land for actual production and speculative purposes.

This expansion continues despite regulations seeking to limit plantation concession sizes at least intermittently until 2004 60 and increase the direct benefit to smallholders. What is

more, the interests of those conglomerates were intertwined with smallholding schemes

locked in contract farming 61 relationships with estate companies. As White (1998, 231) states, “if plantation agriculture is the agrarian analogue of a large factory, contract farming is the agrarian equivalent of family-based industrial sub-contracting.” In this regard, oil palm smallholding schemes cannot be analytically separated from plantation agriculture, as both are geared towards large-scale agribusiness. More importantly, both are entrenched in the capital intensive plantation model.

Both oil palm smallholding schemes and estates are mobilised as a political project by state officials in Indonesia which entailed systematic devaluation of pre- existent economic systems. For contemporary state officials involved in oil palm agribusiness expansion, agro-ecological systems in remote areas of Indonesia manifest the triple absence of productive land uses, modernised agriculture and disciplined labour force (McCarthy and Cramb 2009). As Dove (1999) highlights in his study on Indonesian plantation officials, peasants and indigenous people are systematically represented as

60 See A. Casson 1999, p. 26 referring to “Plantation Use Permit Regulation, 107/Kpts-II/1999” Although the success of its application appears limited, this measure was intended to limit the power of former large Chinese-Indonesian monopolistic enterprises which were closely related to the New Order regime. 61 For a critique of contract farming see Little and Watts (1994, 65) who argue that contract farming like plantation agriculture are exploitation systems based on “networks of dependence and subordination”.

87 potential beneficiaries of plantation agriculture, yet also lacking in the capacities to understand its purpose and how it works. The plantation is used by state officials as a technology to fix the posited lacks of low income farmers and territories lacking transport infrastructures considered to be marginal to the state economy. The utter devaluation of pre-existent agro-ecological systems is intrinsic to the deployment of large-scale agribusiness.

Subjects of oil palm agribusiness in the post-New Order era

The economic-political crisis that led to the fall of the New Order regime caused extensive institutional transformation in Indonesia. Reformasi and Desentralisasi pluralised the population, allowed demonstrations and increased provincial and local institutions’ power. A resurgence of localised ethnic identity movements took place throughout the country; among the best politically organised movements were the Dayak ones in the provinces of Kalimantan 62 . Nevertheless, the Reformasi era came with a renewed emphasis on a resolutely neoliberal 63 conception of society and the role of

markets in achieving the right disposition of men and things. The decentralisation of key

mechanisms of government based on markets and volatile legal arrangements reshaped

the administration of the relationship between territory and people (McCarthy 2004). The

economic crisis of 1997-8 created a situation which led to further liberalisation of the oil

palm economy through the IMF/World Bank’s Sectoral Adjustment Loan (Fried, 1998).

Development through oil palm monoculture persisted, but the state further entrusted this

62 See Schiller (2007) on Dayak ethno-political movements in East Kalimantan. Brown (2002) provides a model of political analysis which identifies ethno-cultural political projects in Indonesia and explains how they come in opposition with political projects of the civic nation which depicts the nation as a single community of equal citizens. 63 See Harvey (2001) for a definition of Neoliberalism in a historical perspective.

88 economy to investors and landholding communities themselves. As a result, the latest boom phase of oil palm in Indonesia rests on highly diversified and volatile arrangements between landholders/smallholders, estate companies and territorial administrations. The latest phase of liberalisation has also affected wage workers in state plantations where permanent positions have been rare and legal frameworks for labour modified to become more flexible. Moreover, government investments (1964-1990) in rural infrastructures which had significantly improved living conditions and reduced inequalities in Indonesia were scaled down after the global financial crisis of 1997, which as a result exacerbated inequalities (Dhanani et al. 2009).

In the context of the increased autonomy at the provincial and district level

(otonomi daerah ), policies were established without clear implementation guidelines from a weakened central government that led to “the coexistence of different logics of regulation” (McCarthy 2004, 1205). As a result, decision-making related to oil palm was relegated “to the sphere of political and official interests” (Barlow 2003, p. 12).

Decentralisation policies have increased the importance of oil palm as district governments are forced to collect local taxes and find new sources of revenue 64 . In this new context, district governments compete with one another to attract agribusiness investments. The investment laws of 2007-2008 seek to facilitate revenue generation through oil palm. Tax incentives are provided to companies “that venture in rural and border areas to develop innovative industries that have the capacity to absorb large scale

64 District administrations are empowered to administer land development according to decentralisation regulations on regional autonomy. Friends of the Earth, 2008, 29.

89 manpower into the workforce.” 65 Such ultra-liberal regulations pave the way for further oil palm plantation expansion under the alleged imperative of economic growth, along with district government’s quest for revenue. However, plantation companies maintain a high level of independence in their own operations and control over distribution of profits as expressed by the official of a state plantation company who mentioned that his company had always enjoyed otonomi daerah .

However, the government has renewed its commitment to improve smallholders’ access to oil palm since the Crisis of 1997. According to Casson (1999, 26), referring to

Habibie’s government decree of 1998, Ekonomi Kerakyatan, “national land use rights and land ownership in the hands of a few individuals or companies shall be prevented in light of efforts to enhance the strength of cooperatives, SMEs and the people at large.”66

This was also followed in 2009 by plantation revitalisation for smallholders which aimed to support oil palm smallholder development, with yet few results (Kompas, Jakarta 19

January 2009 cited by McCarthy 2010). If large-scale plantation estates still dominate palm oil production in Indonesia, as according to official numbers they do, smallholders have increased their share of oil palm area since the early 2000s (Table 1).

In this context, the PIR-Tran programme was followed and largely replaced by the

KKPA, Primary Cooperative Credit for Members scheme (Kredit kepada Koperasi

Primer untuk Anggotanya ) from 1995-1998 for which many district governments have expressed interest. Although the programme was implemented under Suharto’s New

Order, the KKPA epitomises the latest set of principles by which oil palm secures

65 “The law is also permissive in land acquisition matters with lease for an initial 60 years with an option to extend for another 35 years”. Indonesia’s Investment Law, Undang-undang Penanaman Modal , 25 April 2007, iNusantara Networks, Socio-Economic and Political Analysis, www.inusantara.com.sg 66 See Decree No. XVI/MPR/1998 on Political Economy within Economic Democracy (Casson 1999)

90 development opportunities for agrarian populations (McCarthy 2010). The KKPA consists of a joint venture plantation scheme development in partnership between local landholders and the plantation company. According to the KKPA model, the plantation is set up by the private company in situ on landholders’ consolidated land areas in a joint venture arrangement. Joint ventures for large-scale agribusiness rest on direct partnership between plantation firms and customary land holding communities, with minimal state intervention. Landholders cede land rights in exchange for shares in the estate company or in line with the PIR model, in exchange for oil palm plots in the periphery (plasma) of the estate plantation (nucleus).

Models similar to KKPA were widely used in Malaysia, especially in Sarawak, under different development programmes (Bissonnette 2011). This strategy is meant to further the economic efficiency of development models through oil palm agribusiness.

The case study presented by McCarthy (2010) holds key observations on problems related to joint venture oil palm smallholding schemes (KKPA) in Jambi, Sumatra. Oil palm schemes in situ open a space for appropriation of resources held under customary arrangements. Joint ventures generally take place between large plantation companies and communities with often unclear and disputed land rights both within the members of the community and among communities. McCarthy (2010) emphasises that pre-existing economic and political power imbalances in land holding communities influence the attribution of oil palm plots in the scheme, and that a lack of transparency and accountability in the cooperative’s management was further exacerbating inequalities 67 .

Problems associated with KKPA schemes and more generally with joint ventures for oil

67 Many cases of distrust towards smallholders’ cooperatives, and conflicts related to land ownership within or between oil palm schemes have been reported in plantation belts of Indonesia. Interview Syerikat Petani Kelapa Sawit, Kalimantan Barat, 2008.

91 palm agribusiness can be attributed in part to the almost complete disengagement of the state even from monitoring and arbitrating tasks (Ngidang 2002; Majid-Cooke 2002).

Models similar to this one are widespread in an institutional context which favours personalised agreements between influential/powerful members of landholding communities and oil palm estate companies. Potter (2009) provides a comprehensive list from the Kalimantan Review of types of conflicts which have occurred in Kalimantan between 1998 and 2001, most of which are related to the failure of companies to provide sufficient oil palm plots (plasma) 68 . Plasma schemes have been used throughout the recent history of Indonesia as a mere tactic by estate companies to access large land areas primarily for the development of conventional plantations. However, the partnership

(kemitraan ) joint venture model described by Li (2011) 69 does not even burden itself with the provision of oil palm plots for smallholders. It relies on the constitution of a single plantation entity in which landholders become shareholders and dependant on the company’s dividends. In this scheme, smallholders are deprived of individual land titles.

This expanding model has facilitated the allocation of dividends to corrupt government officials who were not even involved in the oil palm scheme.

The implementation of smallholding schemes for oil palm agribusiness has increased the desirability of this economic option, but has also generated a large number of conflicts. Conflicts are widespread in the process of economic transformation through large investments for the development of oil palm agribusiness. A group of social and

68 In cases listed, companies converted land previously obtained from communities into oil palm for estate operations. Despite contract agreements, numerous companies had failed to provide oil palm kaplings (plasma) for the landholders. This in turn led to widespread cases of demonstrations, vandalism and violent confrontations (Potter 2009). 69 This oil palm plantation model will be further extended over 50, 000 ha only in Buol, North Sulawesi (Li 2011).

92 environmental NGOs have reported widespread cases of shooting (134 people), arrests

(936 people) and torture (479 people) in conflicts opposing smallholders and villagers to oil palm estate companies and their security personnel 70 . By mid 2009, a report by Sawit

Watch had recorded 576 specific cases of land conflicts related to oil palm plantations in

Indonesia 71 . However, in most of those cases, what is at stake is not so much oil palm itself, but rather the modalities of access to wealth.

The KKPA, as in the case of other joint venture projects for oil palm expansion in

Indonesia, marked an important shift in the ways in which knowledge of political economy was deployed for development. If the proportion of oil palm land attributed to smallholders has increased since the year 2000 (Table 1), the quality and reliability of oil palm revenues for many smallholders remains contentious. With the abandonment of PIR and the relegation of the state to the role of regulator, the relations between the population, territory and wealth are increasingly conceived as a mere extension of diffuse market mechanisms. Liberalization policies are meant to allow the swift mobilization of labour and land as exchange value through investments in oil palm. By doing so, widespread conflicts related to the implementation of oil palm schemes are relegated to issues of governance in the rhetoric of state and plantation officials. These problems are in fact embedded in large-scale agribusiness and contract farming (De Schutter 2011). As oil palm expansion becomes solely driven by private companies with the state and the

Transmigrantion Programme as enabling structures, socioeconomic development becomes entrusted to individual entrepreneurs, landholders and investors. The population itself, in line with neoliberal principles, is increasingly conceived as made of individual

70 Friends of the Earth, Life Mosaic and Sawit Watch (2008). 71 Interview with Fatilda Hasibuan, Sawith Watch, Bogor, November 4 th , 2010.

93 entrepreneurs with variable degrees of success and failure in the new oil palm agribusiness economy. Oil palm agribusiness, as it channels desires for work or affluence, secures economic growth and a relative degree of political stability in

Indonesia.

The political economy of possibilities

Oil palm agribusiness was deployed through different smallholding schemes in

Indonesia to reshape the agrarian economy of Indonesia. Concomitant with specific

projects through which oil palm reshapes the relations between population, territory and

wealth, are ongoing articulation of representations of possibilities provided by

agribusiness expansion at the scale of the nation. More precisely, oil palm provides

possibilities for experts to define prescriptions for land and labour in Indonesia. A range

of government and plantation officials engage in knowledge production and

representations through which the project of oil palm agribusiness solves particular

problems related to job provision, resource management, or economic development.

Visions of oil palm agribusiness in Indonesia constitute an attempt to rework relations

between territory, population and wealth. In this regard, oil palm agribusiness, although it

shapes different locales in complex and unpredictable ways, is represented as a single

device that generates uniform economic possibilities at the scale of Indonesia. These

forms of planning lead to the production of abstract categories for administration of

population and territory, and inform the allocation of concessions for large-scale

agribusiness, especially in Kalimantan (Figure 3). The production of territorial categories

94 for the project of oil palm agribusiness expansion by international organisations reinforces this particular project and transforms possibilities into eventualities.

Figure 3. Current oil palm monoculture areas and concessions earmarked for future expansion in Sumatra and Kalimantan, Indonesia. Sources: WWF 2008, based on Statistics of the Republic of Indonesia; Koh et al. 2011.

The postcolonial governments of Indonesia starting with the New Order have adopted policy orientations to ensure continuous growth in palm oil production to fuel exports (Hawkes 2006). Palm oil provides a significant contribution to the export economy of Indonesia and is central in foreign exchange earnings 72 . Indonesian

specialization in palm oil production is a strategy actively promoted by liberal economists

in Southeast Asia since the late 1960s 73 . As a result, this commodity has become prized

among influential political and economic actors eager to participate in the anxious move

72 According to the Directorate General of Estate Crop, Min. of Agriculture Crude palm oil exports is the most important source of foreign exchange in Indonesia. (Yasa 2007). 73 Strategies for Agricultural Development and intra-regional trade as growth strategy. ECAFE growth studies, series no. 7. Reprinted from Economic Survey of Asia and the Far East 1969, Bangkok 1970

95 towards the diversification of energy sources for which palm oil is increasingly considered 74 . The possibilities seemingly offered by oil palm agribusiness do not cease to

excite investors and planners who further envision endless opportunities. The growing

potential for diversification in energy through biodiesel production is perceived by

investors and policy makers as a guarantee of endless expansion in production 75 .

“Indonesia is expected to continue to be the leading producer with further expansion of the sector. The government has announced its objective to produce 40 million tonnes of palm oil by 2020, 50 percent for food and 50 percent for energy while becoming the “best sustainable palm oil producer in the world”. To achieve this, national production would have to double over the next 10 years with up to 300,000 ha of new land devoted to oil palm annually.” (World Bank 2011).

In the Indonesian context, real and imagined oil palm potential for expansion fuels

discourses which emphasise the abundance of both land and labour. This potential has

been envisioned for a long time. Accordingly, oil palm agribusiness is productive as it

continuously expands territorially to create jobs and generate wealth. In the mid 1990s,

the clear objective of allocating 20 million hectares to agribusiness in Indonesia was

articulated in the economic and political spheres of the country. In 1996, the founder of a

large agribusiness conglomerate and the personification of large politico-business

oligarchy families, Eka Tjipta, expressed the potential of Indonesia to become a giant in

the production of palm oil and paper pulp as strategic commodities 76 . This investor

envisionned that the 10 million hectares for oil palm cultivation will provide millions of

jobs ( lapangan kerja ) and smallholding opportunities ( petani gurem ). This vision of development through agribusiness clearly laid out possibilities for the predatory class of

74 These developments in palm oil production in Indonesia coincide with corporatisation and financialisation of agriculture globally (McMichael 2009). 75 For a critique of biofuels which are in fact agrofuels, see: E. Holt-Gimenez and A. Shattuck, Agrofuels & Food Sovereignty: Another Agrarian Transition. In: H. Wittman, A.A. Desmarais and N. Wiebe (eds.) Food Sovereignty: Reconnecting Food, Nature and Community. Fernwood Publishing 76 Eka Tjipta Usulkan Bangun 20 Juta Hektar Perkebunan, Kompas, 27 Juni 1996

96 capitalists close to the political power of New Order Indonesia. In this regard, the production of possibilities acts as a disciplinary power that channels desires towards a readily available economic option while excluding more democratic and egalitarian agrarian economic possibilities.

Many policy makers in Indonesia are confident in the role and reliability of oil palm expansion as a strategy to create jobs. This conception is conveyed by members of the political class involved in the promotion of the palm oil agribusiness 77 . These actors

represent oil palm agribusiness as a panacea for problems of underemployment and

unemployment in the country. In this regard, the director of an important technical school

of plantation agriculture, Lembaga Pendidikan Perkebunan (LPP) stated in 2009 that 9.5 million unemployed people in the country were candidates ( calon karyawan ) for work in the oil palm industry 78 . According to him, these candidates for work were from the densely populated central islands of Java, Madura and Nusa Tenggara. In this discourse, the palm oil industry has the potential of absorbing surplus labour from central islands.

Oil palm agribusiness is discursively presented as a unitary device of development linked to possibilities of employment. There remains a notion of strategic urgency in these discourses that posit oil palm as the only possibility to create wealth in the near future.

Moreover, the jobs described in these discourses conjure a vision of an undifferentiated universal population of landless workers.

The mega-project of an oil palm plantation belt in the border area in Kalimantan near East Malaysia exemplifies the discursive linkage between oil palm agribusiness, employment and border control. Although this mega-project, as it was conceived by

77 Rose Suharto, Oil palm commission. 78 Personal communication, LPP, Yogyakarta

97

Indonesian government officials in the mid-2000s, has now been abandoned, it has been recycled in smaller-scale priority infrastructure development initiatives in recent state planning through the National Agency on Border Management (BNPP) (Yulisman 2011).

The oil palm plantation belt mega-project put forward by the Indonesian government under president Meghawatti in 2005 sought to solve problems of illegal border crossing from Indonesia to Malaysia while creating millions of jobs 79 . The former governor of

East Kalimantan announced that the oil palm corridor project covering over 12 million hectares would create 18 million jobs 80 . More importantly, this project sought to provide jobs within Indonesia to hundreds of thousands of Indonesian workers otherwise participating in circular migrations to Malaysian plantations 81 (Potter 2009). In these

discourses on the immediate possibilities provided by oil palm, the productive power of

agribusiness in the narrative of linear national development obscures potential

alternatives based on political engagement with the problem of resource distribution.

Discourses that link oil palm agribusiness to efficient use of natural resources for

development are also important in policy orientations of officials at all levels of

government, such as at the provincial level. A speech delivered by the Assistant

Governor of West Kalimantan on the occasion of a political meeting 82 provides insights into the prevailing development vision among government officials. In this discourse, oil palm agribusiness was emphasised as an important development strategy. The Governor described at length the abundant natural resources available in the province as having

79 Wakker E., The Kalimantan Border Oil Palm Mega-project, Commissioned by Milieudefensie and the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation (SSNC), April 2006, p.7-10. 80 Demi Kebun Sawit Kaltim Ubah Tata Ruang Perbatasan, Kedeputian Bidang IPSK –Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia, 19 th December 2006, www.ipsk.lipi.go.id/inter/berita/detil_berita.php?vid=101 81 This also took place as Malaysia significantly tightened border control and the enforcement of coercion mechanisms for Indonesian plantation workers who crossed the border without permit. 82 Pancur Kasih, Hotel Kapuas, Pontianak, Kalimantan Barat, December 2009

98 inherent development potential. He emphasised that despite rich and abundant natural resources, human resources remained weak ( sumber manusia lemah ) and population scarce in the province which constituted a barrier to development. Agribusiness development ( pembangunan agribusiness ), according to him, would provide a way to expand infrastructures in the province and achieve economic development. It would also mobilize labourers from other parts of Indonesia to create new centres of growth in remote areas of Kalimantan. In continuity with transmigration programmes, this narrative presents an agrarian vision of development fulfilled through agribusiness as the most efficient way to redistribute populations and harness natural resources. However, it represents Kalimantan Barat as a space that needs to be reshaped and that lacks necessary infrastructures and interconnections. Successful ministers of agriculture in Indonesia have advocated for agribusiness development as the most efficient way to provide conditions of development and economic integration of the landless. The pro-poor discourses on agribusiness by Indonesian officials seek to broaden the political legitimacy and assert the populist orientation of rural projects, despite the structural limitations of large-scale agribusiness.

The discourses that create a field of economic possibilities through oil palm agribusiness are sustained by an important deployment of technical knowledge for planning. Research institutes are at work in the establishment of maps that demonstrate the potential of Indonesian outer islands for the expansion of oil palm. Future expansion envisioned stretches over more than 20 million hectares. The Centre for Soil and

Agroclimate Research and Development of Indonesia (CSARD) has been involved in the production of maps representing land suitable for oil palm agriculture in Indonesia. The

99

CSARD is part of an important network of international research institutions on forest and agrarian issues funded by North American and European international development agencies that operate in Indonesia in collaboration with state authorities. The CSAD is known for generating data which contribute to the promotion strategies of agriculture expansion based on reclamation of peat soil in the outer islands of Indonesia.

Figure 4. Potential land for oil palm expansion in Indonesia. Source: Center for Soil and Agroclimate Research Development, 2002.

The map produced by the CSAD (figure 4) demonstrates immense potential of agricultural growth throughout the Indonesian archipelago. The CSAD is producing maps which constitute through representations a field of agribusiness possibilities to be glanced through by experts, investors and state planners. The map shows large tracts of contiguous suitable land that represent an abundance of land resources for expansion of oil palm cultivation. This cartographic representation of land suitable to oil palm agribusiness based on remote sensing posits an ideal territory for the expansion of a profitable crop which obscures existing economic land uses and land holdings. In this regard, the maps have no practical use and remain a tool of ideal representation which

100 reinforces discourses of abundance. The agro-economic focus of the maps represents the

Indonesian outer islands mainly through the biophysical characteristics of their soils. The land, its agrological and topographical features, is readily represented as a commodity which has exchange value through its potential for the production of palm oil. However, the areas delineated for oil palm expansion erase the complexity of land concession attributions and competing claims for the utilization of resources on the ground. The maps conceal the highly political processes between the ideal potential for oil palm cultivation and its actualization. Among high-level civil servants, the abstract aerial representations of the territory and its productive capacities create an ideal plane for land- use conversion which rests on the creation and intensification of a resource frontier. With all-encompassing representations of the territory which promote a vision of radical transformation through oil palm expansion, a field of possibilities is created.

The application of the REDD programme (Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation from the United Nations) in Indonesia seeks to integrate oil palm agribusiness into environmental governance and conservation. The REDD programmes and the large investments it implies to prevent deforestation 83 provide a constellation of actors with new regulatory frameworks, and technical and legislative tools to increase the control of natural resources. In Indonesia, through REDD funded programmes, and with the use of satellite imagery, experts seek to earmark land which will be “preserved”, and set aside for conservation, as well as “degraded land” which will be converted into oil palm plantations 84 . The categorisation of land allows the legitimate expansion of oil palm

plantations. Land deemed ‘degraded’ has lost functional value which can be recovered

83 In March 2009, US$5.6 million was approved by the UN-REDD Programme Policy Board for the Indonesia National Programme. 84 World Resource Institute and Sekala 2010, RSPO meeting.

101 and enhanced through oil palm production. The category of non-degraded forested land calls into existence carbon markets that seek to commoditize forest protection.

Through REDD, oil palm agribusiness becomes a tool to intervene in specific territorial categories in the production of value. The association between oil palm agribusiness, development and environmental conservation is stressed by state officials and investors 85 and is further legitimised by global scale environmental governance projects. Oil palm agribusiness expansion on ‘degraded land’ is increasingly seen as a way to manage natural resources and protect the environment by channelling agro- industrial transformations onto specific territorial categories while seeking to integrate the remaining territories to modes of conservation. Political and economic actors converge in the alleged objective to pursue the expansion of large-scale agribusiness, while increasing its legitimacy as a means of socioeconomic development and environmental conservation.

Conclusion

Oil palm agribusiness in Indonesia derives from a history of interventions into the relations between population, territory and wealth. In this regard oil palm agribusiness is embedded in Indonesian agrarian politics. Throughout the agrarian history of Indonesia, ways of knowing population and territory through specific conceptions of political economy have been central to the complex task of exercising power. Following decolonisation, Sukarno sought to address posited problems of resource access directly by population redistribution with the transmigration programme. Since the social and

85 As noted by Djama and Daviron (2009) these discourses have become important in oil palm agribusiness: “Accepting that conservation means development as much as it does mean protection.” As stated by Datuk Carl Bek-Nielson, chair of United Plantation and member of the Executive board of RSPO.

102 economic experiments of guided economy under Sukarno, successive actors in line with predominant (neo)liberal economic principles have sought to optimize relations between population, territory and wealth. The growing demand for palm oil was integrated into changing regimes in the continual expansion of markets for land and labour.

As the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter (2011) states, oil palm, like other agribusiness monocultures, is still seen by influential political- economic actors in Indonesia, as elsewhere, as an efficient strategy to achieve rapid economic growth and labour absorption. However, the evaluation of the effects of globally traded commodities such as palm oil fails to recognize that plantation agriculture radically reshapes complex geographies in irremediable ways. Large-scale estates dedicated to oil palm agribusiness are nevertheless considered indispensable to the development strategies of Indonesian government officials. Indonesian officials constantly attempt to integrate oil palm agribusiness in smallholding agriculture through contract farming. In this regard, the enforcement of regulations to constrain plantation companies to engage in the formation of smallholding schemes appears as a productive way for the government to “channel agricultural investment into the support of small- scale farming” (De Schutter 2011, 261). Numerous policies until recently restate the importance of oil palm smallholding programmes and new regulations seek to compel estate companies to integrate smallholders into plantation agriculture. For government officials, the agribusiness smallholders are granted direct access to capital and technical knowledge provided by the estate. However, given the flaws inherent to smallholding schemes, oil palm as development device also shows important limitations and contradictions.

103

In the project of development through oil palm agribusiness, the subjects constitute two groups: 1) smallholders who are potential entrepreneurs in agribusiness; and 2) landless workers who are expected to reap the wealth trickling down from agribusiness. The plantation involves the possibility to create a space where population and labour would be interchangeable, or at least in theory at the stage of planning. In oil palm agribusiness, security rests on the production of possibilities of future development for the population and the relegation of contradictions in profit-driven agribusiness to mere contingencies. The oil palm economy in Indonesia constitutes a complex site of power struggles, as the right disposition of things and people shifts according to conceptions of political economy and ways of rendering populations and territories knowable to those who exercise power. Oil palm agribusiness in the contemporary history of Indonesia does not entail predetermined ways of knowing and doing, but is continually redeployed through different modalities as a strategy for different institutions and organisations to govern resources and people. The conversion of a territory into an oil palm smallholding scheme or estate is no finality, but indicates the emergence of new labour subjectivities and geographically specific forms of social organisations and power dynamics which I turn to in the next chapters.

104

Chapter 4

Subjects of agribusiness: Valuing land and labour

“Relations of power…they are played; it is these games of power ( jeux de pouvoir ) that one must study in terms of tactics and strategy, in terms of order and of chance, in terms of stakes and objectives (Foucault, 1994a, 3, pp. 541-542). The game is a useful metaphor for Foucault. In a game one is both free and constrained. Players find themselves at points where they must respond. In addition, movements in a game are infinitely variable. While players are confined by rules, indefinite number of possibilities and options exist within them…” (Olsen 2004, 457)

Introduction

Oil palm agribusiness in Indonesia is the outcome of a specific history of control and discipline over populations, territories and wealth. This crop has become an important investment opportunity in Indonesia for large conglomerates as well as local smallholders and investors. In many parts of Indonesia where I conducted research, large areas of land are now valued for their potential transformation into oil palm plots by small local investors such as Pak Alma whom I met in Nias, an island of North Sumatra.

In this region, oil palm has recently been planted by smallholders as a speculative investment. The lack of a processing mill on the island means that oil palm cannot be exchanged for capital. Yet Pak Alma, a confident patriarch with important local authority, decided to engage in oil palm agribusiness as an independent smallholder after his son befriended workers on an oil palm plantation in North Sumatra and brought back seeds and information. Pak Alma was quickly convinced of the economic potential of oil palm in the region where he lives in Nias and decided to learn about oil palm production, which he describes as “stealing experience” ( curi pengalaman ). He decided to sell the

105 real estate he owned in tourism to invest all his capital ( modal ) in oil palm as he dared to try ( berani coba ) planting oil palm. In 2007 he invested all his financial assets to buy land, oil palm seeds, fertiliser and pay labour to develop his own plantation over 8 hectares. In parallel, over the years he wrote a business plan and tried to convince the officials from the Ministries of Agriculture ( Dinas Pertanian ) both in Nias ( kebupaten ) and North Sumatra ( propinsi ) to attract investments for the development of a palm oil mill in the district where he lives. Pak Alma also managed to convince 30 families in the vicinity of his property to plant the oil palm seeds he could provide. By doing so he reinforced his economic position as the instigator of an important project in his attempt to obtain investments for the development of an oil palm mill. He mentioned being regularly visited by high-level government officials and investors from Indonesia and other countries. In the quest to access wealth from agribusiness, he has achieved a central position in the nascent, speculative field of oil palm agribusiness in Nias.

Pak Alma deploys oil palm agribusiness as a project in Nias which could eventually reshape economic possibilities for important populations in large territories.

The outcome of his crusade to attract investment for the construction of a palm oil mill is uncertain and constitutes a gamble. Yet Pak Alma’s willingness to take risks and to engage in speculation allows him to become an instigating agent of agribusiness 86 . As this case shows, the capacity to envision agribusiness is not the sole privilege of large investors but can also be located through discourses and practices of smallholders and small investors. The figure of Pak Alma is one of a subject who is cultivating his privileged access to capital and knowledge that may secure his position and enable him to

86 The set of practices deployed by Pak Alma can also be read as a manifestation of Weberian notions of ethos, what he calls the ‘spirit of capitalism’, (1920, 55)

106 accumulate capital in the oil palm agribusiness economy. The achievement of profit maximisation through oil palm agribusiness is dependent upon a specific set of tactics.

While the field of agribusiness is of course structured by the uneven distribution of capital, it is also highly dynamic as subjects are jockeying for potential new positions and access to power.

As the case of Pak Alma shows, through oil palm agribusiness, power is deployed by institutions, groups and people to attempt and govern the relations between populations, territories and wealth. Oil palm agribusiness is highly valued by a large range of people for the economic possibilities it allows to envision, not necessarily as an immediate source of income. In many narratives, investment in oil palm cultivation comes with the belief in the potential of the crop, and this high potential justifies risky investments and speculative operations. Before it exists as a material reality, oil palm agribusiness is envisioned as a desirable economic activity that reinforces the benefits of an agent able to engage in this production in a position of power. Once large-scale agribusiness schemes are in place, the material conditions produced through specific forms of knowledge and practices govern modalities of access to wealth. The reality that takes shape on the ground, just as the attempt to mobilize oil palm agribusiness as a project, forms a field where relations of power are constantly played.

In this chapter I attend to specific figures of agribusiness and conditions in which they impose or are subjected to a specific vision or conception of economy through oil palm agribusiness in Indonesia. I attend to the ways in which oil palm agribusiness structures a field of meaning and economic practices in which power is mobilised by different subjects. I contend, as Barker and Lindquist (2009: 37) that specific

107 subjectivities embody a “creatively constituted subject position” that is produced by the intersection of social processes of signification and individual creative engagement with large-scale agribusiness. First, I look at the formation of oil palm agribusiness in a region of West Kalimantan by paying attention to meanings of land and labour for a range of subjects. I emphasise the contingent and dynamic formation of markets for land and labour. I focus on the entanglement of social and technical aspects of production management to explain land accumulation and exclusion from capital accumulation.

Then, I examine the field of oil palm agribusiness from the perspectives of workers and the forms of power they are able to mobilise in everyday relations often in adverse livelihood situations. I look at sociological aspects of gender and age that further differentiate subjects of oil palm agribusiness in the labour management practices on the estates. The terminology used to describe and categorise labour and the ways in which the labour of different groups of agribusiness subjects is valued are scrutinized.

Reshaping land and livelihoods

Social and technical experiments

From the 1980s onward, the Indonesian government has implemented contract farming smallholding schemes in partnership with private oil palm companies and financial institutions. These schemes manifested the attempt of political and economic actors to materialise a vision of economic change. The oil palm agribusiness smallholding schemes (Perkebunan Inti Rakyat, PIR or People’s Nucleus Estate scheme) have been instrumental in the oil palm boom as they fostered important investments and agro-industrial infrastructure development. The PIR scheme includes three distinct

108 territorial and managerial units; the smallholding scheme itself (plasma) is integrated into the broader structure of the oil palm plantation company which retains management over the core (inti or nucleus) of the plantation and the oil processing mill ( pabrik ) (Figure 5).

An interpretation of the PIR terminology is provided by Dove (2011, 28-29). According

to him, the PIR model and its terminology reveal that it is inherently a structure that locks

smallholders into a relationship of dependence vis-à-vis the estate or plantation company.

“The relationship between the smallholders and the central estate is reflected in their respective official labels, based on terms drawn from biology: the central estate, with its own planting and processing mill to which all produce must go, is the “inti” or “nucleus” and the surrounding smallholdings are the “plasma”. An explicit goal of nucleus-estate managers is to ensure the dependence of the smallholders and the dominance of the nucleus not only in terms of politics, economics, and technology, but also in terms of the authority of the estate’s regime of knowledge. The nucleus is spatially and ideologically represented as the source of…expertise for the surrounding smallholdings…the nucleus estate reflects an explicit privileging of estate knowledge: the smallholders are supposed to learn from the central estate holding, not the reverse.”

As does Dove (2011), I acknowledge the unequal power relations experienced by smallholders incorporated to the agro-industrial complex of oil palm production on a plasma scheme. However I emphasise the way in which the economic field created by oil palm agribusiness is conducive to exacerbating differences. Ultimately, the PIR scheme contributes to the diffusion of forms of knowledge and rationality that allow some agents taking part in the smallholding scheme to reinforce their dominant position within the

Plasma scheme. Therefore, relations of dependence, although they are shaped by the relation between the Plasma smallholders and nucleus/inti, also take place in a dynamic and diffuse field of market exchange that play out in broader social relations structured according to gender, ethnic and age differences. The realisation of the diffuseness and complex configuration of relations of dependence derives from post-structural thinking best represented by Foucault. However, in the context of plantation agriculture, to grasp

109 the full material implications of power relations within an oil palm agribusiness scheme leads to draw on Marxian critical insights. This body of literature best represented by

David Harvey or Harod (2001) sheds light on the formation of geographically specific labour regimes as they unfold through everyday relations of production and reproduction.

As smallholding schemes and estates reshape the economic realm and incorporate new subjects, it weaves into the pre-existent social fabric of places, and improves the situation of some with a privileged role in market relations. As Hall et al. (2011, 147) point out, markets do not operate in a social vacuum, “it takes human agency –socially situated practices– to create and sustain the conditions necessary for a market to operate, and to insinuate ‘the market’ into intimate relations to the point where it overrides other considerations.” In many parts of rural Indonesia, agents reinforce the roles of markets in livelihoods as economic calculations become further tied to jobs available on estates or land available for oil palm cultivation. In the context of the oil palm boom, whether people are smallholders or plantation workers, social life is largely mediated by market valuations of labour and land.

The implementation of an oil palm agribusiness scheme reinforces particular market mechanisms that emerge in the valuation of labour and land. Markets form a field of calculability through which value is produced according to social conceptions of difference 87 (Callon 1998). Markets are sites of evaluation and calculation embedded in complex institutional arrangements and social relations. The labour and land markets that emerge around oil palm agribusiness lead to the emergence of calculating agents, managers and investors that set in motion processes of accumulation. Market relations

87 M. Callon (1998, 2) makes a useful distinction between the market as a concept and the marketplace the reality of which market refers to. In the same way, the distinction between the economy and economics, the latter being the science that studies the former.

110 come to exist through dynamic institutions that determine possibilities of commodity acquisition and control of work and livelihood (Bourdieu 1981). With the expansion of large-scale agribusiness, investors and developers invoke market relations and logics in their efforts to enhance institutional legitimacy and cement resource appropriation and ownership. They rely upon and deploy market relations to legitimize their appropriation of commodities, land or labour.

To better capture the constitution of the economic field formed by agribusiness, I go back to the origins of the PIR project in a region of study. In the region where I conducted research in the Sub-district ( kecamatan ) of Meliau, in the district ( kebupaten ) of West Kalimantan 88 , oil palm has become an important plantation crop in the mid

1980s when the state plantation company (PTPN) converted its rubber production into oil

palm on the Northern bank of the Kapuas River. In 1991-1992, the plantation company

that I refer to as Perusahan Swasta A (PSA) was granted a concession over 10,000

hectares to implement a PIR oil palm smallholding scheme on the southern bank of the

river, which then engulfed most of the land of a predominantly Malay community I shall

call Desa Buaya (See appendix 6). In this project, the inti estate extends over 2,000

hectares, approximately 20% of the total concession granted to the plantation in the early

1990s. The remainder of the concession was divided into sub-schemes of oil palm plots

(kaplings ) of 2.5 hectares each that were distributed to both local landowners and

transmigrants from central islands. All smallholders participating in the PIR became

members of the Kooperative Unit Desa (KUD) which coordinates the collection of fruits

and inputs provision. Although an assistant manager at PSA pointed out that issues

encountered on the smallholding plasma scheme are social and those encountered on the

88 In collaboration with Universitas Gajah Mada, Yogyakarta.

111 inti or estate are technical, this case study shows the close entanglement of social and technical issues and their role in shaping access to power for a broad range of subjects.

The PIR implied far-reaching socioeconomic and ecological reengineering for the inhabitants of the region as they found themselves incorporated into a radically new set of social and ethnic relations. In most schemes the land was shared between pre-existing inhabitants and transmigrants from densely populated islands sponsored by state programs to resettle into the scheme in Kalimantan. Indonesian state officials in New

Order Indonesia sought to integrate different ethnic groups in Kalimantan to ensure better incorporation of the region into the nation 89 . Indonesian government officials through

PIR schemes attempted to create cosmopolitan societies in new communities organised

around oil palm agribusiness. Through the PIR programme, the inequalities in terms of

land possession between local inhabitants and Javanese transmigrants were to be levelled.

In the PIR schemes, all Indonesian subjects were seemingly provided with the same

material base to engage in oil palm agribusiness. According to dominant political

conceptions, Indonesian national subjects were ethnically diverse and were represented as

such (Hitchcock 1998), yet nation-building implied legal and political uniformity for all

Indonesians (Fidzpatrick 2006, 76).

At the start of the PIR project in Meliau, most indigenous inhabitants – Malay inhabitants of Desa Buaya and Dayaks from nearby communities – were convinced or coerced by local leaders to give up pre-existing land owned according to customary arrangements in exchange for a plot planted with oil palm in the PIR scheme. The terms

89 According to prevailing representations of ethnic differences, the land-rich and capital-poor indigenous inhabitants of West Kalimantan were to be socially integrated with the land-poor but industrious and disciplined Javanese. (Pemberton 1994, 14). This process was described by indigenous Dayak organisations in West Kalimantan as a form of acculturation and social control for Dayak communities would (Manifesto Gerakan Pemberdayaan Pancur Kasih 2009).

112 of the trade set by the company were 7.5 hectares of land previously used for rubber and shifting cultivation in exchange of 2 hectares of land planted with oil palm in the scheme plus 0.5 hectare for a house and a garden, which formed one plot or kapling . If a family

owned less than 7.5 hectares, it could still receive a kapling but often in a less favourable

location and with a longer delay. Those who owned more than 7.5 hectares could receive

more than one kapling . The emergence of oil palm agribusiness in the region did not

entail the constitution of markets from scratch; populations had already been integrated in

different degrees within commodity markets fuelled by rubber cultivation introduced

during the Dutch colonial period. However, large-scale oil palm agribusiness intensified

and extended market mechanisms and further integrated populations’ livelihood in

industrial processing systems, producing market dependence which redefined livelihood

conditions and possibilities. From an opportunity, market relations became an imperative

(Wood 2002, 60).

As agribusiness reshapes practices of production, it weaves into the pre-existent

social fabric of places, and improves the situation of subjects with a privileged role in

political and economic decisions. Depending on social position, not all families gave up

their land, and some who did were never compensated. The lands of more powerful

families not surrendered to PSA their land rights formed enclaves in the plasma schemes

(Figure 5). These enclaves allowed their owners to preserve ownership rights and

livelihoods on large customary lands often planted with rubber as the surrounding areas

were being converted into oil palm monoculture. The owners of these land enclaves were

able to make independent economic decisions and to benefit from the high prices of

rubber in the 2000s. Moreover, they were also able to transform their agrarian activities

113 gradually and start oil palm cultivation at their own pace, avoiding what for many has been radical incorporation into the field of oil palm agribusiness and erasure of previous livelihoods.

Enclave Enclave Plasma smallholding scheme

Nucleus/Inti estate

Plasma Processing mill Plasma Sub-scheme Sub-scheme

Plasma Sub-scheme

Enclave

Figure 5. Representation of the PIR oil palm smallholding scheme. Source: Adapted from Dove 2011, 29.

In the predominantly Malay community of Desa Buaya, many felt betrayed by the head of the village ( kepala desa ) who orchestrated the dispossession of families with limited political power. The outcome of these land deals depended on contingent arrangements between the families and the village administration working with officials of the transmigration programme and the oil palm company officials. Influential individuals in the community usually ended up with a better deal than those who lacked access to political power. Landholders were often pressured into giving up their land as most did not have formal land titles and were told that their land would be taken with or without their agreement. In this context, one oil palm plot was seen as the best a family

114 could receive. Those who gave up their land received food rations and a stipend for a year as compensation. However, the radical transformation of land ownership patterns and land use had dramatic effects as the economy based on smallholding rubber and food crops was erased.

The land thereby acquired by the company through land deals with local

inhabitants was used to set up plasma smallholding schemes for transmigrants within the

PIR. The Tran-PIR participants came from densely populated islands of Indonesia such

as Java, Lombok and Nusa Tenggara Timur. They were sponsored to migrate and

provided with oil palm plots ( kaplings ) and food rations upon arrival. Transmigrants

settled in the houses provided by the transmigration department on PIR sites and usually

formed kinship based on ethnicity and language. One transmigration site would generally

be organised by ethnicity, as for instance transmigrants from Flores would regroup and

organise around cultural activities specific to the community of origin. Indigenous

participants to the PIR scheme largely remained or resettled in their village of origin even

if they were provided a house on the scheme. Kinship relations appeared very important

for populations who found themselves in adverse situations after resettling on PIR

schemes. Once local inhabitants and transmigrants started claiming revenues from their

kapling , they had to repay a debt which could take between 30% and 40% of their total

revenues from the palm oil sold to the mill. Until the debt is fully repaid, the ownership

title of the smallholder is held by the bank that finances the company.

Social categories of land owners and wage workers are often blurred in contexts

of agribusiness schemes in Indonesia. In the decade following the beginning of the oil

palm scheme many plasma smallholders were unable to derive an income from their oil

115 palm plot. Newly settled transmigrants and local inhabitants who surrendered their land to the company found themselves deprived of livelihood permanently or until their oil palm plots provided sufficient yields. All smallholders had to fall back on other sources of income outside the smallholding scheme for an extended period of time as oil palm takes up to 10 years before providing sufficient amounts of fruits without optimal fertilization. In this situation, most smallholders worked for PSA, whether as daily workers on the core estate (inti) or on the plasma where they were hired to clear land and plant plots with oil palm for future settlers. This work provided them with enough money to sustain themselves and their family but remained close to the bare minimum ( pas pasan ).

The transmigration programme constituted a pool of captive labour where smallholders were in fact plantation workers. Whether the constitution of captive labour was planned or not by the company remains hard to assess, however the outcome was beneficial to the plantation company. Considering the low yields obtained by most smallholders due to the lack of fertilizer provision, many have been working on the inti estate since 1992 and still do. More than two decades after the start of the PIR scheme, many smallholding families complement their income by wage work on the estate.

Smallholding families in plasma schemes provide a large part of the labour needed for the operations of the inti. One kapling planted with oil palms provides a basic income for a family which is often supplemented by work of both the male and female on the plantation or on the plots of neighbours unable or unwilling to perform strenuous tasks 90 .

The labour flows from the plasma to the inti, within the plasma, but also from the inti to

90 In many cases, male smallholders with a productive oil palm plot would work up to 10 days per month on the estate (inti) and up to five days on plasma plots of neighbours to supplement the family income.

116 the plasma as often harvesters hired by the estate management will spare time to work for plasma smallholders.

These smallholding schemes have produced a socioeconomic matrix where inequalities of chance and access to capital have quickly manifested themselves. The ideal plan designed to provide revenues to all families taking part in the PIR encountered important implementation problems. According to all informants met in the PSA scheme of Meliau, fertiliser provision by the PSA Company was highly deficient in the first years of settlement, which significantly delayed the moment where people could derive revenues from their oil palm plot. In these conditions, a significant number of the transmigrants and of the local inhabitants involved in the smallholding scheme sold their kapling in the years after they joined the scheme. According to village-level information corroborated by different sources, approximately 50% of the initial landholders have sold their kapling which according to field observation is a conservative appraisal. A large number of families had limited resources or time to invest in their own kapling and let it deteriorate. Despite the low productivity of oil palm plots in the first decade after the settlement of the PIR scheme, many held on to their plot as they valued the potential and considered future possibilities of oil palm agribusiness. In this way they often secured a relatively advantageous position as landholders in the field of agribusiness once they accessed revenues 91 .

The PIR programme has led to the formation of communities of smallholders, although not in the way that was originally envisioned. In one of the sub-schemes of the

91 Nearly 20 years after the beginning of the programme, an oil palm plot can provide a family with one to six tons of fresh fruit bunch (FFB) per month. In 2011, one ton of oil palm fruits, depending on the grade of the fruits, provided a smallholder with approximately 1,630,000Rp per ton when sold at the PSA mill before deductions ( pemotongan ) of all kinds for transportation and road maintenance which represent approximately 15% of the value of the fruits sold to the PSA mill.

117

PIR scheme conceived for 500 households I shall call Desa one, there were 216 households registered in 2011. Some of the households living in Desa one had recently settled in the sub-scheme from other communities in the vicinity who had more recently arrived to live with kins. Some were spontaneous migrants who had not originally taken part in the PIR programme. Spontaneous migrants 92 had never been granted an oil palm plot and were wage workers on the scheme. Out of the 500 oil palm plots in the sub- scheme, many were owned by people who resided in other villages. As a result, the land ownership structure has become more geographically diffuse as kaplings are being traded between smallholders of different villages and communities. The sub-scheme became a viable desa yet not only with the population that had been mobilised in the first place.

The social contours of land accumulation

Representations of wealth through land accumulation in plasma schemes are conveyed on different scales in Indonesia. The department of labour and transmigration

(Kementerian Tenaga Kerja dan Transmigrasi ) is celebrating the richest transmigrant of

Indonesia. And the first prize was awarded in 2010 to a transmigrant from Jakarta

involved in oil palm cultivation 93 . In the vicinity of the PSA plasma scheme, wealth is directly equated to the number of oil palm plots owned. “He is rich ( sudah kaya ); he owns a lot of plots” (punya banyak kapling ). These successes in land accumulation also imply the transformation of plasma smallholders into entrepreneurs who now rely on the

92 In this regard, the oil palm economy is attractive to spontaneous migrants, especially to young men. Alex, a 40 year old migrant from Timor who recently started working as a truck driver in the plasma scheme told me: “It’s easy ( mudah ) to get work here. In Timor there is no work except farming. As a farmer you only earn enough to eat ( cukup untuk makan saja )”. 93 Berita Ketransmigrasian, Transmigrant and UPT Officer, Elections Trustee, at the National Level in 2010. Joko Prawoko earns Rp 211,000,000Rp / year or an average of 17,500,000 million / month and became a transmigrant in 2006 in Jambi province, the fastest growing oil palm belt in Indonesia in 2010- 2011.

118 labour of paid workers. According to the regulations in which plasma smallholding schemes are entrenched, the smallholders are not allowed to sell their kapling to the estate company. Oil palm plots are endowed with a market value insofar as they are exchanged with other smallholders who are considered particulars and not corporations.

Many plasma smallholders have managed to accumulate numerous land plots and become actors of agrarian capitalism. Oil palm agribusiness is more capital intensive than it is time intensive and therefore is conducive to land accumulation in smallholding systems. The fact that one oil palm plot requires from seven to nine days of work 94 per month provides lots of time and flexibility to smallholders. Two adults in a relationship can maintain and harvest many oil palm plots or easily manage waged labour on important areas. In fact, the nature of oil palm which requires intensive labour only at intermittent stages for planting and harvesting is suited for an “absentee landlord-wage labour mode of production” (McCarthy 2010, 845). The modes of management rendered possible by the physical nature of oil palm allow temporary labour investments and land accumulation in non-contiguous locations. Land accumulation rests on land dispossession in a context of finite land resources.

A common way to explain why so many transmigrants and local inhabitants sold

their kapling on the smallholding scheme is in terms of lack of desire and capacity to

remain on the plasma scheme. It is widely said that those who sold their kapling and left

the plasma scheme could not handle it ( tidak tahan, tidak mampu ), they were not happy

in the PIR scheme ( tidak betah ). These explanations seem to conceal the complexity of

factors that affected conceptions of value and evaluations of future possibilities as an oil

94 7 hours per day: 2 days to spray pesticides (nyemprot ) + 2 days to harvest ( panen ) + 2 days to weed (babat ) + 2 to 3 days to apply fertilizer ( mupuk ).

119 palm smallholder. It remains that the structural conditions of access to oil palm smallholding were highly exclusive for people without the capital to withstand low incomes or capacity and willingness to become plantation workers. Those who stayed on the plasma scheme had specific cultural and economic assets and dispositions that gave them confidence in the future possibilities of oil palm agribusiness. The value they attributed to participation in oil palm agribusiness was an abstract operation that went beyond the immediate benefits and that often required extensive kinship support.

However, the price of land in regions of oil palm agribusiness increased quickly since the early 2000s. In 2005, a poorly maintained oil palm plot sold for 11 Million Rupiah in the plasma scheme of PSA. In 2011, the same oil palm plot could be sold for over 50 million

Rupiah.

Local inhabitants from communities such as Desa Buaya, even though they

provided the land on which the PIR was realised, accessed oil palm agribusiness on

highly uneven terms, and some were excluded from the outset. Local inhabitants,

contrary to transmigrants, had often no alternative place where to find livelihood after

being excluded from the scheme as smallholders. Many factors over the long term forced

a large number of local inhabitants to sell their oil palm plots, even though it was their

only landed asset. Many alleged that the oil palm plot they were given by the company

PSA was located too far from the village where they resided and that they had no

intention to resettle on the plasma scheme. Others mentioned having to sell their oil palm

plot when a member of the family fell ill and required prolonged and costly medical

attention. These reasons were often combined with the fact that families obtained very

low yields if any with oil palm as they lacked the capital to apply fertilisers and spray

120 pesticides on their plot. The PIR project that was supposed to provide local inhabitants with access to productive oil palm agribusiness rather transformed them into landless plantation wage labourers.

It is commonly said in Kuala Buaya that over 50% of the original smallholders

who received an oil palm plot in the Plasma scheme have sold it. Some of the landless

inhabitants of Desa Buaya live in highly precarious material conditions. Many informants

in that community, even people who were still children when their parents lost land

ownership, still remember those events and their implications. A young Malay man from

Desa Buaya who recently started driving an unreliable truck for a contractor of PSA said:

“we put up ( tahan ) with the work here because we don’t have land”. Later on, he told

about the time when his family ceded their land planted with rubber to PSA. This

suggests that the land and labour markets as shaped by oil palm agribusiness are not

completely naturalised, as people remember the contingency and unfairness of land

grabs. Land market is continually produced as people engage in operations where aspects

of livelihood, land and labour are being valued and exchanged.

Among oil palm smallholders, land plots are exchanged as stored units of wealth

and circulated as exchange value. Important wealth has been constituted in smallholding

schemes by farmers who have accumulated up to dozens of oil palm plots. Different

groups of people are identifiable throughout Indonesia for their propensity to become

successful investors in oil palm agribusiness. Many ethnic Chinese and Batak form a

distinguishable class of entrepreneurs in oil palm in Indonesia. Many smallholder who

identify as Chinese-Indonesian in West Kalimantan accumulated important wealth in

rubber cultivation and converted it into oil palm by buying plots in plasma schemes. It is

121 widely known that some people of Batak origin from Northern Sumatra, the region where oil palm has been cultivated for the longest in Indonesia, have specialised in oil palm investments 95 . Many have accumulated capital and knowledge to pursue aggressive land acquisition in plasma schemes. The expertise accumulated by individuals of Batak origin was allegedly in high demand at the time when oil palm plantation companies started their operations in Kalimantan Barat in the 1980s and 1990s. Myths of success and hard working dispositions also circulate about the Javanese people; some in many plasma schemes have achieved high levels of material wealth.

The economic scope of land accumulation in plasma schemes and the constitution

of the field of agribusiness are not only geographically limited to the oil palm scheme and

its immediate surroundings. Land exchange has repercussions for the agrarian structure in

smallholding schemes but also for agrarian economies in the transmigrants’ communities

of origin. With the creation of exchange value through oil palm, the capital derived from

land concentration in oil palm schemes is often re-invested in transmigrants’ villages of

origin. A transmigrant from Flores I met on the plasma in West Kalimantan in the plasma

scheme of PSA told of the way in which he bought the oil palm plots of his neighbours

who were from the same community as him. As the value of palm oil was low, his

neighbours who were from the same ethnic background decided that they had more to

gain by going back to their community of origin. The oil palm plots they sold had never

been maintained and were described as forest oil palm sawit hutan , a plot where other

tree and plant species have invaded and that requires rehabilitation work. With the money

he earned with his four oil palm plots, he was able to obtain a land title for the land he

95 Discussion with Janis Chung, invited researcher at the Center for International Forestry Research, Bogor, Indonesia, November 2010

122 still owned in Flores. He mentioned that he has obtained property titles in case members of his family wishes to move back to Flores. He described his investments as a way to secure a good future for his children 96 .

In large areas of Indonesia, oil palm plots are quickly appropriated as a legitimate

livelihood option and reliable form of stored wealth that maintains a good exchange value

on markets. In this regard, plantation workers from Desa Buaya who obtained permanent

jobs in the 1970s and 80s at the state plantation (PTPN) in Meliau converted their wealth

into oil palm plots. These heads of households are from wealthy Malay families in the

community and had obtained one or two plots from PSA at the time of the land deal.

They had increased their oil palm land ownership through successive acquisitions. They

secured ownership titles of these different plots and also managed to find reliable workers

to harvest their plots once a month. These smallholders in Meliau were part of the small

elite that set the norm of material success in the community. The people with access to up

to six oil palm plots are able to purchase more land and to obtain loans from the bank.

These smallholders display the capacity to mobilise important economic and social

capital to maintain a good position in the field of agribusiness and in the village economy

in general.

96 In the same vein, in Lombok Timor, one of the richest men of the village participated in a Tran-PIR scheme and accumulated 9 plots of oil palm in a Plasma in Kalimantan in the late 1990s and early 2000s. During my visit to Lombok Timur, the wealthy transmigrant was investing in the construction of a facility for the commoditisation of rice in Lombok, while constantly traveling between Kalimantan, where he owned oil palm land, and Lombok.

123

Independent smallholders

Plasma smallholding scheme

Nucleus/Inti estate

Processing mill

Figure 6 . Representation of the PIR oil palm smallholding scheme and perimeter of expansion for independent smallholders . Source: Adapted from Dove 2011, 29.

Once a mill is operational, independent smallholders can engage in oil palm cultivation beyond the plasma schemes, provided that they can secure access to land after the plantation company has finalised the enclosure process (Figure 6). Land acquisitions for oil palm are taking place within an important perimeter around the PSA palm oil processing mill. This land is valued for its relative proximity to the oil palm mills where fruits must be transported within 24 hours after harvest. In those regions most land not yet planted with oil palm is referred to as empty land ( lahan kosong ). The land market for oil palm cultivation beyond the plasma scheme is known as a better investment among inhabitants of Desa Buaya. In fact, the oil palm plots provided by the company PSA in the plasma are criticised as being of poor quality. The oil palm plots developed by small investors independently ( pribadi) are controlled by the landowners themselves who claim

124 that they provide higher yields and more freedom regarding where to sell the fruits 97 .

These independent smallholders contribute to the production of the expanding frontier of

oil palm agribusiness outside of the PIR Plasma scheme.

The epistemic boundary between estate plantations and smallholdings is blurred in

cases where independent smallholders have expanded their operations to the point of

setting up small estates. One wealthy family of agribusiness entrepreneur in Meliau

Kalimantan Barat is composed of a Batak migrant from Sumatra who married a local

Malay woman from a wealthy family. The husband secured an income as a plantation

official at PSA and was able to accumulate up to 200 hectares of oil palm independently

(pribadi) by buying land from Malay neighbours since 1995. He had been advised on

available land to buy by the head of the village ( Kepala Desa ) and concluded a

partnership with the nearby state plantation company. The pribadi plantation keeps

expanding and hires 20 permanent workers from the community who are managed

according to the standard plantation management model with defined targets for

harvesters and fixed daily wages for female workers involved in maintenance. The

capacity of smallholders to accumulate land inside and outside the plasma scheme blurs

the distinction between large-scale plantation companies and independent medium-scale

companies.

In regions of Kalimantan, investments in land outside plasma schemes are

endowed with legitimacy. In comparison, plasma oil palm plot ownership constituted

through PIR schemes is now increasingly challenged by Dayak political movements. The

97 L. Feitrenie (2010) and Rist et al. (2010) have emphasised the important economic benefits of oil palm cultivation for smallholders in Indonesia which explain the growing participation of independent smallholders to this economy. However, they have not taken into account the constraints of the agro- industrial structure centered on the formation of nucleus and contract farming schemes which form the majority of agents of oil palm agribusiness.

125 reengagement of the Indonesian political class with pluralism and the attempt to ensure a more equitable access to resources in the aftermath of the Reformasi has allowed the development of a Dayak ethnic consciousness 98 . Dayak political organisations which

have arisen in many parts of Kalimantan in the wake of the reformasi of 1997-1998 have

in fact led to important demonstrations of political power from many groups in

institutions of West Kalimantan. Dayak social and political movements are questioning

the legitimacy of land ownership of transmigrants on what used to be allegedly Dayak

customary lands appropriated for PIR projects. In this regard, the land markets for

smallholders as made of standard agreements are disrupted by political claims based on

ethnic citizenship in Kalimantan Barat. Many transmigrants from islands such as Java

have reported being intimidated by people who from Dayak organisations and who claim

rights on the plasma lands allocated to the transmigrants. This has translated into

evictions and forced land transactions to the benefit of members of Dayak groups who are

said to form homogenous ( kompak ) interest groups compared to Malay communities,

which according to pervasive narratives are more divided and individualistic.

Calculations in this context are enlarged to capacities to mobilise and deploy force for land acquisition along with the capacity of protagonists to articulate legitimate land claims and mobilise political support. Oil palm agribusiness constitutes a field of economic practices characterised by land deals, as shown in the case of land acquisition by PSA in 1992 and the capacity to mobilise power to exclude some and accumulate land and capital. Calculations also take place with regard to force and political legitimacy in

West Kalimantan.

98 Fidzpatrick (2006, 76); Schiller (2007) analyses the formation of Dayak organizations in East Kalimantan through forms of solidarities that can be mobilized to increase political power at the scale of the district or the province.

126

Valuing labour in oil palm agribusiness

Questions of gender

In the field produced by oil palm agribusiness, agents occupy vastly different positions in relation to access to capital. The land acquisition process and the deficiencies in technical and managerial support to the smallholders have exacerbated differences. For people deprived of land ownership or profitable land ownership, access to capital is largely structured by the value of their labour. The value of labour in plantation agribusiness is mediated by complex contingent social processes that rest on unequal power relations mediated by markets. Oil palm agribusiness comes with specific norms and practices directed towards defining the parameters of labour exchange. These norms and practices are part of broader commoditisation processes which lead to the formation of a distinct market-based economic realm endowed with its own laws 99 .

As oil palm agribusiness comes to dominate livelihood possibilities in a place, it produces conditions of socioeconomic differentiation legitimised through market mechanisms. It is well documented that large land deals that give way to market-based agribusiness schemes impact women and men in vastly different ways (Behrman et al.

2012). In fact, new conceptions of property and resources redefine patterns of social exclusion, devaluing the labour of populations of workers according to the emerging structures of meaning (Federici, 2004). Labour in this case is mainly valued according to gender, age, education and real or posited physical strength. The labour and knowledge of women is devalued as agro-ecological systems are replaced by monoculture industrial

99 Bourdieu (2000, 17) discusses the historical emergence of the economic realm as a specific game. The economic field is understood in this perspective as a cosmos endowed with its own laws which would confer validity or legitimacy to what he calls “the radical autonomisation” which pure economic theory operates by constituting the economic scheme as a distinct universe.

127 systems. Moreover, women in agrarian societies largely face a number of specific issues, namely poor access to capital and land, the double burden of work in their productive and family roles, and low participation in decision-making (De Schutter 2011a, 19). These sociological aspects help further refine the understanding of the field of agribusiness as it reshapes material and cultural possibilities of large populations of workers, whether landless or not in Indonesia.

Among plantation workers in the area under study in Meliau and elsewhere, employment opportunities on the inti plantations, private (PSA) or state owned (PTPN) are largely differentiated according to gender 100 . The oil palm plantation labour regime is

structured around gendered tasks performed by teams (geng ) of workers under the

management of a supervisor ( mandor ) at the bottom of the bureaucratic chain of

management. Conceptions of gender differences inform managerial practices in the field

of oil palm agribusiness and largely impose a relatively strict gendered division of labour.

On most plantations, a conceptual distinction is made between maintenance ( perawatan )

tasks which are largely reserved for women, and production ( produksi ) tasks reserved for

men. The sexual division of labour naturalises a “…strict distribution of the activities

assigned to each sex, of their place, time and instruments…” (Bourdieu 2001, 9).

Spraying pesticides ( menyolo ), weeding ( babat ), clearing bushes ( miring ) and applying

fertilisers ( memupuk ) are considered as light maintenance tasks and largely if not

exclusively performed by teams of women. In opposition, tasks conceived as highly

strenuous, harvesting ( panen ), loading and unloading the oil palm fruits in trucks ( muat )

100 The situation is slightly different on oil palm plantations in Malaysia where female labour involvement is less important, although still significant. On Malaysian plantations important populations of men also perform jobs usually devolved almost exclusively to women on Indonesian plantations.

128 or driving trucks ( sopir ) are referred to as production tasks and are exclusively performed

by men.

The jobs that are largely devolved to women on the plantation rest on naturalised

conceptions of women’s social roles in a context of male domination. In this regard,

women provide care to palm trees, whether in the plantation itself or in the nursery

through rows of palm trees 101 . Most tasks performed by women consist of bending down

to the level of the base of each individual oil palm tree to apply pesticides, fertilisers or to

weed them. The sexual division of labour is premised on ingrained differentiations

between male and women’s legitimate uses of the body (Bourdieu 2001, 23). The modes

of labour management exploit social bonds between groups of women from the same

village who work in the same team. As an informant narrates, “there is time to chat

(ngobrol ) before work when we gather in the morning, we eat together…we help those

who are slower to achieve the target so we can all finish earlier”. The breaks and social

rhythms that take place through work reinforce the conception of the job as casual even

through it is experienced as physically arduous.

The tasks assigned to teams of women in oil palm estates at PSA and elsewhere

place the bodies of female plantation workers in close proximity with toxic chemicals.

Oil palm plantation work exposes women to chemical pesticides and fertilisers which

constitute important health hazards 102 . Exposure to pesticides and herbicides causes

101 In describing the landscape of a tea plantation in India, Chatterjee (2001: 173) emphasises the discipline imposed on the landscape itself which mirrors the discipline imposed on the workers. Pruning in the tea garden “creates the flat and linear horizon of a strikingly and mathematically rationalised landscape.” According to her, the land of the plantation also creates its own temporality, its own plucking and pruning seasons. 102 See the report by Friends of the Earth et al . (2008) for an activist account on the health problems related to oil palm.

129 health effects such as coughing, sore throats and headaches 103 . Plantation companies such as PSA recognise the health effects of pesticide and fertilizer and allegedly try lessening the deleterious impacts of exposure to pesticides and dust ( racun dan debu ) by providing weekly milk rations to female workers. Along with milk ( susu powder ), general medicine

(obat ) to treat symptoms such as body aches is provided by the mandor or assistant manager to workers who request it. Free milk and medicine contribute to the production of an economy of basic foodstuffs provision which strengthens the intimate relation between estate management and workers. Most workers reported not wearing masks of poor quality they were provided, as they would prevent workers from breathing freely.

The faults and neglect of plantation companies are mediated by an economy of gifts which is questioned by workers themselves, many being aware of the limited value of these gifts. These forms of violence are largely entrenched in the modalities of plantation agribusiness which exploits both women and men’s bodies but differently according to social and cultural dispositions and positions.

The agro-industrial complex reinforces gender roles as the heterosexual couple is made into a complementary economic unit on the estate. Tasks and pay scales often cement segmented yet complementary job markets for women and men who form a couple. Some modes of labour management encourage the formation of male-female work teams, often married couples, in which the male will harvest ( panen ) the fruits from the trees and the female will pick up the individual fruits fallen from the bunch ( brondol ).

In many cases, the woman performs wage labour without being listed on the estate

103 Women’s pesticide poisoning has been documented by organisations such as Tenaganita and Pesticide Action Network (PAN) Asia and the Pacific, Kuala Lumpur.

130 company pay list, and is therefore considered as her husband’s helper 104 . Most maintenance tasks devolved to women are remunerated with fixed daily wage. Female workers are usually paid minimum wage 105 (upah minimum ) for a day of work of six to eight hours to achieve a target set in the number of pesticide containers sprayed or in terms of kilos of fertiliser applied 106 . Often marriage will cement an economic unit based on the higher earning capacity of a male who has become a truck driver, harvester or security agent and a female who seeks casual labour BL on the oil palm estate.

In comparison, the tasks of men in general are largely remunerated on a piece rate basis according to the effort that an individual harvester or driver can provide on a given day. In a large number of plantations in Indonesia, these tasks are remunerated with a basic wage for reaching a production target in kilograms of fruit harvested ( gaji pokok) and the surplus to that production target is referred to as a bonus ( premi ) for workers. 107

Oil palm fruits harvested are weighed when delivered to the mill, as drivers and harvesters are paid according to the number of fruits harvested. The daily income for harvesters on estates Kalimantan Barat ranges from 50,000Rp to 150,000Rp 108 depending

104 Kapadia (2003) also noted in her study a pervasive attitude among women to consider themselves as casual workers providing support to their husbands to increase the family income. 105 The regional minimum daily wage in West Kalimantan during the time of fieldwork (2011) was 35,000Rp, an increase from the preceding year (2010) when it was at 31,160Rp. 106 The targets at the plantation PSA are: 12 pesticide containers ( solo) each containing 15 litres of pesticides per day; 35 palm trees per day weeded ( babat ) for which workers are paid on a piece-rate, 700Rp. to 1,000Rp. per tree cleared of weeds according to the condition of weeds; 350 kilos of fertiliser per day, 2 kilos of fertiliser ( pupuk ) per tree. 107 The target sets the minimal weight of fruits to be harvested in a day. The target is adjusted by the central management of a plantation ( kantor pusat ) according to real and predicted harvesting conditions. Targets depend on climatic conditions, since the fruits can only be harvested if ripe and only ripen with sufficient rainfall. The conditions of production on the plantation depend on the weather and the application of fertilisers (kondisi produksi tergantung kondisi cuaca, pemupukan ) as well as the distance between palms, disposition, and configuration of the overall plantation (pemiliharan ). As a clerk mentioned, when there is a prolonged lack of rain, targets are usually unattainable by most harvesters – Informant PSA 108 The piece rate wage at PSA is 55 Rupiah per kilo, each fruit bunch ( tandan ) weighs between 10 and 30 kilos. A young and healthy man can harvest up to 200 tandan per day given the right conditions, which are: the height of the trees; the availability of ripe fruits; the capacity to circulate freely between the rows of oil

131 on the physical condition of the men and the availability of fruits. The daily wage ranges from 20,000Rp for half a day (four to five hours) to 35,000 Rupiah for a full six to eight hour day of work.

The oil palm plantation labour regime in which people find themselves integrated provides higher wage opportunities to men than to women. The agro-industrial system of plantation agriculture rests on large machinery, cranes, trucks and bulldozers all driven by men, which clearly leave the imprint of masculine domination in plantation social relations. In most plantations, the status of permanent worker ( karyawan tetap or pegawai bulanan ) which usually constitutes a long-term agreement between a worker and the plantation company that provides some benefits to the worker is only extended to men working in production (Table 2). The status is not directly related to the job, but more to personal arrangements with the estate management. As the assistant manager at the plantation PSA emphasised, it is very rare that women, unless they work as supervisor

(mandor ), are provided with permanent worker status. According to him, there is a large availability of women labour on the plantation and there is no need to provide them with a permanent status.

In the region under study and elsewhere, whether it is in the desas created with the

PIR scheme or in the pre-existing communities, the large majority of women are employed as daily workers. Daily workers, whether men or women, are commonly referred to as BL which stands for buruh lepas, free, casual, temporary labour or buruh

liar , translated as wild labour. Daily workers are officially referred to by plantation

companies as karyawan harian lepas (KHT) (see table 2). The BL work is daily ( harian )

palm (pasar pikul) if there are no tall weeds; the distance between the harvested palm tree and the road where the fruits get picked up. The monthly wage varies from 1,500,000Rp to 300,000Rp for harvesters.

132 or piece rate ( borongan ) work which emphasises the punctual and time limited nature of the job to accomplish. Borongan work is often done as a side job on top of regular employment. These nuances reflect the social meaning of daily work on plantations which is conceived and experienced as casual and informal work that comes with no serious commitment to the company. However these terms conceal the fact that a large population of women work on a regular basis as Buruh Lepas (BL) on the PSA or PTP plantation, and possess no other source of income to contribute to the family’s economic needs. Their material condition is closely related to the labour regime based on perceptions of abundant and disposable female workers already geographically incorporated into oil palm agribusiness.

Supervisors ( mandor ) and clerks ( krani ) who are largely males enjoy important power in regards to illegitimate access to money and fraud. Many daily women workers in different plantations including PSA and PTP have emphasised that practices of fraud and corruption as normal ( biasa ). When a daily worker takes a day of absence because of sickness, a common practice for the supervisor is to write down on the list that she was actually working that day. As the daily worker is not entitled to a wage for a day of absence, the supervisor in complicity with the clerk will appropriate the wage that is delivered to the worker marked as present on the lists. By a similar technique, supervisors often add names on pay lists that do not correspond to workers and appropriate the income in complicity with higher levels of management. The flexibility of the labour regime allows for more systematic types of fraud which happen at higher levels of management. One man recalls witnessing the assistant manager of an estate division still collecting the wage of 30 workers who had left the plantation a month ago. Along these

133 organised ways of securing higher incomes for higher management, workers mentioned rare and more sporadic cases of unpaid days of work when wages are simply appropriated by an immediate supervisor.

The agro-industrial complex creates material conditions that allow the reproduction of male economic domination among populations incorporated into the field of oil palm agribusiness. As Bourdieu (2001, 23) emphasised, masculine power

“legitimates a relationship of domination by embedding it in a biological nature that is itself a naturalised social construction”. The social conditions that allow men to become truck drivers 109 , security agents or staff members such as assistant managers provide a

privileged position in the field of oil palm agribusiness. These jobs also form distinct

fields of practices in which differentiation occurs according to age and experience, but

yet which provide some level of social mobility denied to most women. Even though men

who work in harvesting or loading oil palm fruits are also often subject to casual and

precarious labour arrangements, their average incomes are largely superior to those of

women. Oil palm agribusiness assigns relatively high paying jobs in a more permanent

perspective to men and casual and informal work to women which is considered by both

management and workers as permanently temporary. According to social conditions that

reproduce male domination, males perform production work and females maintenance

work.

109 Average income of a truck driver at the PSA Inti, Kalimantan Barat in 2011 is of up to approximately 8,000,000Rp per month which is over 300,000 Rp per day for the most experienced truck drivers working for a well established contractor. Truck drivers who carry fruits from the plasma scheme to the mill usually earn less; according to interviews, the wages of these drivers range from 2,000,000 to 5,000,000 per month.

134

Table 2. Work status official terminology in two estate companies in 2011

PSA – Perusahan Swasta A PTPN – State plantation Status Description Status Description Karyawan Harian Daily workers registered Buruh Lepas (BL) Daily workers registered Lepas (KHL) or BL or not on the paying list of e.g. pesticide sprayer, or not on the paying list of e.g. pesticide sprayer, the company; no mandor the company; guarantee mandor guarantee of minimum of minimum daily wage; daily wage; no formal no formal social benefits social benefits Karyawan Harian Daily workers registered Pegawai kontrak Status enforced in 2001; Tetap (KHT) on the paying list of the waktu tertentu Workers under contract e.g. mandor, company; received formal (PKWT) for a 2 to 4 year period; harvester, sarjana training; agreement to e.g. mandor, renewable contract; perkebunan kelapa work full time; minimum harvester minimum daily wage; (SPK) daily wage; no formal bonuses; agreement to social benefits work full time; no formal social benefits Pegawai Bulanan Permanent worker; Karyawan Harian Status abolished in 2001; (PB) predetermined monthly Tetap (KT) permanent worker; e.g. high-level office wage; possibility of e.g. mandor, minimum daily wage; clerk upward mobility; harvester bonuses; formal social bonuses; formal social benefits benefits Staff Permanent worker; Pegawai Rendah Status abolished in 2001; e.g. assistant predetermined monthly Bulanan (PRB) permanent worker; manager wage; bonuses; formal e.g. high office clerk predetermined monthly social benefits; apex of wage; bonuses; formal the estate bureaucracy social benefits Staff Apex of the estate e.g. general manager bureaucracy

Changing labour regimes, strategies and tactics

In a region overwhelmingly dominated by oil palm monocultures, livelihood opportunities for women and men are determined by changing and often volatile labour regimes in estates. And if most men have a relatively privileged economic position in the field of agribusiness, socioeconomic status and access to capital determines the level of vulnerability to changing work conditions. Labour arrangements are constantly subject to changes according to strategies and tactics adopted by plantation management to increase profits. As plantation companies are incorporated into larger conglomerates, targets of profitability are adjusted. In fact, the management of a large number of oil palm

135 plantations in Indonesia is contracted to expert teams from prominent agribusiness conglomerates ( system lahan kontrak )110 . In this way, the management changes rapidly and with it the labour regime that determines wages and labour conditions of workers. If this trend is more pervasive in private plantations, it is also significant in state-owned plantations (PTPN) (Table 2).

Sudden changes in labour regimes often trigger demonstrations against the plantation company as reported by many plantation workers from a large number of companies. The fact that an important proportion of workers are geographically embedded in the SPA oil palm agribusiness complex leaves many with no alternative but to accept the new work conditions. Women are generally more vulnerable than men to the changes in labour regimes as most are incorporated into the labour force on highly casual and flexible terms. Moreover, women are traditionally less mobile than men to look for employment in Indonesia.

The change in management that led to the generalisation of a piece-rate system at

PSA and which became effective in January 2011 triggered important demonstrations and mass desertions of families. The basic monthly wage ( gaji pokok ) of 750,000Rp per month to harvesters that was revoked used to provide security and also disciplined them to work every day. The basic monthly wage usually dispensed even during a leave justified by sickness provided a security to workers at PSA. The basic monthly wage cemented the relation between worker and mandor , as the worker was expected to come to work every day or to provide a valid justification of absence. According to one

110 Example provided by an informant in Lombok who explained that “a company which is usually from Malaysia is hired to manage land that belongs to another company in Indonesia, MGI (Multi Gambut Industri) but which is contracted to a private company from Malaysia PT Tabung Haji. It is just like an exchange system”.

136 assistant manager, the basic wage was removed because whether workers reached the production target or not, they received the basic monthly wage. The system based on a monthly wage created jealousy ( cemburu sosial ) and encouraged some workers to do the bare minimum while others systematically went over the target to earn more ( premi ). If

the assistant manager lamented that since the new labour regime, workers were not

compelled anymore to work every day and had left empty many positions, the piece-rate

system for harvesters had increased individual productivity.

Without the security of a steady bottom wage, many workers who decided to keep

working on the plantation were allegedly enticed to work harder and longer hours. Others

now only worked one or two days a week. Some groups of workers such as the mandor

and pemuat were able to maintain the previous system. However, harvesters without

readily available alternative had to accept the piece-rate borongan wage system, despite

the fact that the provision of a basic monthly wage is still the norm on oil palm

plantations in Indonesia. As the assistant manager stated with irony, “here all are casual

workers ( pemborong ) even though they are already permanent workers on paper”.

Large populations of workers are left with limited options in cases of volatile

labour regimes that further constrain economic possibilities. Predominant attitudes of

workers towards the labour regime in oil palm agribusiness can be understood in relation

to a continuum of livelihood strategies. The majority of the 11 women BL workers

interviewed at PSA, having achieved low formal education displayed diverse attitudes

toward the job on the plantation. Some highlighted their commitment to the work, as they

were left with no other livelihood options. Others, often married to husbands who earned

higher wages or still living at home with their parents, worked on a more casual basis and

137 dismissed the importance of the work. Most highlighted at the same time the unlikelihood of becoming a permanent worker and their unwillingness to commit to plantation work 111 . Bu Annisah, a migrant from Madura in her late 30s who is a daily worker at

PSA and is married to a man who works as a truck driver for the same company, exemplifies conceptions of freedom and valuation of casual labour arrangements as a way to exercise power over her body:

It’s great to work as a BL, some days my feet are in pain ( saya suka satu hari sakit kaki ), other days I have a headache ( satu hari sakit kepala ). Permanent workers, they have to work every day, but I’m still a daily worker ( buruh lepas ). I’m still free ( masih bebas ). The trained permanent workers (SPK) if they don’t want to work one day, they have to ask permission first, I don’t have to.

Posited freedom towards work obligation is represented as an advantage of the

work as opposed to a form of precariousness. Although in some cases the reasons cited

not to go to work appear related to the health impacts of the environmental hazards

inherent in the work itself. Older women mentioned they only worked a few days a

month as their health condition did not allow for more. Many said that it is impossible to

truly become a permanent worker because of social obligations such as weddings and

funerals, pregnancy or because of their physical conditions. Most BL work on average 18

to 21 days a month, partly as a result of meteorological conditions – fertilisers and

pesticides cannot be applied when it rains – and due to personal decisions or sickness.

The risk of lack of income due to meteorological conditions is devolved onto the BL

workers themselves.

The agency of people who lack land ownership or livelihood alternatives to

plantation labour is often exerted by the action of disengaging with work on estates. Ibu

111 The observations coincide with Ann Stoler’s (1985, 183) account of the oil palm plantation belt in Delhi in which she mentions that young daily workers from nearby villages describe their work as bebas (free) and also as merantau (migration).

138

Ani, a Chinese-Indonesian who just moved back to Desa Buaya after living many years in Jakarta, prides herself on working every day at the PSA estate, regardless of sudden changes in the wage system. She emphasises that when she started working on the plantation two years ago, “the labour regime changed constantly, alternating between daily wage ( harian ) and piece-rate ( borongan ). No women wanted to work; they preferred to stay at home to sleep. The weeds were so tall in the plantation, but there were hardly any workers to do the job”. This indicates the capacity of workers to disengage as a means of protest. Ibu Ani describes behaviours such as Luna’s, a 22-year-old single woman employed as BL with no family responsibility, who usually worked spraying pesticides ( penyolo ) and was more recently assigned to weeding ( babat ). She expressed discontentment with the changing labour regime on the estate as her fixed daily wage as penyolo was replaced by a piece-rate arrangement for weeding which reduced her

income:

The supervisor ( mandor ) in the office is more laid-back, so I’m not afraid of being fired ( tidak takut dipecak ). We are a group of six women working at PSA who decided not to come to work for one week after the rules changed. The plantation management at PSA said we have our own gang , that we form an evil group ( kelompok penjahat ). No one dares to bother us, we form a gang … It has become our main grief, there has to be a fixed daily wage ( harus ada gaji harian )…Before, those who worked weeding received a daily wage, but the boss changed at the estate and the rules changed too…There is no way that we can make as much money on a piece-rate wage as we did on a daily wage. There are some who don’t understand the problem. But if the boss wants to fire me, I just say please do so.

This quote sheds light on some aspects of the complex relationship between Luna and the plantation management. More generally, Luna’s narrative displays the tactics of workers faced with a changing labour regime who have to gauge possibilities in personalised arrangements with people who embody the management. It is through personalised arrangements that workers exposed to toxic substances can ask to be

139 transferred to a different task when they feel affected by pesticide exposure, or when they become pregnant. In distinction with Luna, many married women with children interviewed do not have the luxury to stop working for an extended period of time and do not dare risking loosing their job to protest against deteriorating labour conditions.

According to Kapadia (2003), “because the chronic unemployment of landless labourers makes them insecure and fearful, the privilege of belonging to work-teams makes them value these jobs greatly, thus ensuring not only an adequate labour force but also a hardworking and docile one” 112 . Kapadia’s observation does not entirely capture the

diversity of narratives of female casual workers employed at PSA. However it points to

the general power relations that govern work relations in an oil palm plantation belt and

the relative docility of large populations with limited livelihood alternatives beyond

estate work.

The loose employment relationship that links female daily workers to the estate is

used by workers as a form of empowerment yet it provides the management with some

level of control over workers who are free to work for low piece-rate wages and also free

not to. The estate management sets low wage conditions in a labour regime that provides

extreme flexibility and that ultimately retains workers with limited alternatives. The

abundant labour supply and the highly limited work alternatives in the region enable

these tactics of exploitation and show ways used by estate companies to provide wages

below the minimum fixed by the state through piece rate systems. Those who refuse to

work on a given oil palm plantation because of changing labour regimes or because of

more general dissatisfaction with the wage and working conditions need to exploit other

livelihood options. Some will revert to working on oil palm plots in the plasma scheme or

112 Kapadia (2003) cited in Loosing ground…p. 27.

140 on those belonging to relatives or friends. In the Plasma scheme, landless workers are usually provided with only a few days of work per month at an advantageous rate compared to wages on the central estate (Inti-Nucleus). Others have connections with landowners who are still involved in rubber cultivation and require labour for tapping.

However, as oil palm agribusiness keeps expanding within a given perimeter and filling up the land available around the palm oil processing mill, agrarian employment opportunities outside this economy require workers to travel long distances.

Labour markets have formed both in the plasma and inti. The wage provided by plasma owners is usually much higher than the wage provided by the estate, however it is usually reserved to the masculine job of harvesting. The wages in the plasma are fixed according to norms that form market rules among oil palm smallholders 113 . Oil palm

smallholders who hire workers to harvest their plot will usually provide the wage of

150,000Rp per ton compared to 55,000Rp per ton on the PSA estate. If these flows of

labour create some level of competition to the advantage of plasma smallholders, their

effect on the labour supply of the inti is moderate, considering the low intensity of labour

requirements of oil palm and the large availability of labour. In fact, plasma inhabitants

who specialise in harvesting oil palm plots in different plasma sub-schemes of PSA do

not earn more than the average permanent worker on the inti 114 , as the labour

113 Some smallholders in plasma schemes manage engage in social capital and rely on service exchanged with neighbours and kin for harvest tasks, gotong-royong, while also providing a small compensation in kind and money. 114 Pak Surdiman is the son of a transmigrant from Java who arrived in Kalimantan as a teenager. He now lives with his family in an abandoned house in one of the Plasma sub-schemes of PSA. He makes a living exclusively harvesting oil palm plots in different plasma sub-schemes, but in order to make ends meet, he has to travel long distances to reach oil palm plots ready to be harvested and pay for his own transportation costs by motorbike. He earns 150,000Rp per ton harvested but he says that many plots provide hardly one ton. He used to work as a casual worker at PTP, but said he was unable to work steadily every day ( gak mampu kerja setiap hari ). He works on average 20 days a month and says that he earns under 2,000,000Rp a month to support his family.

141 requirements on the Plasma are sporadic and filled through casual agreements between neighbours, relatives or acquaintances.

Questions of status

Market exchanges have taken place since the colonial penetration in the region of

Meliau in Kalimantan Barat in the early 20 th century. The capacity to obtain money in

exchange for labour or commodities in exchange for money is not something new for

most. However, the compulsion to sell labour to survive has only become widespread

with the emergence of large-scale oil palm agribusiness in the region and concomitant

rarefaction of available cheap or freely accessible land. For some this compulsion

towards market integration has been experienced as an opportunity through which they

have consolidated their social and economic position in a given space. Nevertheless, the

market exchange that derives from economic conversion to oil palm agribusiness, beyond

compulsion and opportunity, imposes itself as a naturalised reality, as a field where status

and social trajectories are defined. The market and concomitant forms of consumption as

a reflection of social positions become the privileged place of meaning formation. Access

to capital allows the deployment of economic resources but also provides privileged

access to knowledge and practices that maintains those privileges.

As oil palm agribusiness becomes the predominant economic sector in regions of

Kalimantan, families with access to sufficient capital are sending their children to private

agribusiness schools and programs of agriculture in universities. The social position of

parents in the field of oil palm agribusiness translates into dispositions for education of

142 children. Specialized education 115 allows children, male and female, to access higher paying jobs in the management of oil palm plantations or as clerks. In the region surrounding Desa Buaya, where most of the land in a large perimeter is privately owned, and where market processes are deeply ingrained in the social relations, formal education is valued by some as offering more livelihood possibilities. As noted by a retired permanent worker at the state plantation (PTPN) who managed to accumulate wealth throughout his career:

Before (when I started working) you could receive the permanent status directly (langsung ). At that time, what was important was the experience ( pengalaman ), not education ( pendidikan ). In the past, nobody had an education, now it is hard to get a permanent status on estates, only those with education stand a chance to become permanent workers.

Bu Céki, a 32-year-old married woman who is one of the rare permanent workers applying fertiliser at PSA, explained her conception of socioeconomic opportunities in the village of Desa Buaya. She said that a lot of the girls working with her are still teenagers; many are only 15 years old. “They don’t want to pursue education after junior high school ( melanjutkan sekolah ); they say that it’s better to receive a wage, even through they receive only the minimum wage as BL”. She mentioned that girls are used to working for money at a young age as their mother brings them along on the plantation as children during the school holidays. In this way, Ibu Céki highlights the risks inherent in the high accessibility of work on oil palm plantations for women. To make sure her two young daughters will receive a proper formal education, she never offered them to

115 People I met during my fieldwork in Kalimantan Barat were coming back or about to leave the rural area to attend training in Agribusiness schools in Bogor, Medan, at the Universitas Tanjng Pura in Pontianak. For most, parents were paying the tuition fees; others were able to benefit from scholarship programs. An informant who works on the plantation of PSA studied at the Polytechnic Institute for Kelapa Sawit in Bekasi and was sponsored by the company PSA itself after she attained high grades.

143 work with her on the plantation to prevent them from getting used to earning money at an early age.

In the oil palm plantations visited in the region of Meliau in Kalimantan Barat, consumer goods are increasingly accessible. As it is often the case among certain classes, social status based on immediate consumption capacity, and conspicuous forms of consumption is valued over what is experienced as the abstract knowledge provided in schools (Willis 1977). As a matter of fact, most young women working as BL on oil palm plantations wear highly fashionable clothes, even to work on the plantation, and display the latest cell phones available. The same could be said of the young men who work loading oil palm fruits in trucks; some of them expressed disdain for formal education 116 .

An older truck driver said, laughing about his younger helpers ( pemuat ), “when they

were in junior high school, they were always drunk ( suka mabok-mabok ) so they preferred becoming kuli – a term that refers to manual worker in the tradition of colonial

Asia – instead of going to kuliah (school)”.

Access to consumption goods has improved on Indonesian plantations such as

PSA. Many have mentioned during the time I spent on the plantation how people who work as harvesters nowadays can own a motorbike compared to people who two decades ago had no access to such goods. In fact, the generalisation of bank loans ( system kredit ) for motorbike purchases and also other forms of long-standing borrowings provide all workers, even casual ones, with access to different niches of consumption goods. As

Harvey (1998, 105) highlights, “by locking workers into certain conceptions of lifestyle,

116 The common sociological pattern for those who load the fruits in oil palm agribusiness is to quit school after Junior High School. Then they join a team of fruit pick up which encompasses a driver and two helpers ( pemuat ) who are responsible for loading the fruits in the truck. The helpers seek to acquire the necessary experience in truck maintenance and mechanics to eventually be hired as drivers themselves. The relatively low wages provided to helpers are compensated by advancement opportunities.

144 consumer habits, and desire, capitalists can more easily secure compliance within the labour process while capturing and creating distinctive and proliferating market niches for their sales”. Most stores in the region in the village of Desa Buaya accept credit purchases by consumers they know and who are listed. Patterns of consumption contribute to the naturalisation of oil palm agribusiness in regions of Indonesia, as monoculture becomes a means to fulfill desires.

When asked about the differences in the cost of living between 20 years ago and now, Pak Zaki, a man who spent all his life working as a casual worker at PSA, mentioned that, before, when he started working, the wage was small, but there were limited consumption goods ( barang ) to purchase. Now wages are increasing every year

following minimum wage regulations, but there is so much to buy and to shop for

(belanja , jajan ). The society of consumption inhabitants of the region have been integrated into, along with the domination of oil palm agribusiness, has reshaped social norms. If especially male workers are allowed to work more to earn more, many mentioned being barely able to keep up with the rising price of consumption goods. In this regard, the field of oil palm agribusiness can also be understood as complex and dynamic market relations with far reaching implications for subject’s livelihood possibilities.

Conclusion

In the space produced by oil palm agribusiness, experts, estate managers and smallholders deploy techniques of power to secure access to labour and land. With geographically specific nuances, critical insights provided by Beckford (1983, 177)

145 remain valid, namely that “inherent to the plantation system is the tendency toward monopolisation of land by plantation owners as a device to deprive the majority of people of access to an independent livelihood and therefore to ensure the plantation of labour supplies.” However this strategy of large investors and planners is not an end in itself, but rather contributes to the formation of a rugged geography where tactics and strategies are constantly deployed by subjects of agribusiness in the pursuit of specific objectives. The radical conversion of space into oil palm agribusiness implies the emergence of specific labour subjectivities with different attitudes, knowledge and practices. The social and cultural dispositions towards risk, capital, work and education largely determine the position of actors in the field of possibilities and constraints formed by a given economic activity 117 .

…the art of estimating and seizing chances, the capacity to anticipate the future by a kind of practical induction or even to take a calculated gamble on the possible against the probable, are dispositions that can only be acquired in certain social conditions…Like the entrepreneurial spirit or the propensity to invest, economic information is a function of one’s power over the economy. (Bourdieu, p. 64)

The capacity to calculate and take or devolve risks to workers in agribusiness or in other fields derives from specific social conditions and translates into power over the economy according to Pierre Bourdieu 118 . The social position of actors in fields of meanings and practices determines what can be envisioned and performed. The space of oil palm agribusiness as it emerges in specific sites of West Kalimantan through plasma schemes and estates largely determines the material possibilities of important

117 According to Scott (1976, 29-34), the economic strategies in agrarian societies imply compromise between maximisation of work productivity and the limitation of risk taking. 118 Bourdieu (2000, 17) discusses the historical emergence of the economic realm as a specific game. The economic field is understood in this perspective as a cosmos endowed with its own laws which would confer validity or legitimacy to what he calls “the radical autonomisation” which pure economic theory operates by constituting the economic scheme as a distinct universe.

146 populations. Large-scale economic conversion to oil palm agribusiness shapes social difference and economic subjects. Access to wealth or wages is governed by privileged subjects of agribusiness, land owners, and managers.

Markets for land and labour in oil palm agribusiness as they emerge through contingent power relations come to mediate access to social, economic and cultural capital. The market for land is entrenched in a politics of exclusion through coercion and deficient support for smallholding agribusiness production. Moreover, the market for land is rooted in the broader social relations of the region and the nation, as ownership depends on access to capital and some level of political legitimacy. The labour market is embedded in social and cultural conceptions of embodied difference and specific dispositions inherited from historical backgrounds. The labour market is the outcome of norms about the value of specific kinds of work in large-scale agribusiness and agro- industrial space. The value of oil palm plots ( kapling ) and labour ( kerja ) is largely legitimised by market relations constituted as a set of rules largely autonomous from other spheres of society.

Only those who have achieved an advantageous position in the field of agribusiness experience market processes as opportunities. For the others, selling their labour to estates or plasma smallholders is a compulsion which takes place in a context of economic vulnerability. As Max Weber noted in his sociology of capitalism, “capitalism educates and chooses, by a process of economic selection, the subjects – entrepreneurs and workers – who are best adapted and necessary” (Weber 1920, 55). Oil palm agribusiness as a manifestation of forms of power related to capitalism causes ongoing

147 differentiation and produces exclusions which nevertheless are mediated by the tactics of subjects of agribusiness.

148

Chapter 5

Migrant plantation workers: Tensions of mobility and immobility

“…the economic givens are crucial; they define much, but not all, of the situation that human actors face; they place limits on the responses that are possible, imaginable. But those limits are wide and, within them, human actors fashion their own response…their own history” (Scott 1985, 42).

Introduction

The large labour requirements on oil palm plantations often involve the mobilisation of workers from densely populated areas of Indonesia to the oil palm belts located in Sumatra and Kalimantan where local populations do not fulfill the labour needs of plantation companies. The oil palm plantation economy of Indonesia in this regard contributes to the historical vision of government officials to encourage the mobility of labour from central islands such as Java and Lombok to outer islands such as

Sumatra and Kalimantan. An account of oil palm plantation labour in Indonesia is to a large extent an account of mobility and migrant labour. The development of new centres of economic growth based on oil palm agribusiness on the islands of Sumatra and

Kalimantan where labour is relatively scarce depends on continual flows of labour from densely populated islands. There is a long-standing history of plantation labour migration from Java to Sumatra and Peninsular Malaysia (Saptari and Elmhirst 2004). In fact, since the late 19 th century, male labour circular migration across Archipelagic Southeast Asia

has been commonplace. The subject of large-scale agribusiness in Indonesia is often a

migrant worker from densely populated islands of the country.

149

An important number of writings have focussed on contemporary Indonesian transnational migration 119 , however limited attention was paid to internal migration.

Internal migration processes refract shifts in the geographies of systems of capital accumulation within Indonesia. Internal migration of plantation labour extends the work on transnational-state mechanisms aimed at controlling overseas labour flows by adding attention to the efforts of plantation companies to order mobility processes within the state of Indonesia. This chapter focuses on the tension between mobility and immobility in the modes of control of labour in oil palm agribusiness. It analyses how the tension between mobility and immobility defines the field of oil palm agribusiness. Plantation managements that seek to maximise profits by immobilising workers in the space of the plantation in order to constitute a core labour force while workers negotiate forms of mobility to maximise access to cultural and economic capital. The focus of mobility allows examining competing strategies and visions of labour mobility.

Labour mobility is a prime locus of power in large-scale oil palm agribusiness, a site where conceptions of benefit and losses are articulated by migrant workers. Attention to mobility contributes towards an understanding of plantation work through the lens of complex livelihood strategies beyond the binaries of resistance and acceptance. In this regard I investigate plantation work as it takes on meanings specific to social and spatial realities. Work in oil palm agribusiness is culturally embedded. Culture is defined as

“webs of socially negotiated meanings, rather than a given…interpretation of symbols,

119 The work on transnational female domestic labour migrating from Indonesia to Malaysia and Saudi Arabia has emphasised limits to mobility of workers entangled in unequal power relations in the private space of the house. Transnational domestic workers are structurally deprived of rights outside the legal category they occupy as worker. The focus on the mobility and immobility of labouring individuals/groups in the space of oil palm agribusiness of Indonesia draws from the intersection of feminist migration research and critical political geography (Silvey et al . 2008).

150 places and relationships” (Silvey and Lawson 1999, 124). In this perspective, I examine experiences of mobility and immobility as narrated by plantation workers interviewed in the islands of Lombok and Nias, two resource-strapped islands known in Indonesia to be important reservoirs of migrant plantation labour. I pay attention to subjective experiences of work and mobility in the agrarian context of Indonesia as shaped by oil palm agribusiness. I look at the ways in which migrants’ experiences and livelihood strategies intersect with the attempts of plantation companies to optimise profits and modes of production through efforts to manage and control labouring bodies in space.

I first situate the contemporary experiences of plantation work in a broader historical context of labour recruitment and labour regimes in colonial plantations in

Indonesia. I trace transformations in modes of labour control and governance, while emphasising the diversity in strategies of control that range from overt coercion to the promotion of welfare. I exemplify the ways in which different modalities of mobility are used by subjects of agribusiness. Second, I examine the economic context of Lombok and the ways in which workers from Lombok interpret migration to the oil palm belts of

Indonesia. I focus on mechanisms that influence labour mobility in relation to cultural representations of labour, gendered differences and modes of social reproduction. Third, I provide a brief comparative basis to the case study of workers from Lombok by looking at the ways in which networks of plantation workers have developed in Nias and how these networks differ from others that have been incorporated into forms of control and discipline associated with plantation work.

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Recent and ancient histories of migrant plantation labour

Spaces of coercion and welfare

I met Pak Sunanto in the office of Sawit Watch in Bogor, an umbrella organisation dedicated to the defence of labour and smallholder rights in the oil palm industry of Indonesia. He was emaciated and looked exhausted as he managed to escape from a plantation in East Kalimantan where he was forced to work in dire conditions for months. He had been flown back to Java by Sawit Watch whose members sought to record and disseminate his story. Pak Sunanto, a married 40-year-old man, was recruited in his village of Central Java in 2010 by a middleman he knew from a neighbouring village who was working for a contractor of the plantation company in East Kalimantan.

Pak Sunanto and other men in his village, most of whom were already accustomed to migrating to find work, enlisted after being promised high wages, good working conditions and comfortable accommodation on the plantation. They formed a group of 13 men from the same village who travelled and worked together. They incurred a significant debt for transportation fees, food and equipment, and were brought far inland into East Kalimantan on the plantation frontier. The workers from Central Java found themselves forced to live and work in an area where land had just been cleared in a camp made of rudimentary tents with no available drinking water and inadequate food provisions, limited to a diet consisting solely of rice and hot peppers. Their task was to clear the weeds and bushes prior to the planting of oil palms. The 13 men were paid on piece rate and received a single group rate for every 60 hectares cleared which after deductions for debt repayment amounted to 150,000 Rupiah per person for approximately

152

50 days of work, a wage well bellow the legal minimum 120 . And their debt kept on

building up as they had to purchase food on the plantation.

Pak Sunanto intended to leave this plantation site after the first few days, but the geographical isolation of the site and security agents prevented him from escaping for over four months’ time during which he was allegedly forced to work. This plantation company (PSK) has been allocated concession rights over 20,000 hectares of which 2,300 hectares were planted with oil palm in 2010. As this case demonstrates, the geography of frontier plantations, just like the large degree of autonomy from state institutions historically enjoyed by plantation companies, reinforces the power of plantation management to coerce labour and provide wages under the minimum cost of living.

When Pak Sunanto finally escaped into the jungle at night with one other man of his village, he was eventually rescued by foreign researchers involved in environmental conservation. After our interview, I said that thanks to the dissemination of stories like his, people would be more cautious before accepting work on plantations; he responded that plantation companies and the labour recruiters would always manage to find and deceive ( membohong ) new workers desperate for good-paying jobs. Pak Sunanto had no hard feelings toward the middleman who had recruited him, but had no intention of repaying the rest of his debt to the contractor. Sawit Watch publicised PSK’s abuse of labour rights and provided legal assistance to victims like Pak Sunanto, whose case they framed as slave labour ( perbudakan ).

The case of Pak Sunanto is an extreme but not rare form of labour coercion in the contemporary oil palm plantation economy of Indonesia 121 . This case points to the

120 The minimum wage varies in Indonesia according to provincial regulations. It is usually higher in the provinces of the outer islands where the cost of living is also higher.

153 vulnerabilities and modes of spatial control forced on plantation workers in Indonesia.

The concept of spatial entrapment developed in feminist geography captures the centrality of coercion and dominance exerted on workers (Silvey et al . 2008). The case of

Pak Sunanto at PSK is best understood in relation to more subtle cases of control,

discipline and coercion which do not always involve direct physical violence but which

are rooted in the everyday structural violence of poverty 122 . This case also points to the strategies and tactics used by plantation officials and contractors to secure sufficient labour for strenuous tasks in remote areas. I examine the structures of coercion in oil palm plantation work in dynamic relation with workers’ subjective experiences.

Subjective perspectives often blur the distinction between economic and extra-economic means of coercion and point to diffuse modes of control and dominance.

Pak Sunanto’s story stands in continuity with methods deployed in the colonial period to access labour power. In fact, the large need for manual labour in the plantation sector of the tropics has consistently been met through personalised practices in recruitment, remuneration and welfare provision. 123 The plantation economy historically is characterised by complex modes of labour recruitment through contractual and temporary arrangements. Contractual and temporary arrangements have been used in cases of chronic labour shortages on plantations, or for labour intensive operations such

121 Out of the 60 informants who participated in this research as migrant plantation workers, through a snowball method, nine reported at least one experience of unpaid work or forced work in the past 10 years, which did not include other cases of abuse and neglect experienced by workers. The Indonesian Commission on Human Rights stated the number of 5,000 cases of human rights abuse in the oil palm sector. This information most likely refers to the number of individuals who have filed complaints against oil palm plantations, both smallholders and workers. (Pak Nur Kholis, Deputy Chairperson of the Indonesian Human Rights Commission, RSPO Meeting, Jakarta, November 10 th , 2010). 122 I refer to the conceptualisation of power as articulated by Michel Foucault (1975, 37), through the microphysics of power and the multiple pressure points of power relations that integrate bodies in punitive techniques, or in this case, in capitalist modes of production based on plantation agriculture. 123 According to a report on the question of labour in plantation agribusiness throughout the world, the “essential characteristic is the absence of a direct employment relationship between the principal employer and the workers, who remain employees of the labour-supplying intermediary”. ILO 1994.

154 as land clearing and replanting or to evade labour legislations. Ann Stoler (1985, 169) asserts in the case of oil palm plantations in Deli, North Sumatra, in the 1980s, that companies resorted to inventing “that there was a labour shortage to resort to temporary labour” instead of relying on permanent workers. Plantation companies use the spectre of short-term labour shortages to justify increasing the proportion of temporary workers to whom they refuse to provide benefits.

I trace the colonial history of plantation labour in Indonesia as it helps understand the historical continuities animating contemporary techniques for managing plantation labour in a regime of large-scale agribusiness. Colonial practices further reveal the constitution of labour structures and the imperatives of control and profitability they responded to. Throughout Asia in the 19 th century, networks of plantation labour migration stretched over different states and were mainly governed by chains of agents of labour recruitment working for planters which operated with government support. The reliance on migrant labour was not so much related to local labour shortages, but rather to the fact that “local inhabitants were either not prepared to accept employment under the conditions accompanying the new mode of production, or were regarded as unsuited for such employment” (Breman 1990, 15). In the Netherland Indies, the Coolie 124 Ordinance

(1880) in effect explicitly permitted debt bonding and indenture labour arrangements in

the plantation economy. The ordinance framed the contractual agreement between a

worker and the plantation company and also stipulated the penal sanctions that could

ensue if the contract was breached. Plantation workers were contracted for a period

ranging from one-and-a-half to three years time after which the travel fees for the

124 The coolie or kuli is an ethnically loaded term that historically designated manual labour from Asia and is still used by Indonesian plantation workers to refer to themselves and highlight their social position as manual workers.

155 workers to go back home were covered by the employer. Corporal punishment could lawfully be used against workers if they refused to work or tried to escape before the completion of their contract (Saptaru and Elmhirst 2006). Discipline was exerted directly on the labouring individuals and also through modes of control that placed them in spaces regimented by labour discipline and removed from previous social networks.

Well into the first part of the 20 th century, the colonial plantation economy in

Indonesia relied on the Coolie Ordinance. The reliance on migrant contractual labour

became a strategy of plantation owners for a number of economic reasons, as explained

by Breman (1990, 20-48). Despite costs of recruitment and transport from islands such as

Lombok and Java to the plantation belts of Sumatra, the fact that labour was ‘imported’

from distant places appeared to have been a cost-lowering factor for the plantation

industry. In fact, the labour supply was controlled by the chain of recruitment and

therefore ensured greater control over planters’ labour conditions and wages. According

to historical documents collected by Breman (1990), the lack of familiarity 125 of workers

with the environment and their simple lack of resources to undertake a trip back to their

place of origin until the end of the contract limited their capacity to express dissent with

working conditions. This leads Breman (1990, 35) to assert after a broad review of

colonial literature on Asia that labour in European economic enclaves of plantations and

mines was “ mobile but unfree ”. In the second part of this chapter, I question this assertion through attention to migrants’ subjective understandings of mobility, and ask how particular mobilities and immobilities come to be perceived as freedom or entrapment.

125 T. Nierop, (1999, 59) highlights the disciplinary conditions imposed on coolies as they reached foreign- owned economic enclaves. “Once on the enterprise he (the coolie) entered a world regulated by numerous obligations and restrictions set by the employer. Without the social framework of his place of origin he became one amongst hundreds, or even thousands.”

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The Ethical Policy adopted in the Dutch East Indies in 1901 led concretely to the creation of a labour inspectorate who further policed labour practices in the plantations concentrated in East Sumatra and South Kalimantan. However, the penal sanctions of the

Coolie Ordinance were only abolished in 1931 126 . Progressively, in the wake of the

Ethical Policy, labour conditions improved on European plantations as planters were

encouraged by inspectors to provide welfare to their workers, and labour actions

intensified 127 . The nationalisation of foreign-owned plantations which started in

December 1957, and the creation of state-owned companies eventually unfolded into a

relatively stable employment structure that prevailed throughout the 1980s and most of

the 1990s (Kartodirdjo and Suryo 1991, 174). The plantation structure was maintained

while corporal punishment was replaced by injunctions encouraging workers’ self-

discipline and economic imperatives, in the same way coercion was largely replaced by

incentives along with some level of welfare provision on most plantations. However, as

the case of Pak Sunanto revealed, violent forms of coercion persist in the plantation

economy of Indonesia, as extreme manifestations of more diffuse mechanisms of control

and discipline.

The New Order regime rehabilitated the plantation economy through the state- owned companies (PTPN) while instituting permanent job positions for men in oil palm plantations. In so doing, the government promoted job security as an indication of its

126 Houben (1999, 20-23) examines the impact of the Labour Inspectorate on Europeans in the improvement of labour conditions in foreign-owned enterprises in colonial Indonesia and argues that measures such as the Labour Inspectorate were effective, in comparison with Breman (1991). 127 In Sumatra of Kalimantan, an important number of plantation workers settled permanently in areas surrounding rubber plantations and engaged in subsistence agriculture to complement plantation wages (Stoler 1985, 180).

157 commitment to social welfare 128 . Permanent workers in state-owned and private plantations constituted a core labour force enticed to remain on the plantation until a small pension was granted at retirement according to state regulations 129 . However, temporary contracted workers from nearby villages or from central islands have continued to consistently fulfill intermittent labour requirements at lower costs than permanent workers. In her account on the plantation belt in Deli, North Sumatra, Ann

Stoler (1985, 167-9) mentions that the shift from rubber to oil palm which intensified in the late 1970s led to the replacement of permanent by temporary labour. She states that the low labour requirement of the crop is conducive to the use of temporary labour, a statement which holds true in comparison to rubber plantations. However, most oil palm estate companies seek to secure a core permanent labour force for the year-round intensive tasks of harvest and maintenance. In the 1980s there was a ratio of one temporary worker to two permanent ones in oil palm plantations in Sumatra which illustrates the tension between the core permanent labour force and peripheral, precarious labour (Badan Kerja Sama Perusahan Perkebunan Sumatra 1985, cited by Sairin 1996).

Observations in Kalimantan show that this ratio prevails currently in some plantations but varies greatly from one company to the other.

Since the Reformasi of 1998, a number of liberalisation measures have been taken by state officials to allow plantation companies to limit the permanent workforce with comprehensive social benefits such as pensions. President Habibie (1998-1999) promoted

128 According to Sairin (1996, 5) after Indonesia’s independence, plantations provided four main types of benefits to permanent workers that distinguished the plantation sector from other economic sectors: housing, medical care, cash wages and wages in kind. 129 Sairin (1996, 16) discusses the law of 1957 which contributed to the constitution of a stable labour force on Indonesian plantations. This regulation was based on the decision of the Panitia Penyelesaian Peselisihan Perburuhan Pusat (Central Committee for the Settling of Labour Disputes no. P4/M/57/6578- p4/8418 of July 1957).

158 an aggressive expansion of oil palm and sought to further liberalise labour regulations

(Casson 2002, 224). A new labour law adopted in 2003 gave more flexibility to employers in the plantation sector as it legitimised a greater reliance on casual workers without pensions or rights of association 130 . Even some state-owned plantations replaced

permanent jobs with contract arrangements, shifting the historical role of state-owned

plantations away from their status as providers of the most secure jobs. This trend has

been confirmed for plantations in Sumatra and Kalimantan, both private and state owned.

The impact of this flexible labour regime is captured by a retired plantation worker from

a state plantation in Kalimantan Barat, who said in 2010, “some worry because they will

not have a pension, they have to move ( pindah ) when their contract is over.” Having to

engage in circular migrations or to move from one plantation to another is common

among younger workers in contemporary Indonesia. Liberalisation measures coincided

with the oil palm boom and increased the mobility and flexibility of labour in this

sector 131 . However, paradoxically, the structural nature of plantation labour requirements

leads to forms of control and discipline that seek to restrict labour mobility, at least for a

given period.

However, permanent jobs and corollary social benefits remain available under

specific conditions for certain categories of workers such as harvesters in many plantation

companies in post New Order Indonesia. By offering permanent jobs, plantation

companies seek to optimise production. In order to do so, they seek to maximise profits

by managing the interplay between the cost of labour turn-over and that of social

130 The modification brought to the law (UU Ketenagakerjaan no.13/2003) has been discussed by a large number of organisations, among which Friends of The Earth (2008, 82), for its major implications. 131 The large number of plantation companies who have started their operations in Indonesia since the early 2000s, often in a chaotic regulatory framework, have produced highly volatile and unpredictable labour conditions for workers in some newly established plantations.

159 protection of workers. This is especially the case in large corporations with consistently high productivity and high investment, enabling them to create a permanent labour force and maximise the return on sustained investments. These large corporations such as Sinar

Mas, member of RSPO are often committed to specific interpretations of social corporate responsibilities (SCR) to access niche markets governed by certifications (see chapter 2).

In this regard, permanent jobs are often available in remote areas where labour is scarce and land easily available even to plantation workers. Many remote plantation companies in fact have to sponsor the costs of labour transportation and therefore design enticements and social benefits to tie the labour to the site of production 132 .

Bearing in mind the plantation labour history in Indonesia, I approach individual experiences of migrant workers in the oil palm industry as part of broader forms of power that shape contemporary integration of workers in large-scale agribusiness. Following

Wright (2006), I look at the way in which corporate structures laid out to achieve capital accumulation intersect with geographically specific production of meanings and social practices of production and reproduction 133 . Labour migration in Indonesia is embedded

in a broader political economy of access to resources. In this regard, the growing wave of

migration from resource-strapped parts of the country to plantation belts in Indonesia

does not constitute an important shift in practices of mobility. In the recent decades

labour mobility has accelerated in Indonesia and throughout Southeast Asia 134 . A large

132 Discussion with Phanette Barral, Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (CIRAD). 16 March 2012. 133 Melissa Wright (2008) discusses myths of labour disposability in factories of Mexico and China which largely rely on unspecialised young unskilled female labour. She explores the ways in which these discourses and social norms reinforce conceptions of women as disposable –temporarily employed and cheap– in the industrial economy. 134 Jonathan Rigg (2003) provides a comprehensive account of migration in Southeast Asia, focussing on contract workers and undocumented migration processes (p.163-168). He emphasises the reductionism of

160 part of the Indonesian population engages in internal and international migration as part of livelihood strategies, but also as rite de passage , reflecting the national moral economy

of migration 135 . Female internal migrations to industrial zones and international

migrations as domestic workers are increasingly significant in the socio-cultural

landscape of Indonesia 136 . For landless males without specialised education in the

segmented market of migratory labour, migration to the plantation industry is often seen

as the most accessible option for finding work.

Making use of mobility

Contemporary forms of immobilisation of workers take place through contingent

means and can be appraised through the specific strategies of a plantation company to

maximise capital accumulation. Many plantation companies deploy means to recruit and

secure access to a sufficient and relatively stable labour force, especially young

harvesters. In regions where labour is relatively scarce, there is some level of competition

between plantation companies to attract workers. Recruiters interviewed in Lombok

emphasised the relentless need for healthy young men on estates given the significant

turn over and fast expansion of cultivated areas. One of them mentioned working for a

company in the province of Jambi (PT MGI/Tabung Haji) that stretched over 86,000

hectares divided into 16 estates that continually needed new workers ( calon buruh ).

However the level of competition for workers between companies is not such that high the neoclassical econometric framework to analyse migration and points to the multiplicity of factors both cultural and economic underlying migration. 135 Johan Lindquist (2009), through ethnographic work in Batam, Indonesia, reveals the transformation in identities and aspirations of Indonesians through internal and international migration and forms of geographical mobility. 136 See Rebecca Elmhirst (2007) on notions of mobility and work in a village of Java where young women have access to industrial work outside the village area as male manual labour in rural areas becomes less valued economically and symbolically.

161 standards of housing and bonuses in kind are generalised. Although plantation companies generally provide free housing, smaller companies often rely on low expectations of workers and temporariness of stay to justify their provision of only the bare minimum in terms of amenities.

The case of the plantation company in Kalimantan Barat where I conducted fieldwork referred to as Prekebunan Swasta A (PSA) offers an example of the strategies deployed by the upper management to secure access to harvesters from Lombok by using specific channels of mobility in times of labour shortages. Plantation managers always seek to adjust labour access to optimise the relationship between labour compliance and profit maximisation, or the balance between turn-over costs and wages or benefits provided to workers to entice them to stay. In January 2011, an estate of Kalimantan

Barat PSA generalised the piece-rate mode of remuneration and cancelled the basic minimum wage for harvesters. This decision triggered protests and strikes as many workers felt they had lost the security net that the basic monthly wage constitutes

(chapter 4). In the midst of the labour unrest, workers and their families left the PSA estate to look for work in other plantations located in the region. The management of a recently established plantation company located elsewhere on the Kapuas River I shall call Perkebunan Kalimantan Baru (PKB) was informed about the labour situation at PSA by its former workers. As PKB was facing a labour shortage it resorted to recruiting dissatisfied workers from PSA. As explained by a security agent at PSA, in the housing scheme where he lives, 15 families out of 40 were recruited by PKB. PKB enticed the new workers to move to the plantation by offering them monthly bonuses in kind such as rice and cooking oil and slightly higher wages than those offered by PSA. These 15

162 families were picked up by the buses chartered by PKB which covered moving fees

(ongkos jalan ). The departure of these families along with others created a labour shortage of harvesters at PSA. During the time I spent on the PSA estate, an assistant manager mentioned that he usually needed 105 harvesters but that only 88 were employed on a regular basis at the moment. All 88 workers were enticed to work more by being offered a higher piece-rate on Sundays, but the assistant manager was still expecting new workers ( peganti ) to be recruited from outside the region.

Plantation managers are able to mobilise labour through recruitment networks to optimise the labour force in quantity and quality. In June 2011, as I was in the office of the manager of PSA, Pak Pasaribu, for an interview, he received a phone call from another manager working for the same company as him in another estate. Through their discussion I understood that a recruiter was arriving at PSA with 25 men from Nusa

Tenggara Barat (NTB) – a province essentially composed of the islands of Lombok and

Sumbawa – to address the labour shortage. Pak Pasaribu discussed how the workers would be shared between his plantation and the other plantation of the company. I heard,

“you can keep fifteen and I will keep ten”. Further interviews with PSA clerks and assistant managers provided information on the labour recruitment process of men from the central islands of Indonesia. In case of a labour shortage, the estate manager will contact the central office of the company located in Jakarta. It is the central office in

Jakarta which takes necessary measures to contact a local labour agency ( agen lokal ) in the central islands of Indonesia, which will then dispatch a sponsor to recruit and accompany workers to PSA in Kalimantan Barat. When I asked specifically about workers from Lombok, I was told by a clerk specialising in wage administration that a lot

163 of men from Lombok are already specialised in harvesting and were sought for that reason. In fact, many harvesters from Lombok had already started to work on the plantation in recent months.

In case of a labour shortage, mechanisms are designed to fix migrant workers for a given period of time. Whether they are recruited by a labour agency or they migrate spontaneously, newly arrived workers from Lombok and NTB are often economically tied to the plantation for a period of time. These arrangements are personalised and often volatile. Pak Arman, a man in his sixties from Lombok who had arrived recently at the

PSA estate, mentioned that he was advised by a friend he contacted by phone about the work opportunity. Pak Arman’s arrival coincided with the change in management on the estate. Although he came to the estate spontaneously and paid for his travel fees by borrowing money (500,000 Rupiah) from neighbours in Lombok, he agreed to have a part of his wage withheld for almost a year. The PSA estate management would withhold

100,000 Rupiah per month on his pay for six months, and this money (600,000 Rupiah) would be returned ten months after he started working. The management’s rationale for denying a part of the worker’s wage is that the money covers potential medical care

(jaminan ). The same reason was stated by the manager of the estate when he mentioned that half the wage of newly recruited workers from NTB would be withheld for a few months and given back to them after a year. Moreover, the newly arrived men from

Lombok had to purchase working tools ( alat ) and food with wage advances ( bon ). Pak

Arman shared a decrepit house with four other workers from Lombok with a limited

supply of rain water for daily consumption and hygiene. But as one of his colleagues and

housemates mentioned, “as long as there is work, I will just stay here ( biar di sini aja )”.

164

The strategy of PSA to constrain the mobility of migrant workers from Lombok and elsewhere rests on holding wages, which constitutes a form of coercion. However coercion is offset in part by opportunities to earn incomes at PSA that are higher than the ones provided in Lombok. The living situation at PSA seemed poor but the working conditions were acceptable for the men from Lombok. Most male migrant labourers from

Lombok have previously worked on Malaysian plantations 137 where they have become

accustomed to piece-rate wages and contract work away from home. As many narrated

work experiences on plantations, whether in Malaysia or in Indonesia, they displayed

foolhardiness toward strenuous efforts associated with plantation work. The cultural

disposition of men for hard physical work, individual motivation and high mobility, such

as that displayed by men from Lombok, is used by the PSA estate to enforce a piece-rate

remuneration system while replacing long-standing workers who refused the new labour

arrangement 138 . The attempt of a plantation company to optimise the labour force works through the needs and desires of workers. The socioeconomic context of Lombok provides background information that allows for a better understanding of the importance and meaning of migrant plantation work and how practices of mobility are used by plantation migrant workers themselves to increase their benefits.

137 Wong (2006, 223) describes the guest worker regime as it was designed in Malaysia to recruit workers from outside the country and provide “assisted passage…to be directly recruited into the industry” whether it is rubber or oil palm. This system shares some affinities with the ways in which Indonesian oil palm plantation companies seek to recruit and immobilise workers on their estates. 138 A local Malay man who lived and worked at the PSA estate expressed disappointment at not being able to leave the estate for a better job ( pindah kebun ) because he was a single parent and needed support from his extended family that lived close by. I told him about the men from NTB and Lombok who were replacing those who had left PSA. He responded that only new workers could accept the new wage system without complaining, because they did not know how it was before at PSA.

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Migrant plantation work in Lombok

Searching for labour

Lombok is well known among activists and militants against labour exploitation

in oil palm agribusiness for being traditionally an important labour reservoir for the

plantation industry in Southeast Asia. Lombok is an Indonesian island that belongs to the

province of West Nusa Tenggara, and is characterised by some of the highest population

densities in the country and an economy heavily dependent on agriculture. The agrarian

economy of Lombok does not provide sufficient employment to the population,

especially in the arid eastern part of the island. In villages of East Lombok where I

conducted interviews, the large majority of men without access to land or government

jobs were engaged in circular labour migration.

I deliberately focussed on workers with experience in oil palm plantations of

Indonesia, many of whom had also worked on Malaysian plantations 139 . Migration to the plantation sector in Malaysia emerged on a significant scale in the 1970s. Plantation labour is attractive to men without specialised education. While most male workers seek to build a household in their village of origin in Lombok, circular labour migration to the outer islands of Indonesia or Malaysia is a central aspect of contemporary livelihood strategies. The 25 open-ended interviews and participant observation conducted with men from Lombok involved in oil palm plantation work in Indonesia have granted access to a large spectrum of experiences that took place in a large number of plantation companies in Indonesia.

139 The specific case of oil palm plantation labour migration within Indonesia and from Indonesia to Malaysia compels us to reconceptualise to some extent the conceptual division between internal and international migration as Skeldon (2006) proposes. The oil palm agribusiness sector constitutes a single industrial entity and depends on the same labour reservoir.

166

The economic resources of the agrarian economy of the Kabupaten of East

Lombok in the desa of Sola where I conducted research are scarce and unevenly distributed, which impacts the terms of labour recruitment (see appendix 4). The sub- district has a very high population density of 740 inhabitants per square kilometre, which is higher than the 571 hab/km2 average population density of the island 140 . Among male

inhabitants of working age, 73% are landless rural workers who form the largest part of

those who migrate to oil palm plantations. Most smallholders own less than 0.25 hectare

of irrigated or non-irrigated land for rice production in the desa of Sola. If jobs are available locally during times of rice transplanting and harvesting, those jobs are largely reserved for regular workers who reside permanently in the village.

East Lombok is characterised by a small landed elite involved in tobacco

cultivation and trade. The village where I stayed had two prominent rich tobacco

producers who owned over four hectares of land on which they practiced seasonal

intercropping of tobacco and tomatoes. Rich landowners were providing daily jobs

paying 30,000 Rupiah to 40,000 Rupiah, which was the norm for a day of manual labour

in the area in 2010-2011 in the moral economy of village 141 . The wage provided by the large fruit and vegetable growers in the highlands of Lombok 142 is only 90,000 Rupiah

per week. In comparison, the wage for harvesting on plantations can reach 150,000

Rupiah per day in the best conditions on Indonesian plantations and double that amount

on Malaysian plantations. The transmigration programme (Tran-PIR) in which many

140 Rencana penbangunan jangka menengah desa, tahun anggaran 2010-2014. Desa Sola, Kecamatan Sola, Kabupaten Lombok Timur 2010 141 Rich landowners of the village own conspicuously large houses are known as Pak Haji and derive prestige from the fact that they have done the pilgrimage to Mecca in communities strongly influenced by Islam. They 142 Due to the temperate climate and volcanic soils in the highlands of Lombok, this region concentrates on fruit and vegetable production. However, the local economy is dominated by a number of large players, one of which, a rich Sino-Indonesian, who owned 500 hectares of land, according to local inhabitants.

167 inhabitants of the region have taken part in the 1980s, has expanded the agrarian economic base of certain families of the region. The transmigration programme has led to the formation of lasting economic migration networks between relatives in Lombok and provinces of East and West Kalimantan (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Labour migration patterns from Nusa Tenggara Barat to Kalimantan and from Nias to North Sumatra. Concentration of oil palm plantations indicated in green; in red, land cleared largely for oil palm plantation expansion. Source: Adapted from the Digital Chart of the World

Landless rural inhabitants who are not employed by local landowners are often

ready to endure difficult working conditions and low paying jobs on plantations because

they know that the labour offer far exceeds the jobs available in Lombok. A common

saying in villages of East Lombok is: “before, recruiters 143 were looking for coolies, now

coolies are looking for recruiters.” This context allows the labour agencies of plantation

companies and their middlemen to easily recruit workers in Lombok. FELDA, the largest

143 The terminology of people engaged in labour recruitment in Lombok requires careful attention. The most common way to refer to labour recruiters I encountered in East Lombok is sponsor, although they are also referred to as agent ( agen ) and occasionally as tauke or contractor in a context of labour migration to Malaysia, which can refer to brokers, for those employed by larger recruitment agencies of Malaysian employers.

168 state plantation company of Malaysia, offers recruitment contracts to well-established recruitment firms in Lombok. These firms depend on networks of brokers deployed throughout the villages of the island. As for Indonesian companies, they usually proceed through informal means which can also involve similar recruitment structures as

Malaysian companies. Often a labour recruiter or sponsor acts as the middleman between a plantation company and sites of labour origin. He is remunerated by the plantation company according to the number of workers he recruits.

It appears that undocumented labour migration from Lombok to Malaysia, which has been substantial historically, has decreased since 1997-1998. As Lindquist (2010) emphasises, although undocumented migration to Malaysia has been common in recent history 144 , the process of migration to Malaysia is increasingly formalised and

bureaucratised since the crisis of 1997. In fact, the 1997 crisis was a turning point in

labour migration to Malaysia, with the severe crackdown on Indonesian unregistered

migrant workers in Malaysia. Indonesian workers were at that time detained and deported

in large numbers. These measures were concomitant with more systematic enforcement

of immigration laws and with the facilitation of the visa application process for

workers 145 . As stories of mistreatment of undocumented Indonesian workers in Malaysia became more widely known in Lombok 146 , potential migrants’ submission of a formal

144 Sidney Jones (2000) describes the networks which Indonesian workers have to integrate into to access Malaysia without paying work visa fees through the legal, institutional channels. Malaysian employers would pay a contractor who would then hire middlemen to recruit workers in Malaysia. As Johan Lindquist (2009, 135) states, “The employer is thereby able to access inexpensive labour while avoiding any responsibility for workers’ welfare” by circumventing labour regulations in Malaysia. 145 See C. Chin (2008) on the strategies adopted by the Malaysian state to deal with popular anxieties about undocumented Indonesian migration to the country. 146 Many informants in Lombok mentioned experiences of detention and deportation from Malaysia in 1997 and 1998. In some of the worst cases, a man told about his story of deportation after which he was handed to Indonesian authorities who sold him to a labour contractor involved in illegal logging ( penebangan kayu

169 visa application to a sponsor, despite its high costs, had become the norm among the people I interviewed. At the scale of Lombok, documented international work migration has more than tripled between 2004 and 2008, from 14,000 to 48,000, the majority being men going to work on Malaysian oil palm plantations and women working as domestic workers in Malaysia and Saudi Arabia (Lindquist 2010, 122). In the desa of Sola in

Lombok Timur, which encompasses 1,724 households, there were 237 international migrant workers recorded in 2010 147 . Many children in communities of East Lombok are

often raised by extended family as both parents are involved in circular migration outside

the island.

In villages of East Lombok, work on Malaysian or Indonesian oil palm plantations is conceived by men as an accessible and immediate source of income, which can be undertaken if the potential migrant has immediate access to capital to pay for transportation and visa fees. Scarce access to money in East Lombok prohibits many potential workers from engaging in plantation work. Interviews reveal that men have paid from 3 to 6.5 million Rupiah for a Malaysian plantation work visa between 2008 and

2011. Some mentioned however that some sponsors would allow them to pay half the amount up front and the rest would be deducted from their wage once they started working on the plantation in Malaysia. By comparison, the costs to work on a plantation in Indonesia whether sponsor fees or simply travel fees ( biaya or ongkos ) ranged from

500,000 to 1.5 million Rupiah in 2010. The fee charged by a sponsor covers the transportation, usually by boat and bus, the food and also the sponsor’s commission that

liar ) where he was forced into slavery for a year. These stories speak to accounts of domestic workers being in the space of exception formed outside law as the space of the home (G. Pratt 2005). 147 The figure was undifferentiated by gender or type of work. Rencana penbangunan jangka menengah desa, tahun anggaran 2010-2014. Desa Sola, Kecamatan Sola, Kabupaten Lombok Timur 2010.

170 varies from 100,000 to 200,000. Capital is accessible with high interest for those who are able to pawn collateral. Smaller, more informal 100% interest loans from neighbours or kin are the norm. According to prevailing practices, the borrower repays his loan at his convenience but commits to giving back twice the amount he received ( satu jadi dua ).

The decision to work on Malaysian or Indonesian oil palm plantations is the outcome of circumstances and calculations or ways of envisioning possibilities. For those who can borrow the necessary amount to afford a work visa ( paspor ), plantation work in

Malaysia is known to provide higher wages 148 in a better regulated work environment where the positive economic outcome of the trip is almost certain. However, many of those familiar with oil palm plantation labour in Malaysia saw work in Indonesia as a more desirable option after access to Malaysia became formalised and more expensive.

For many who worked both in plantations of Malaysia and Indonesia, the fact that

Indonesian workers’ passports were held by some Malaysian companies until the end of a contract discouraged them from going back. As for working in Indonesia, some reported that they enjoy more freedom to leave unsatisfactory work conditions and felt less pressure ( ditekan ) than in Malaysia. Often, social networks, friendship and trust will determine work place when someone invites ( ajak ) a friend to try it out on a particular

plantation.

Most workers interviewed had accessed Indonesian plantations through a sponsor

that had been recommended to them. For men from Lombok without prior knowledge of

a plantation belt outside their social environments, the sponsor provides a necessary

148 The wage on Malaysian oil palm plantations can reach up to 50 RM (US$ 16) per day, 1,400 RM per month for harvesters in 2008, if harvesting conditions are good. The wage in Malaysia is on average twice the average wage in Indonesian plantations for the same job, although wages can vary greatly from one estate to the other.

171 service. The sponsor is usually a former plantation worker who established good relations with the lower management of an estate in Kalimantan or Sumatra and committed often informally to accompany ( antar ) new workers. According to myths expressed by

plantation managers, Lombok men are disciplined, hard-working (rajin ) people suited to

the strenuous task of harvesting. This representation of men from Lombok is also

deployed by the workers themselves when they make comparisons with other ethnic

groups on plantations. Plantation managers interviewed value masculine labour from

Lombok although it is supposedly abundant and easily accessible. How the subjective

experiences of migration and plantation labour of men from Lombok relate to techniques

of labour control and discipline of large-scale oil palm agribusiness, is the question I

explore in the next section.

Merantau and limits to mobility

The experience of work and mobility among plantation workers from Lombok is

the result of material conditions and livelihood strategies, but also mediated by cultural

meanings. Forms of mobility in this context are always situated in relation to practices of

social reproduction (Bakker and Silvey 2008, 3). Social reproduction, according to Silvey

(2010, 510) “refers to both the reproduction of labour power and the biological

reproduction of the species”. Therefore social reproduction involves processes of

embodied possibilities and limitations defined through family institutions and social

safety nets, for instance. Social reproduction along with gender relations is central in the

formation of meaning regarding place and home. The material and epistemic context of

plantation migrant labour highlights the contours of social relations and the way in which

172 the reproduction of labour is secured in contexts of profit-driven corporate agribusiness.

It brings the focus onto spheres of intimacy which are also governed by labour mobility and immobility in large-scale agribusiness. In fact, even though practices of direct corporal punishment have been largely but not completely removed from the plantation economy since the colonial era, it is still the body and its capacity to labour that is the object of power relations, of tactics to maximise production and profits.

Migrant work to Malaysia or other islands of Indonesia is referred to in Lombok as merantau , a term which most basically refers to work-related circular migration.

Originally a male business related to specific customs among peoples of Indonesia, it now takes on a more homogenized meaning on a national scale (Mrazek 1994 cited by

Lindquist 2009, 29-30). Merantau refers to almost the full spectrum of migratory

practices in Indonesia among underprivileged populations, from female domestic

workers’ international migration to those of internal migrant plantation and construction

workers. When used in a discussion, merantau emphasises at times the compulsory

economic aspects of migration or the cultural value of life experience away from home

that involves adventure. The mobility inherent in merantau often becomes entangled in

the flexibility and volatility of labour regimes in the oil palm plantation sector.

Underprivileged rural inhabitants from Lombok or elsewhere assume forms of coercion

related to their socioeconomic status when they merantau and seek work in plantations.

Although plantation work seems to be the main economic option available to most

males from Lombok who engaging in merantau , it involves risks 149 . The conditions that create risks are often integrated into techniques of labour control, through forms of

149 Nooteboom (2003) discusses individual and collective practices of risk taking in rural Indonesia in relation to gambling and sexuality. It further points to individual and collective dispositions towards capital and work which are relevant when thinking about work in a context of heightened mobility.

173 exclusion and inclusion in a specific labour force. If oil palm estates require large amounts of labour, often they only provide jobs to those who can perform the most strenuous jobs such as harvesting. This adds to the risks of injury and sickness associated with merantau . Many young men who migrate to a plantation in Indonesia for the first time, even through a sponsor, take the risk of not being able to earn enough money to support themselves. One informant mentioned he did not dare to eat two full meals a day on a plantation in Riau, as he was forced into debt because of the prices of food on the estate and because one month of wage was stolen from him by the mandor . He was forced to stay five more months working on that plantation in East Kalimantan before he repaid his debt and saved some money for the trip back. Many informants have had to request that relative send them money to cover their food debt and the travel fare back.

After a 19 year old man was denied work on a plantation and was mugged in the port of

Mataram by a criminal ( preman ) on his way back home, he highlighted the shift that his experience had prompted in his calculation of the value of taking the risks associated with merantau: “I don’t want to merantau and work there in Kalimantan anymore, I will only look for work here (in Lombok) now.”

Constraints and vulnerabilities of workers are often acute for those who are confined to temporary migrant labour on plantations. In fact, a large population of men in

East Lombok is effectively specialised in oil palm fruit harvesting even though the job is considered to be unspecialised manual labour (coolie) in common language in Lombok as elsewhere. Despite specificities of plantation work, most informants related to migrant plantation work as part of the general experience of merantau . In the narratives of most informants, the specificities of modes of labour control underlying oil palm plantation

174 work are obscured. Suhadin is a married, 32-year-old man who spent most of the past 12 years working on oil palm plantations in both Malaysia and Indonesia for periods ranging from one month to three years. In between work trips he would come back to his place of origin in Lombok, where he had married twice, had two children and lived in a precarious material situation. He rented a room in a wooden house shared by 4 families. Throughout the weeks spent with him as he was a key informant, he consistently assimilated the risks inherent in plantation work to merantau :

“When I was away for work, when I found myself in harsh conditions, I’ve never asked my parents in the village to send me money. If I ever had an insufficient wage [...] I would be patient, wait and work as long as necessary to save enough to pay for my fare back. When times are tough, I can eat frugally [...] the most important remains that if someone dares ( berani ) merantau someone dares taking risks.” - Suhadin

Numerous times, Suhadin faced adverse incorporation in the oil palm plantation economy of Indonesia. He mentioned being outsourced 150 and often referred to himself as

a coolie to highlight the vulnerability underlying his experience of plantation work.

However, his narrative exemplifies the degree to which risk and capacity to access wealth

is individualised and not necessarily linked to the structures of plantation work. In this

particular narrative, honour in self-help is more valued than the outcome of specific work

experiences 151 . Plantation work is not experienced as a definitive livelihood option but simply as an accessible source of income for immediate reproduction. Migration plantation work takes place in the broader field of meaning and mobile livelihood strategies which is referred to as merantau . According to this conception, plantation work is instrumental to the economy of the family established in the place of origin.

150 Used in English by the informant during the interview. 151 This statement can be related to the notion of cultural capital as defined by Bourdieu which allows conceptualising the accumulation of prestige in the same way as economic capital can be accumulated (Thompson 1991).

175

For men who are not yet married, merantau is often an attempt to achieve a number of goals that are socially and culturally valued in the village of origin in Lombok.

Migration often breaks the monotony of village life and occasional employment for the youth. Young men from the same village usually travel and work together. Migrant work in oil palm plantations for younger men met in Lombok Timur was narrated as adventure with friends away from the village and was often related as an important life experience.

Plantation work is valued by many young men in large part because it locates the worker in a context of limited ties and responsibilities. The capacity to work for only a limited period of time, a few months to a few years, and to return home, was highlighted by many as a desirable feature of the work. Nazim, who is in his early 20s, recently traveled with two friends to seek work on an oil palm smallholding scheme in Kalimantan Barat where his sister lives. He recalled there were very limited economic opportunities in this smallholding scheme and he experienced rough conditions ( sengsara ) for four months without earning much. Nazim and his friends eventually left the smallholding scheme and found work on a private plantation company for six months. They first performed tasks of maintenance and replanting on a casual basis, where the daily minimum wage they received barely covered food and living expenses (35,000 Rupiah per day). It is only when they were asked to harvest fruits as a team ( borongan ) that they managed to save enough money to afford the trip back. They would have kept earning money harvesting, but the palm trees were old and produced very little. He recalled his experience of work and migration in these terms:

“For me what’s most important is a work to which I’m not tied, because I’m still single and young. [...]The fare back, we got it by selling my hand phone and my shoes on top of the money we managed to save, which in total was about 2,500,000Rp. We spent all our money on the trip back. I had only 50,000Rp left when I reached the village. The trip back from West Kalimantan lasted eight days

176

by boat because of all the stopovers. [...] But I really enjoyed that experience despite the fact that the wage was so low.” – Nazim, 25 years old

For Nazim and his friends, the experience of work and mobility was of course shaped by the material conditions of plantation work. But he understood the hardship he experienced as a valuable aspect of his mobility. The reason why workers find themselves having to stay long periods of time on a plantation often ensue from low wages and high food prices on plantations. Whether workers are recruited by an agent or seek employment spontaneously, the costs of the trips to and from the plantation are usually covered by workers themselves, often, as mentioned above, through loans obtained from relatives or friends. The “transit from places of reproduction to place of production”152 is relinquished to the private sphere among migrant workers from

Lombok. Moreover, young workers are dependent on the village of origin for social

reproduction which is not fulfilled by plantations in a context of low wages in a context

of volatile and casual arrangements.

Placing home in plantation work

The geography of plantation work is in part constituted by continual circular migration of labour flows. For a large population of plantation workers, the places of social reproduction and production are separate and distinct. For workers involved in circular migration, social reproduction in the family takes place in the village of origin in

Lombok. Home in Lombok is also where the married male migrant worker’s wife and

152 Herod (2001, 13) discusses the ways in which Marxian political economy has emphasised the action of capital on labour struggles, without attributing agency to the workers themselves. His approach according to which, “laborers are active geographical agents that can shape the landscape of production” (p. 15) illuminates the complex geography of migrant plantation work.

177 young children live. The village becomes the locus of plantation labour’s regeneration between work trips. Return to the village of origin provides a sense of place to workers, as the village forms a place of familiarity and security outside the rhythms of plantation work. The home in the village of origin is important in relation to the embodied reality of strenuous, monotonous and hazardous labour in corporate agribusiness 153 . Many

plantation workers decide to come back home to the village before the end of their work

permit in Malaysia. They report being tired ( capek ), needing to rest for an extended

period of time. As expressed by many men met just after they came back from a work

sojourn on a plantation, away from the plantation belt a migrant worker finds conditions

to improve his health before going back to the plantation. Many also manage to find daily

work in construction ( bangunan ) in the village, or provide help to relatives during harvest or replanting seasons.

Household formation in the village of origin is generally central to plantation worker’s livelihood calculations. Patterns of marriage also depend on success in accumulating capital on the plantation in order to pay for the wedding. As Lindquist

(2010, 122) points out, the island of Lombok has one of the highest divorce rates in

Indonesia and Southeast Asia. More than a third of male and female informants from

Lombok had already gone through at least one divorce in the past few years. “By the late

1990s, it was claimed that couples marry when the man returns from Malaysia and divorce when the money is gone and he once again leaves for the oil palm plantation

153 Harvey (1998) elaborates on the location in which a body is positioned in relation to capital circulation and accumulation. It is in the matrix of capital circulation and accumulation that the body of workers is situated, a matrix in which the village provides conditions of social reproduction for migrant workers.

178 abroad.” 154 Related to this observation, many men expressed the need to secure a family space in the village of origin before leaving again to work on the plantation. This is the case with Randi, who had recently come back from Sumatra Selatan where he was employed by a large oil palm corporation and was now working temporarily in construction in his village in Lombok:

I divorced three times [...] and I have no kids yet. [...] Before going back away to look for work, I want to find myself a wife. If I’m single away, I’m going to spend all my earnings. But if I have a wife, I’ll have someone to think of while I’m away, someone to send money to so that she can save it at home (in the village). Without a wife, I’m only looking for a way to have a good time. The first time I worked abroad before being married, I burned through my wage all the time. But now, even women migrate for work…I want to get married before I leave again. – Amzah, 28 years old

The economic structure provided by the married couple is desired by men who evoke marriage and home in relation to the carefree lifestyle of a single man who spends his entire wage in amusements at the diskotik, a place of drinking, gambling and

prostitution that can be found even in small villages in plantation belts. As expressed by

Randi, the economic unit provided by the married couple, despite the distance between

sites of production and family reproduction, transforms the purpose of work. The playful

adventure in which many young men engage becomes a more serious economic

engagement after marriage. Patterns of marriage and remarriage transform the meaning of

plantation work and the significance of different labour regimes. Economic imperatives

provided by family commitments also contribute to more permanent settlement of

workers on the plantation.

For experienced plantation migrant workers, the importance of the home is often weighed against the possibility of settling down as a family on a plantation for an

154 Lindquist (2010, 122) citing Leena Avonius “Reforming Wetu Telu: Islam, Adat and the Promises of Regionalism in Post-New Order Lombok” University of Leiden. Chapter 2.

179 extended period of time, sometimes up to 10 years. For many men, plantation work is something they undertake alone without their wife and children, who have to stay in the area of origin, in Lombok. But for others, it is precisely the capacity to share tasks of social reproduction with their wife on Indonesian plantations that determines their success at saving money. Moreover, women’s labour combined with men’s increases family incomes in the sexual division of work that imposes itself on oil palm plantations.

Moving the home, the space of social reproduction, from the place of origin to the plantation is seen as something materially and symbolically significant. This is how a labour recruiter in Lombok describes the way in which a whole family will settle on a plantation in Jambi for an extended period of time.

The male workers will arrive earlier on the plantation. After looking at the situation and making sure that the facilities meet the needs of a family, only will he have the courage to bring his family. Although the plantation company provides houses, of course the workers must remain cautious (waspada ) in case the house is not so suitable to a family. Usually a wife will follow her husband to the plantation two months after her husband’s arrival. – Sponsor, 40 years old

This idealised narrative of the recruiting agent describes the transfer of the basis of social reproduction from the home village to the plantation. In this regard, he emphasises the importance of securing decent houses and facilities for a family. This contrasts with the narratives of males who would presumably be more dismissive about living conditions on the plantation if they were on their own. In fact, if the family comes to live on the plantation, the work is not casual anymore for male workers but takes place in a longer and more stable time frame. Men’s place and practices in gender relations in the spatiality of plantation work is problematic 155 . The narrative above highlights dominant discourses in Lombok about men’s capacities to take risks and endure hardship

155 Connell’s (1993, 602) project looks at the place of men in gender relations, and to focus on the institutions which produce masculinity and are in turn produced by it.

180 as mobile and risk-taking agents in contrast to women’s roles centred on the home and unpaid activities of social reproduction 156 . This account also points to questions of risk associated with moving a family onto a plantation, whence the importance for a man of being cautious in this process.

Masculine domination pervades narratives in which the wife follows her husband,

so as to fit the social categories prescribed by the gendered division of work on an oil

palm plantation along with broader social norms. The idea of men as the main economic

agent is reinforced by the corporate agribusiness structure in which women are positioned

economically in relation to their husband. The settlement of a couple on a plantation

away from Lombok in this regard changes the meaning and possibilities of marriage and

divorce. Individuals, especially women, lack the extended support of their siblings

(bersaudara ) which is considered the most important social unit in Lombok to fall back on in a context where divorce and remarriage are common.

The provision of facilities for families, such as schools and in some cases

payments in kind, just as the provision of permanent status, leads to the constitution of a

stable core labour force on a given plantation. The provision of permanent status acts as a

major incentive for workers and their family to remain on a plantation during an

important part of their life. Generally, oil palm companies in Indonesia will only grant the

status of permanence and its benefits (jaminan ) to young and healthy workers physically

adept at strenuous work, and their family. Older workers or those who do not meet the

health criteria defined by companies are expected to only work temporarily on the

156 Webster’s (1998) work provides a conceptual framework that is relevant to the study of the gendered meaning of place in specific economic contexts. The sphere of intimacy always exists in broader processes of place formation, settlement and production of social networks. It also allows a look at the ways in which the distinction between private and public spheres becomes shaped through labour relations and the sexual division of labour.

181 plantation. Health criteria are used on many plantations to determine the value of workers and the potential costs their health could represent to the corporation if they become permanent workers. The health and age criteria used to exclude workers from access to permanent status points to the harsh physical nature of plantation work. However, in the context of Lombok, the meaning of permanent work on a plantation is mediated by specific conceptions of mobility and masculinity as expressed by Randi. Randi worked on a plantation which is part of a large oil palm corporation of Sinar Mas in Riau, where he spent the past two years, a company known to provide good working conditions:

Randi –In order to become a permanent worker, you have to work for 8 months and do the training. After 8 months, they’ll take a picture of you, make a health test and send it directly to the company boss in Jakarta [...]. JFB –Do you see health tests as an issue? Randi –It doesn’t matter, I’m healthy! That time in 2008, I became a permanent worker directly. But I left the plantation for more than a month and lost my permanence, I have to start from scratch. [...]After the age of 35 you cannot become a permanent worker anymore. – Randi, 27 years old

Although he obtained the status of permanent worker, Randi willingly decided to go back to his village. He left the plantation and obtained the money from his pension contribution. He diminished the importance of becoming a permanent worker, as something easily accomplished on that particular plantation for a young and healthy man like him. Confidence in one’s capacities is a pervasive attitude among men interviewed in

Lombok. Although corporate interests treat the labouring body as a disposable tool of capital accumulation, the response of some workers is to express and enact their individual aptitude to cope with the risks of plantation work and shun opportunities of permanence in order to remain mobile. In other cases, despite the permanent status, the declining productivity of a plantation will lead permanent employees to look for work elsewhere, because there is no benefit to being tied to a plantation that provides social

182 benefits ( jaminan ), but no adequate wage. The willingness of a worker to remain on a plantation depends on both the productive capacity of a company and specific decisions of the worker regarding social reproduction.

Plantation work and mobility in Nias: A comparative perspective

Nias, like Lombok, is a small island which constitutes an important labour reservoir for oil palm plantations. Observations from Nias provide a comparative standpoint highlighting how geographically specific contexts give shape to particular networks of mobility in plantation agribusiness. The comparative perspective further highlights the contingency of practices of labour recruitment and forms of engagement in the oil palm plantation economy. It also points to the forms of discipline that transcend place specificities through the forms of labour mobilisation and immobilisation related to the oil palm plantation economy and its labour regimes.

Nias Island is known internationally as a development aid recipient since the tsunami of December 2004 and the earthquake of March 2005. In comparison with other districts of the province of North Sumatra and Indonesia, Nias Island has been consistently described as a region with major development problems, which are reflected in its poor health, education, infrastructure and economic indicators 157 . Although landlessness is not pervasive in rural areas, the island economy has been characterised by low agricultural productivity and high rates of absolute poverty. Most rural households on the island engage in subsistence agriculture and grow cash crops such as wild rubber,

157 The kabupaten of Nias display some of the lowest indicators of development in the province of North Sumatra of which it is a part (World Bank, 2007. Managing Resources to Build Back and Create a Better Future for Nias. Jakarta: World Bank publications).

183 copra and cocoa on plots that average less than 2 hectares 158 (See appendix 5). Family land holdings are often shared among siblings who do not own individual land titles.

The geographical proximity of Nias to North Sumatra has prompted mass labour migration to the plantation belts of Sumatra since the 1970s 159 (Figure 7). It is commonly said that half the population of Nias lives in North Sumatra. Cash crops provide enough capital to ensure the basic needs of a family but often families will seek employment in the plantation belts of Sumatra to improve their economic condition or attempt to accumulate capital to build a house, intensify cash crop production or to repay a debt.

Information gathered in different villages of the Kabupaten of Nias indicates that individuals but more often entire families settle in plantation areas. Most of these migrations are permanent according to observations conducted in four villages ( kampong ) of the Kabupaten Nias, where in each village informants mentioned that a significant number of families were living on oil palm plantations.

Despite the extensive family and kin networks that stretch from Nias to the plantation belts of Sumatra, labour recruiters, agen are also at work in Nias to recruit labour for oil palm plantation companies. People usually move to the plantations of

Sumatra in large groups which encompass numerous families. As reported in the Desa

Leulewonu Nikotoeu, in 2000 more than 80 people from a village of approximately 350 inhabitants were recruited at the same time to work on a plantation in Sumatra. They travelled together and the cost was advanced by the agen and later deducted from their wage. On the plantation they were under the supervision of a mandor who was also from

158 Nias dalam Angka, Badan Penelitian, Pengembangan dan Statistik Kebupaten Nias, Badan Pusat Statistik Kebupaten Nias. 159 Large communities of people from Nias would be established in these areas of Sumatra: Sikampak, Kota Pinang, Bagan Batu, Tanjung Medan, Duri and Torganda

184

Nias yet from a different village. The majority of these people were still living on the plantation at the time of the interview. In many cases reported by informants, the wages and labour conditions encountered by a group on a plantation did not correspond to the promises made by the agen .

Informants who have been migrating individually to plantations in Sumatra without the support of relatives incur high risks and often face conditions of entrapment.

In one case, a man living in highly precarious material conditions in the Kampung Fadoro talked about his migrant work experience in Sumatra where he went on his own seeking work. He reported becoming trapped in daily maintenance work on a plantation. He was compelled by economic means to work on the same plantation for three years until he was able to accumulate enough money to afford the trip back. Many men in Nias with experience in Merantau in Sumatra expressed the opinion that it is almost impossible to accumulate capital by working in oil palm plantations. Of course, experiences vary widely in oil palm agribusiness, and differences in outcomes largely reflect differences in social class and level of education, as those who must sell their physical labour are rarely able to increase their assets.

People from Nias generally constitute important communities on plantations of

North Sumatra and usually regroup by family and village. The presence of extended networks of relatives in the plantations of Sumatra often facilitates the incorporation of people who are newly arrived from Nias to this economy. Many informants who had spent up to 10 years in oil palm plantations in Sumatra only spoke the Nias language as they remained within the ethnic community during their stay there. As in the case of plantation workers from Lombok, high paying jobs are available to harvesters. However,

185 social groups are also confined to low paying jobs. The settlement of families on plantations in the long-standing plantation area of Deli in North Sumatra provides the conditions for the biological reproduction of the labour force. However, children of permanent workers have generally no access to a permanent position, until older age as they are treated as dependant on their parents. Plantation companies benefit from the availability of labour that derives from the presence of families living on site. In situations of job scarcity, kinship mediates low wages and limited work opportunities.

Children live with family and work on a casual basis on the plantation in the hope of being able to obtain higher paying jobs such as harvesters to eventually become permanent workers where this is possible. Those who are not permanent workers often engage in circular migration between a plantation in North Sumatra and Nias, as family members live in both places.

Informants working for large corporations where labour practices are governed by strict regulations were usually back in Nias only to manage the family land. Families with access to permanent jobs on the plantations of Sumatra are less likely to leave, yet they often send back a family member to watch over the family assets left in Nias. However, many informants how they chose to settle back in Nias after marrying someone also from

Nias who was working on the plantation. Life in Nias appeared more desirable to former plantation workers who had access to land and were able to engage in cash crop production on family land. Some also mentioned the difficult relations they experienced with the mandor who supervised their work. Condescending and infantilising discourses are often deployed by managers and supervisors when relating to workers. The work conditions offered on plantations and livelihood possibilities in the village of origin,

186 along with contingent aspects of individual preference, largely determine patterns of mobility between Nias and North Sumatra.

Many informants from the Department of Agriculture (Dinas Pertanian) in Nias are actively seeking to attract large-scale investments in oil palm agribusiness in Nias.

Although they face difficulties securing the investments and problems related to land consolidation, many high-level officials of the Dinas Pertanian are confident that it is only a matter of time before oil palm is cultivated on the island. High-level civil servants have already mapped out the areas that could be allocated to oil palm plantations on the island. Most smallholders interrogated knew about the project and seemed to be willing to convert their rubber plots into oil palm. Many mentioned the limited access to capital and the lack of capacity to increase productivity. In fact, many smallholders in Nias own land but lack the capital to convert into productive cash crops. Oil palm is seen as the crop that will further the access of landholders to capital and improve roads on the island.

Many who had worked on the plantations of Sumatra stated that they would rather sell their labour in oil palm on Nias Island than incur the high costs and the risks related to travelling to plantations in Sumatra.

Conclusion

Since the colonial period, the forms of mobility and immobility through which migrant plantation labour is constituted take shape in complex and dynamic forms of control and discipline which are not confined to the plantation itself. Oil palm agribusiness is a technology of government which produces economic possibilities for people in areas where the agrarian economy is largely saturated. In this regard the vision

187 of agribusiness as tool to redistribute labour and populations throughout Indonesia partly materialises in everyday practices of migrant workers. Complex practices of mobility provide access to economic possibilities in agribusiness. Mobility becomes the object of power and control by recruitment agents and plantation companies which have the power to place workers inside or outside the permanent core labour force. Discipline of labour in the oil palm plantation economy takes place in a broader form of governmentality in which desires, aspirations and disposition to mobility are channelled. Through imperatives of social reproduction, workers become entangled in the techniques of plantation companies to control labour regimes.

Specific subjects of agribusiness in the spheres of management envision ways and design mechanisms to maximize production and achieve the optimal disposition of labour force. Mobilisation and immobilisation take place in this field of interventions. Labour is passively mobilised or demobilised when a company suppresses benefits, thereby leading to labour desertion and actively mobilised when the company engages in labour recruitment through various channels. Access to labour occurs through the deployment of various modes of coercion and enticement that are based on representations of different workers and the dispositions of workers themselves. The tensions between mobility and immobility are enacted by workers as mobility is deployed as a strategy to maximise access to resources. The representations of migrant plantation workers I encountered in

East Lombok emphasise the subject of the adventurous mobile male entrepreneur who displays confidence in his individual capacities. The representations of plantation workers from Nias are less explicit, as workers from Nias tend to seek permanent work on the plantations of North Sumatra. The migrant plantation worker as a subject exists in

188 relation to plantation companies’ labour control mechanisms which involve tactics for management and control that range from exclusion from good paying jobs to the provision of welfare and social benefits. Representations of scarcity or availability of jobs are deployed by plantation companies to shape the expectations of workers and to justify limits on the provision of social benefits. The forms of mobility in which plantation workers engage constantly redefine their experiences of the economic and social limits in which their life unfolds.

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Chapter 6

Conclusion: The contours of oil palm agribusiness

Introduction

At stake with the current expansion of oil palm plantations in Indonesia is the question of life itself or bio-politics. Human life and the environment of which it is part are located at the center of a political project that ascribes value to palm oil production suited to commercial interests. In this account I have sought to demonstrate the contours of this political project. Oil palm agribusiness constitutes a field of practices and knowledge which has emerged historically through modes of visioning economic order and systems of agricultural production. Through a broad range of actions and for different objectives, colonial and post-colonial officials, scientists and investors have engaged in the visioning of plantations for oil palm agribusiness. By doing so, these subjects have contributed to the consolidation of forms of power and ways of knowing population, territories and wealth which have allowed the continual expansion of the plantation model and the different modes of large-scale agribusiness. Oil palm agribusiness both as a project and as an economic system corresponds to an institution of government as

Foucault analysed (1975, 188) and a manifestation of broader capillarity of power in social and economic systems. The modes of discipline that appear through large-scale agribusiness in Indonesia contemporarily can be related to the normalisation of standardised configurations of space and time.

To attend to the forms of governance that take hold with oil palm agribusiness both as an envisioned and material reality, I have departed from Michel Foucault’s (1975,

190

1978) key insights on power. In these writings, Foucault defined modern modalities of power as the sum of processes and mechanisms that create possibilities and constraints which are constantly reshaped by the active engagement of subjects with new meanings and discourses. In line with this conception of power, I have reinterpreted resistance, as analysed by Scott (1985), as the deployment of planning and livelihood strategies.

Attempts by state actors and companies to plan and make mass labour available for the plantation industry, along with attempts of smallholders to accumulate labour and land, point to the labouring body as a central locus of power. However, far from being imposed from above, these attempts to control labouring bodies and land are manipulated by situated subjects and social groups on the ground. Discussions on the labouring body in large-scale agribusiness are based on tensions between Marxian insights on the objectification of labour and Foucault on the body as the prime object of power and discipline. Fuelling this debate, the research demonstrates that oil palm agribusiness contributes to reshaping the meaning of mobility, gender and ethnic differences. The subjects integrated in oil palm agribusiness come to understand themselves through new meanings, categories and processes of value formation and capital accumulation. Oil palm agribusiness is a productive form of power that generates new norms of success and failure, wealth and poverty. Moreover, it instils new forms of discipline and valuation of differentiated labouring bodies, as it reinforces the autonomous sphere of the market.

The dynamic field of oil palm agribusiness

The model of plantation agriculture for oil palm, a broad range of knowledge and practices, did not remain uniform or unchanged throughout places and times. Large-scale

191 agribusiness points to the formation of agro-industrial structures according to which labour and land are organized for imperatives of production. Even when colonial planters in Deli, Sumatra, were allowed to use physical violence on coolies, new strategies to control labour more efficiently through less direct modes of coercion were constantly being designed according to changing socio-political and economic imperatives (Stoler

1985). Moreover, envisioning agribusiness, even in colonial times, never materialized as a totalizing hegemonic power over society and environment in Indonesia. Large-scale agribusiness always encounters the friction of local geographies through which it is reshaped by everyday engagement of economic subjects in this mode of production

(Tsing 2005).

Large-scale agribusiness constitutes a dynamic field of practices and knowledge constantly reshaped by shifting imperatives determined whether by changing political contexts or economic ideologies. Plantations during the colonial period in Indonesia were economic activities which served extractive aims of private companies. The way in which large-scale agribusiness was mobilized by the post-colonial Indonesian government to produce smallholding schemes to increase the welfare of populations was based on new political and social imperatives. However, although the objective of providing smallholders with access in oil palm agribusiness contract farming schemes consolidated in post-colonial Indonesia, the modalities according to which these schemes are implemented was radically transformed according to neoliberal principals of economy.

Economic subjectivities that have been formed by the continual expansion of oil palm agribusiness have led a growing number of smallholders and entrepreneurs to equate palm oil production with welfare and secure livelihood basis. Although, despite the

192 populist aims of oil palm smallholding schemes, large populations have been economically marginalized and dispossessed from the access to land they used to enjoy.

The capacity of state bureaucrats to envision the emergence of a prosperous population of smallholders in agribusiness schemes does not translate in benefits for all people.

In part due to the widespread networks of people involved in this mode of production, oil palm agribusiness in Indonesia does not only emanate from centers of bureaucratic administrations and corporate investors. In contemporary Indonesia, oil palm agribusiness is constantly mobilised by different economic actors at different scales, whether as a project or an actual territorial transformation. Especially since Indonesia entered an era of decentralized political governance, networks of alliances form around the attempt of creating agribusiness schemes often enrol local leaders, bureaucrats and small investors. The emergence of oil palm agribusiness in Indonesia manifests the capacity of groups and networks to impose a specific vision of economic and social change. In this dynamic field of power, large-scale agribusiness becomes a device of government to reshape relations between territories and populations. Even the smallholders who manage to accumulate large tracts of land in a smallholding scheme actively engage with a vision of production and economic change that governs livelihood possibilities of others, even it indirectly.

The plantation model that spreads in Indonesia through estates and smallholding schemes actively reshapes social relations around imperatives of production and accumulation. Oil palm plantations in the province of West Kalimantan have led to the formation of markets for land and labour which naturalize differences and reshape economic possibilities. Oil palm agribusiness works through the production of social

193 categories in relation to production requirements. In oil palm agribusiness, only certain groups are able to maintain high level of capital investments required to sustain oil palm production. Land accumulation by successful smallholder entrepreneurs translates in dispossession of smallholders less disposed to engage in this production. Large populations become subjects of agribusiness as daily workers or piece-rate workers in volatile labour regimes and flexible arrangements. In this context, the maintenance work performed by women is considered by plantation managements as cheap and abundant, therefore disposable. On the other hand, some men occupy a favoured position in oil palm agribusiness, as they are able to access a broader range of jobs and managerial positions. Large-scale agribusiness reproduces and reshapes masculine domination according to specific modalities of production. Moreover, it reshapes livelihood possibilities but also the very way in which value is conceived and future is envisioned by populations living in an area of oil palm agribusiness.

The consolidation of patterns of social and economic differentiation through oil palm agribusiness does not constitute an analytical endpoint. Although the ethnographic gaze in this research can only be attentive to a certain set of practices and attitudes, economic subjects, even those in the most disadvantaged positions of power, deploy strategies and tactics to maximize their benefits from engagement in oil palm agribusiness. Practices of mobility provide a window on the strategies deployed by plantation workers to secure conditions of social reproduction in livelihood configurations that stretch from oil palm estates to villages of origin in Lombok or other central islands of Indonesia. Mobility is also a response to increasing flexibility labour arrangements on oil palm plantations and a way to manage the risks associated to labour

194 migrations in conditions of economic vulnerability. Moreover, forms of temporary labour migrations that people engage in are also related to the desire of people to completely disengage from the forms of labour control and discipline that take place on certain oil palm estates. However, despite the high level of volatility in labour regimes on oil palm plantations in Indonesia, an important population of plantation workers in West

Kalimantan and throughout Indonesia has been protesting and associating for the protection of specific benefits or rights 160 .

Scales of visions of agribusiness

Not all visions of agribusiness in Indonesia wield the same amount of power.

Politics of scale are central to understand the relative power of different actors and forces

at play in the production of a dominant vision of agribusiness. By paying attention to the

ways in which oil palm agribusiness is mobilized to govern at different scales and across

diverse geographies, I have sought to articulate a critical stance towards oil palm

agribusiness as a natural option to achieve economic development. This stance has

allowed examining the specific operations of power that constitute the field of oil palm

agribusiness in the moment of planning and through grounded material practices. As oil

palm agribusiness has become naturalized in discourses of state officials, it is important

to try and demonstrate the contingency of this particular mode of governing territories

and its relation with scales of governance. Even if scales are socially constructed as

attempts to understand dynamics of power – and therefore never stabilised as ontological

units – scalar indications provide an avenue to examine the complexity of forces at play

in the definition of large-scale oil palm agribusiness in Indonesia.

160 Serikat Petani Kelapa Sawit, Indonesia.

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At the global scale, oil palm agribusiness is a manifestation of far-reaching agricultural transformations around the world that have affected most agricultural commodities but especially cereals and crops with high potential for bio-fuel production.

The current trends in agriculture include international land deals, increasingly integrated global agribusiness, and the financialization of agriculture (McMichael 2009). In this highly competitive productive context, agricultural corporations in tandem with state development actors, become center stage actors in the implementation of mega-projects of plantation agriculture. The international agreements at the WTO have taken place to allow for better global circulation of palm oil which has increased the power of large corporations (Hawkes 2010). Through large-scale territorial transformations for the purpose of agribusiness, space becomes governed by the functional principles of plantation production. Such initiatives as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil

(RSPO) are manifestations of corporate neoliberal reforms which seek to improve practices in the field of oil palm agribusiness. However such reform legitimizes a structure of production that imposes power relations through private systems of technical knowledge and hierarchical management practices.

At the national scale, the objective stated by Indonesian government officials to transform 20 million hectares of land into large-scale oil palm agribusiness by 2020 derives from a specific discursive construction of the economy. The rapid expansion of large-scale agribusiness in Indonesia demonstrates the consolidation and intensification of economic processes. The agro-ecological practices and knowledge that took shape over centuries at the local scale are being erased and replaced by the agro-industrial monoculture. The vision of oil palm agribusiness is a dominant conception of economy

196 that allows different actors to secure the production of value calculable according to the national monetary system, and access to market goods. Moreover, oil palm agribusiness secures continual expansion of the agrarian economy as a field where input and output can be calculated according to truncated models of reality. The violence of destruction of livelihoods through large-scale oil palm agribusiness in local areas, also involves the creation of job opportunities for migrant workers at the national scale. For the central and provincial governments of Indonesia, the expansion of oil palm agribusiness provides revenues and extends the reach of the state through the provision of infrastructures.

Ecological impoverishment and socioeconomic marginalization are being externalized in this vision of agrarian change that takes shape through oil palm agribusiness through state-level institutions .

At the local scale, oil palm agribusiness is embedded in the production of social

relations naturalized by market mechanisms. Large-scale agribusiness schemes and

estates consolidate market processes formed by contingent power relations, modes of

appropriation and dispossession that reshape power dynamics rooted in national and

regional histories. Through capital intensive large-scale agro-industrial processes,

populations become entangled in a system which produces material and cultural

conditions of existence. The disciplines that govern production of market value for labour

are entrenched in patriarchal systems of production and reproduction. The mobility of

populations becomes governed by the disciplines inherent in the logic of profit

maximisation and tactics of labour access in oil palm agribusiness that range from

coercion to welfare provision. Practices deployed by oil palm plantation companies to

secure access to labour power rest on representations of labour needs and labour

197 availabilities. Plantation companies derive benefits from the constitution of a pool of captive labour. In a situation of abundant labour, company management is able to adjust the labour force to achieve optimal conditions of profit accumulation. Through disciplinary techniques of agribusiness, the mobility of workers is governed by modes of valuation of labour and by specific meanings of work and mobility in livelihood practices. Ultimately, the modalities that control labour mobility are entangled within the social reproduction of the labour force, which also points to the powers of companies and corporations over human life.

The power deployed through plantation or large-scale agribusiness sets limits on

livelihood possibilities and leads to the formation of specific labour subjectivities.

However the plantation as a model or an institution is not self-contained, it is a site where

broader forces come into play in the government of conduct and integration between

people and economy. If large-scale oil palm agribusiness provides possibilities to

consolidate and rearrange power relations, it takes place within a broader history of

government, the ways in which people’s desires are shaped by abstract forces. In this

regard, the dominance of global and national scales of economic life through oil palm

agribusiness leads to the production of the abstract space of modernity theorized by

Lefebvre (1974, introduction). This form of spatiality was spread by colonial code of

laws, market imperatives and forms of land tenure which reinforce the role of capitalist

agriculture (Cooper 1980). The specific technologies that naturalised market imperatives

and forms of exchange along with modern education contribute reshaping subjectivities

and understandings of livelihood. It is through these subjectivities that power circulates

and leads subjects to value economic practices related to agribusiness. Large-scale oil

198 palm agribusiness is both a specific mode of organization of human and non-human life, and part of a broader power regime that reinforces the importance of national and universal forms of capital production and circulation. In order to denaturalize oil palm agribusiness and articulate a critical position, it is important to avoid positing dualisms between large-scale agribusiness and the agrarian societies concerned. Societies and oil palm agribusiness are to a large extent intertwined in large parts of Indonesia. Awareness of the forms of power underlying large-scale agribusiness will hopefully contribute to opening space for envisioning alternatives to the ecologically destructive and socially exclusive model of agrarian change that currently spreads in Indonesia through oil palm agribusiness. These alternatives, although also problematic, are being articulated by a growing number of non-governmental organisations, some of which of global stature such as La Via Campesina. The spectrum of alternatives encompasses institutional attempts to further regulate land deals at different scales to the promotion of family-based agro-ecology.

199

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Appendix 1. Glossary of Indonesian terms adat Tradition (customary laws) afdeling Division Agen Agent Alat Tool (pole to harvest oil palm fruits) Antar Accompany Babat Weeding Bangunan Development Berani Daring Biaya Cost, fare Bon Cash advance Borongan (pemborong) Contact work (short term) Brondol Oil palm fruits Buruh Lepas (BL) Casual Labour Calon karyawan Candidate worker Debu Dust Desa Village Dinas Pertanian Department of Agriculture divisi Division Gabunga Pengusaha Kelapa Sawit Indonesia (GAPKI) Indonesian Palm Oil Producers’ Association Gaki pokok Basic wage Hutan Forest Jaminan Medical care Kapling Land plot Kaya Rich Kebupaten Department Kecamatan District Kelapa Sawit Oil palm Kemitraan Partnership Kepala Desa Village head Kompak Compact, united, cohesive Kooperasi Unit Desa Village unit cooperative krani Administrative clerk Kredit Kepada Koperasi Primer untuk Anggota (KKPA) Primary Cooperative Credit for Members Lahan kosong Empty land (without valuable cash crop) Lapangan Kerja Field, manual worker Lembaga Pendidikan Kelapa Sawit (LPP) Traning Center for Oil Palm Mampu Able Mandor Supervisor (overseer) Merantau Migration Obat Medicine Ongkos jalan Travel cost

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Otnomi Daerah Regional autonomy Pabrik Palm oil mill (factory) Panen (memanen) Harvest Pas pasan Bear minimum Peganti Replacement Pemuat (muat) Loading Penbangunan Development Perawatan Maintenance Perbudakan Slavery Perkebunan Inti Rakyat (PIR) People’s Nucleus Estate Scheme Perseroran Terbatas Perkebunan Negera (PTPN) The National Plantation Company Limited Perusahan Swasta Private company Petani Gurum Smallholder Pindah Moving Piring (memiring) Weeding around palms Premi Bonus Pribadi Independent Produksi Production Propinsi Province Pupuk (memupuk) Fertilizer Racun Poison Rajin Fierce Reformasi Reform, reformation Riziko Risk Semprot (nyemprot) Spray (pesticides) Sopir Driver Sumber manusia Human resources Susu Milk Tahan Putting up transmigrasi Transmigration

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Appendix 2. Glossary of Acronyms

BAL: Basic Agrarian Law BFL: Basic Forestry Law BL: Buruh Lepas BNPP: National Agency of Border Management CIBC: Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control FELDA: Federal Land Development Authority FFB: Fresh Fruit Bunch GAPKI: Gabunga Pengusaha Kelapa Sawit Indonesia HCB: Huileries du Congo Belge IMPOG: Indonesian-Malaysian Palm Oil Group ISPO: Indonesian Sustainable Oil Palm KHT: Kariawan Harian Tetap KUD: Kooperative Unit Desa MPOB: Malaysian Palm Oil Board NGO: Non-Governmental Organization PIR: Perkebunan Inti Rakyat PKB: Perkebunan Kalimantan Baru PORIM: Palm Oil Research Institute PSA: Perusahan Swasta A PTPN: Perseroran Terbatas Perkebunan Negera RSPO: Roundtable on Sustainable Oil Palm WALHI: Wahana Lingkungan Hidup Indonesia

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Appendix 3. Basic characteristics of respondents by geographical location

Table 1. Sola, East Lombok:

Inf. Gender Age Status N of trips* Arrangement Country 1 M 32 M 6 I A/I 2 M 50 M 2 I/F/S A/I 3 M 35 M 2 S/I A/I 4 M 46 M 3 I A 5 M 26 M 2 I A 6 M 35 M 3 I/R A/I 7 M 28 S 4 I/F A/I 8 M 26 S 1 I I 9 M 25 S 2 I A/I 10 F 25 M 1 S I 11 M 40 M 1 I I 12 M 22 S 1 I A 13 M 23 S 1 I A 14 M 21 M 1 I I 15 M 17 S 1 I I 16 M 60 M 1 S I 17 M 43 M 20 R I 18 M 35 M 15 R A/I 19 M 35 M 3 I A/I 20 F 36 M 2 S I 21 M 30 M 3 I I 22 M 40 M 4 I A/I 23 M 21 M 2 I I 24 M 30 M 1 S I 25 M 23 S 2 I A/I 26 M 25 S 5 I I 27 M 27 S 2 I I * To oil palm plantations for work

Status: M = Married S = Single

Arrangement: S = State sponsored (PIR) I = Independent F = Family network R = Worked as a Recruiter

Country A = Malaysia I = Indonesia

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Table 2. Nias, North Sumatra

Inf. Gender Age Status Education Work in Nias Arrangement 1 M 49 M Post-Sec. Teacher I 2 M 25 S SMP Rubber farmer F 3 M 39 M SMA Teacher I 4 M 25 M < SD Rubber farmer F 5 M 29 M Post-Sec. NGO worker I 6 M 47 M SMA Rubber farmer I 7 M 53 M SMA Rubber farmer I 8 M 36 M SD Petty trader I 9 F 36 M SD Petty trader F 10 M 26 M SD Rubber farmer F 11 M 35 M < SD Rubber farmer F 12 F 36 M < SD Rubber farmer I (Recruited) 13 M 21 S SMP Construction F 14 M 34 M Post-Sec. Rubber farmer I 15 F 40 M < SD Rubber farmer I (Recruited) 16 M 32 M SMA Construction I 17 M 30 M < SD Landless worker F 18 M 21 S Post-Sec. Student I 19 M 48 M < SD Rice farmer I 20 M 32 M SD Transportation F 21 M 30 M < SD Rice farmer F 22 M 45 M < SD Security I 23 M 23 S < SD Rubber farmer F 24 M 30 M SMP Rubber farmer F * To oil palm plantations for work

Status: M = Married S = Single

Arrangement: S = State sponsored (PIR) I = Independent F = Family network R = Worked as a Recruiter

Country A = Malaysia I = Indonesia

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Table 3. Desa Buaya, PTP, PSA, Kalimantan Barat

Inf. Gender Age Work Status Company Job Ethnicity 1 M 55 Smallholder - - Javanese 2 M 40 Permanent PTP Facility maintenance Javanese 3 M 39 Permanent PTP Security Batak 4 M 50 Retired PTP Harvester Javanese 5 M 45 Smallholder - - Javanese 6 M 55 Retired PTP Clerk, administration Malay 7 M 25 Permanent PSA Management Malay 8 F 70 Permanent PTP Facility maintenance Javanese 9 M 32 Permanent PTP Clerk, administration Sundanese 10 M 42 Permanent PTP Clerk, administration Batak 11 M 35 Permanent PTP Supervisor Batak 12 F 55 Smallholder Independant - Malay 13 M 34 Casual PSA Harvester Malay 14 M 61 Retired PTP Driver Malay 15 F 41 Permanent PTP Facility maintenance Javanese 16 M 27 Casual PTP Harvester Javanese 17 M 50 - Independant Fertilizer trader Chinese 18 F 23 Casual PSA Pesticide application Malay 19 F 32 Permanent PSA Fertilizer application Malay 20 M 60 Retired PTP Electricity Malay 21 M 35 Security PSA Permanent Batak 22 M 30s Casual PSA Loading fruits Malay 23 M 27 Contract PSA Driver Malay 24 M 39 Casual PSA Harvester Sundanese 25 F 37 Casual PSA Fruit picking Dayak 26 M 40 Staff PSA Manager Malay 27 M 30s Permanent PSA Harvester Malay 28 M 30s Casual PSA Harvester Javanese 29 F 20s Casual PSA Pesticide application Javanese 30 M 30s Permanent PSA Security Dayak 31 M 30s Permanent PSA Driver Sasak 32 F 40s Casual PSA Weeding Chinese 33 F 41 Casual PSA Pesticide application Madurese 34 M 32 Permanent PSA Security Malay 35 M 55 Casual PSA Weeding Malay 36 F 20 Casual PSA Pesticide application Malay 37 F 31 Casual PSA Pesticide application Madureses 38 M 20 Contract PSA driver Malay 39 M 50 Casual PSA Harvester Sasak 40 M 22 Casual PSA Harvester Sasak 41 M 32 Casual PSA Harvester Sasak

Work status: R = Retired P = Permanent worker C = Casual worker S = Smallholder

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Appendix 4. Population characteristics of Desa Sola, East Lombok

Table 1. Main occupation by gender, Desa X, East Lombok

Occupation Males and Females Smallholder/Farmer 662 Wage Agricultural Labour 1523 Cattleman 237 School Teacher 71 Replacent School Teacher 30 Police / Secutiy Agent 7 Trader / Merchant 71 Specialised technicien 28 Tobacco Oven Employee 63 International Migrant Worker (TKI) 237 Total 2929 Source: Rencana Pembangunan Jangka Menengah Desa Tahun Anggaran (2010-2014)

Table 2. Education level achieved, Desa Sola, East Lombok

Education level achieved Males and Females No Schooling/Illeterate 1323 Islamic School 100 Elementary (SD) 510 Junior High School (SMP) 487 Senior High School (SMA) 430 Post-secondary education 97 Total 2847 Source: Rencana Pembangunan Jangka Menengah Desa Tahun Anggaran (2010-2014)

Table 3. Housing conditions in Desa Sola, East Lombok

Material used for walls and floor Number of houses Brick 674 Wood Board 325 Wood Plank 597 Cement / Ceramic 701 Earth floor 592 Total 2888 Source: Rencana Pembangunan Jangka Menengah Desa Tahun Anggaran (2010-2014)

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Appendix 5. Population Characteristics of Nias, North Sumatra

Table 1. Main occupation by gender among people of at least 15 years old

Occupation Males Females Smallholder/Farmer 85 389 82 484 Industry 1 838 718 Electricy, gax and water 375 159 Construction 3 491 0 Trade and accomodation services 2 315 3 257 Transportation, storage 1 414 106 Real estate, business services 118 0 Community and social services 1 465 881 Total 96 405 87 605 Source: Nias in Figures 2010, Badan Penelitian, Pengembangan Dan Statistik Kebupaten Nias degan Badan Pusat Statistik

Table 2. Education level achieved by gender

Education level Males Females No Schooling/Illiterate 7 533 15 600 Pre-elementary 29 610 31 072 Elementary (SD) 25 181 24 119 Junior High School (SLTP) 20 804 10 855 Specialised SLTP 642 - Senior High School (SLTA) 10 578 4 583 SMK 1 681 862 Post-Secondary 376 514 Total 95 405 87 605 Source: Nias in Figures 2010, Badan Penelitian, Pengembangan Dan Statistik Kebupaten Nias degan Badan Pusat Statistik

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Appendix 6. Population characteristics of Desa Buaya, Kalimantan Barat

Table 1. Main occupation by gender, Desa Buaya, Kalimantan Barat

Occupation Males Females Smallholder/Farmer 1005 997 Security Agent/Policy 34 28 Private company Employee 86 26 Small and Medium Businesses 55 34 Credit Cooperative Employee 3 - State Company Employee 734 348 Others 134 55 Total 2051 1488 Source: Laporan Keterangan Pertanggung Jawaban 2012 (LKPJ)

Table 2. Ethnic origin by gender, Desa Buaya, Kalimantan Barat

Ethnic Group Males Females Batak 125 109 Melayu 1445 1449 Madura 7 9 Sunda 46 49 Jawa 968 978 Dayak 165 161 Timor 4 8 Papua 9 10 Tionghoa 160 140 Bali 32 28 Banjar 6 4 Bugis 10 11 Ambon 6 5 Total 2983 2961 Source: Laporan Keterangan Pertanggung Jawaban 2012 (LKPJ)

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Table 3. Education level achieved by gender

Education level achieved Males Females No Schooling/Illiterate 426 393 Pre-elementary 795 761 Elementary (SD) 778 758 Junior High School (SLTP) 506 579 Senior High School (SLTA) 409 425 Post-secondary education 69 45 Total 2983 2961 Source: Laporan Keterangan Pertanggung Jawaban 2012 (LKPJ)