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ABSTRACT
This paper reflects on the concept of the Plantationocene through an analysis of sugarcane plantations in Guangxi province, China. It argues that although these plantations are owned and operated by local villagers, they are de facto controlled by corporations, and subject to state intervention through a ‘zoning scheme’. They are constructed and operated according to the same logic as other plantations all over the world, namely, the logic of extraction based on cheap land and labor. By demonstrating that plantations are not necessarily large-scale and do not always entail the alienation of land and labor, this paper hopes to empirically broaden the concept of the Plantationocene and to highlight the extractive nature of and the power relations around plantations.
Acknowledgement
Our research is supported by the research project ‘Commodity & land rushes and regimes: Reshaping five spheres of global social life’ (RRUSHES-5) funded by the European Research Council Advanced Grant (Grant # 834006). We would like to thank Wendy Wolford and Andrew Ofstehage (the guest editors of this special issue on Plantationocene) and three anonymous reviewers for their critical and constructive comments that helped us sharpen our argument and improve the overall quality of the paper. We would like to thank Saturnino M. Borras Jr. for his inspiring suggestions and unreserved support. We would like to thank Paula Bownas for the excellent copyediting of the text.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 In this paper, following Don Mitchell's (Citation1996) concept, the making of landscape involves both spatiality and social integration.
2 In this paper, we use pseudonyms for the names of the townships and counties where we did our research. Meanwhile, those interviews in 2020 are conducted virtually due to the restrictions of the Covid-19 pandemic.
3 There is a decrease of sugarcane production area from 2012 to 2016. This is related to the decrease of sugarcane price which is directly link to a plummet of domestic sugar price. According the relevant news, the sugar had decreased around 44% from 8000 yuan per ton in 2011 to around 4500yuan per ton in 2015 (CCTV Citation2012 and He Wenting Citation2015). But both the sugar companies and local state actors have taken actions to retain the zoning region (e.g., offering subsidies and setting lowest sugarcane price annually). As a result, the decrease of the sugarcane area is much smaller compared with the drop of sugar price.
4 According to the Land Matrix database, the top three sugarcane plantations in terms of the size of land deals in operation worldwide are 175,000 ha in Ethiopia, 15,000 ha in Zambia and 14,733 ha in Ethiopia (https://landmatrix.org/list/deals).
5 Although main products and byproducts might change, in line with the politics of flex crops (Borras et al. Citation2016).
6 Although there are also relatively large-scale plantations that are run by specialized enterprises under the ‘double high’ program promoted by the Guangxi provincial government, these account for less than 10% of the total, according to authors’ interviews (field notes, 9 September 2017).
7 In this paper, the cost of controlling over land includes not only the direct cost of land acquisitions, but also the indirect cost of maintaining land control.
8 However, contract farming alone is not sufficient to be considered as a form of plantation. Because contract farming is of high risk of contract violation and thus cannot always secure investors’ control over land-use, production, and circulation of the products. So, it can be viewed as a form of plantation only when it is supplemented with schemes that secure investors’ constant extraction of value via a firm control of cheap land and labour.
9 after 2008, contracting rights were split further from the user rights with the promotion of land transfers (Ye Citation2015).
10 The differing capabilities is related to rural households’ distinct access to resources (mainly labour resource and social resources)
11 But this does not mean that villagers are able to completely control the land. The interventions from above, from below and the interactions of the two serve to affect the land control (for more details, see Xu Citation2019).
12 ‘Double high’ is a state-led program established in 2014 to promote large-scale mechanized sugarcane production with the aim of ensuring both high-quality and high-quantity outputs in Guangxi (Liu Citation2015).
13 Prior to 2018, the price of sugarcane in Guangxi was not determined purely by corporations but also involved state intervention. However, since 2018, the local state has stopped offering a directive price for sugarcane, giving more power to the corporations to control prices.
14 For more details, see Jiang (Citation2014).
15 See TAKE-PROFIT.ORG
16 Although such channels have been blocked temporally due to the impacts of the pandemic.
17 Such dynamics have also been observed in sugarcane plantations in Yunnan, where seasonal migrant workers from Myanmar were largely employed (Borras et al. Citation2022).
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Chunyu Wang
Chunyu Wang is Associate Professor at the College of Humanities and Development of China Agricultural University in Beijing. Her research interests include land politics, migration, left-behind populations and agrarian transformations. Email: [email protected]
Yunan Xu
Yunan Xu is a post-doctoral researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam. She currently works for a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant awarded project ‘Commodity & Land Rushes and Regimes: Reshaping Five Spheres of Global Social Life (RRUSHES-5)’. Prior to that, she worked as a post-doctor research fellow at Singapore Management University. Her research experience and interest revolve around land politics and commodity rush, and how these have shaped the politics of local natural resource control, food, as well as labor and livelihoods, with the geographic areas both in China and beyond (including the countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative). She has published in top international academic journals, including Journal of Peasant Studies, Geoforum, Land use policy, Journal of Cleaner Production, Third World Quarterly and Third World Thematics, and has a monograph published by Routledge. Email: [email protected]