The biofuel connection – transnational activism and the palm oil boom

Abstract

The 10 percent mandatory target for ‘renewable energy’ adopted by the European Parliament in December 2008 is fuelling a frenzy of investment in palm oil across Southeast Asia, leading in turn to the emergence of new, transnational campaign alliances. The specific dynamics of alliance building, political strategies and impacts of palm oil activism are shaped by the key role of the Indonesian environmental and agrarian justice movement, the broadening and radicalisation of groups in Europe and the ways in which these are interconnected by transnational activists. Campaigning has been successful in creating a transnational political debate around palm oil and biofuels and in influencing public opinion in Europe. Peasant activists have played an important role by combining issues of biodiversity and climate change with food sovereignty and by embedding the critique of biofuels within the global movement for climate justice. However, discontented palm oil smallholders and plantation workers are conspicuously absent at the transnational level. Building alliances between agrarian movements and plantation workers could strengthen the movement against biofuels by tapping into the potential offered by the transnational social and economic spaces which characterise the palm oil industry.

Keywords:

• biofuels
• palm oil
• transnational activism
• climate justice
• Southeast Asia

Notes

¹For example, for rubber plantations (Dove 1996, 46–47). See also White's study (1999) of the state PTPN XII Cisokan hybrid coconut Nucleus Estate in West-Java.

²In its ‘PIR-trans’ form, the inti-plasma system was a key component of the transmigrasi programme, bringing Javanese migrants as indebted contract farmers to the outer islands (van Gelder 2004, 19).

³For example, the Wilmar corporation stated for its Sambas plantation, an area of recent expansion, that of the 1,200 workers, only 26 percent were permanent staff, the rest being employed on a temporary basis (e.g. for establishing the plantation or for planting) or as daily labourers (Milieudefensie et al. 2007, 94).

⁴A member of the International Union of Foodworkers (IUF).

⁵The relation between the SPI and AMAN is not always so harmonious, partly because of reservations by activists towards the ‘feudal elites’ of customary rights (Peluso et al. 2008, 230) and partly because of tactical differences regarding the reform of the Basic Agrarian Law. AMAN supported a revision in order to give adat rights more weight, whilst the SPI opposed a reform because of the neoliberal context of the reform and a perceived danger of ‘opening the Pandora's box of corporate influence’ (interview 2009, see also Peluso et al. 2008).

⁶The Penan campaign has been subjected to a vigorous critique, in part because of the strong reaction of the Malaysian government to the campaign and its depiction of environmentalism as neo-colonialism (Weiss 2004), in part because of the way the Penan were ‘objectified and dehumanised’ by their ‘romanticised, essentialised images’ (Brosius 2003, 326). The Malaysian NGO SAM reacted to the charge of being puppets of Northern NGOs by distancing themselves from parts of the campaign (Brosius 2003) and by stressing their national credentials.

⁷I am using Tarrow's term in a broader sense than Edelman (2009b), who focuses his analysis on the leaders of La Via Campesina; the point being that rooted cosmopolitans are a far bigger constituency than ‘the leaders of contemporary transnational agrarian movements’ (2009b, 3), who I would place within the subgroup of transnational activists.

⁸Including the ‘The Climate Alliance of European Cities with indigenous Rainforest Peoples, EU’ (or just ‘Climate Alliance’). In theory, at least, this meant that over 1,200 European municipalities (including 650 towns in Austria and 450 in Germany) were in opposition to the European biofuel targets.

⁹Including ‘Hier Bio - dort Tod: Vom Sterben des Orang Utans’, NDR, Phoenix; ‘Der Palmöl-Skandal - Wie Stromkunden Umweltvernichtung finanzieren’, BR Report München; ‘Der letzte Wald der Orang Utans’, ARD - W wie Wissen 2007; ‘Umweltsünde Biosprit’, ORF – Weltjournal; ‘Mogelpackung Biodiesel’, ARD – Monitor; ‘Ohne Rücksicht - Brandrodung für Biodiesel’, ARD- Tagesthemen 13.12.07; ‘Die Biosprit-Falle’, SWR-Auslandsreporter. See http://www.globalfilm.de.

¹⁰e.g. in the films ‘Hier Bio - dort Tod: Vom Sterben des Orang Utans’ (Altemeier and Hornung 2008) or the Regenwald Report on the ‘Thinkers of the Jungle’ (Schuster and Ullal 2007).

¹¹E.g. in the film ‘Die Biosprit-Falle. Indonesiens Wald in Gefahr’ (Altemeier and Hornung 2007), which features the Papuan tribal elder Kasimirus Sanggara.

¹²‘Hit the Production’ aimed to use civil disobedience to block the harbour of Copenhagen, thereby drawing attention to the linkage between the liberalisation of trade and increased emissions, whilst ‘Reclaim Power: Pushing for Climate Justice’ attempted to create a new ‘space’ made up of activists working on the ‘inside’, delegates, and activists on the outside to discuss the measures and social changes needed to combat climate change. Both actions were partly thwarted by police repression.

¹³The anti-capitalist sentiments of the climate justice movement were taken a step further at the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia in 2010. The ‘Cochabamba Protocol’ identified ‘the capitalist system’ as the cause of climate change and called for a ‘Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth’ to be adopted by the UN.

¹⁴For a detailed discussion on food sovereignty, see Desmarais (2007) and McMichael (2008).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Oliver Pye

I would like to thank the editors and three anonymous reviewers for their painstaking review of the earlier drafts of this paper and also Ben White, Jenny Franco and John McCarthy for their comments at the global workshop on Biofuels, Land and Agrarian Change in Halifax sponsored by JPS and Initiatives in Critical Agrarian Studies (ICAS). I would also like to thank activists from AMAN, Gemawan, WALHI, Sawit Watch, SPI and FSPM for taking time to discuss some of the issues raised in this paper.