Centering labor in the land grab debate

Abstract

Placing labor at the center of the global ‘land-grab’ debate helps sharpen critical insights at two scales. At the scale of agricultural enterprises, a labor perspective highlights the jobs generated, and the rewards received, by people who work in and around large farms. This approach guides my critical reading of the report prepared by a World Bank team that argues for large-scale land acquisition as a way to reduce poverty. Using data from within the report itself, I show why poverty reduction is a very unlikely result. I develop the argument further by drawing on research in colonial and contemporary Indonesia, where large-scale plantations and associated smallholder contract schemes have a long history. A labor perspective is also relevant at the national and transnational scale, where it highlights the predicament of people whose labor is not needed by the global capitalist system. In much of the global South, the anticipated transition from the farm to factory has not taken place and education offers no solution, as vast numbers of educated people are unemployed. Unless vast numbers of jobs are created, or a global basic income grant is devised to redistribute the wealth generated in highly productive but labor-displacing ventures, any program that robs rural people of their foothold on the land must be firmly rejected.

Notes

¹See, for example, Kregg Hetherington's description of Paraguayan farmers attempting to fend off the cross border tide of Brazilian soy (Hetherington 2009).

²Two independent studies found that established plantations require around 84 work days per hectare per year, or roughly one person per four hectares (Friends of the Earth et al. 2008, 78). Highly efficient oil palm operations in Malaysia employ one person per 10 hectares, including the mill (Tunku Mohd Nazim Yakob, email 23 January 2009).

³Smallholder farming has its own problems, not least the new inequalities that arise through the ‘everyday’ processes of accumulation and dispossession among smallholders that roll on relentlessly, despite efforts to prevent them (Hall et al. 2011; Li 2010a; Bernstein 2010).

⁴For a concise introduction to this literature, see Bernstein (2010a).

⁵World Bank (2008) 208, Rigg (2007), Mosse (2007), Rutherford (2008).

⁶See http://www.depnakertrans.go.id/microsite/KTM/?show=main [Accessed 9 March 2011].

⁷Michael Watts (1990) outlines many additional problems with contract farming.

⁸My report is based on field research I conducted in 2009 together with Arianto Sangaji of the NGO Yayasan Tanah Merdeka and Sawit Watch. For more general discussions of the welfare implications of different smallholder styles and contract models in the oil palm sector see: McCarthy and Cramb (2009), Zen et al. (2008), Rist, Feintrenie, and Levang (2010), McCarthy (2010). See also the remarkable quantitative comparison of different smallholder schemes in Malaysia by Cramb and Ferraro (2010), cited in the RGIF report (36).

⁹On the symbolic valence of the terms nucleus and plasma, and for an overview of Indonesia's contract farming schemes, see White (1999).

¹⁰Incidentally, this arrangement is also favorable to government officials, from village headmen upwards, who fraudulently enter the names of their family members on the register of households who have handed over land for development, and receive a share of dividends. In practice, they have no idea where ‘their’ land is located, and do not need to know, since they have no role in management. They use the scheme to obtain income without investing any land, labor or capital at all. I have encountered this practice at both Sulawesi research sites and in West Kalimantan. The schemes also work well for absentees, who buy up land, place it under company management, and wait for their monthly checks.

¹¹The 1997 Transmigration Law, revised in 2009, obliges the company to provide ‘a guarantee of a sufficient income to live decently’ (Government of Indonesia 2009, paragraph 14.3), but it is difficult to see how it could be enforced even in the short run, still less across several generations. Conversion of land to oil palm requires a radical restructuring of the landscape. There is no return to the status quo ante, and there is virtually nothing any government department can do about delinquent corporations, sustainability ‘standards’ notwithstanding.

¹²For critiques of this linear narrative from different perspectives, see Kiely (2009), Araghi (2009), Watts (2009), Akram-Lodhi and Kay (2009), Bernstein (2010b).

¹³See Hall, Hirsch, and Li (2011), Hall (2009), Li (2010), Elson (1997).

¹⁴See Rigg (2006), Bryceson, Kay, and Mooij (2000), Hall, Hirsch, and Li (2011), Hall (2009).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tania Murray Li

Thanks to JPS editor Jun Borras for inviting me to contribute to this forum, and to Jun Borras, Haroon Akram-Lodhi, Derek Hall, Kregg Hetherington and Gavin Smith for their critical input.