Land grabs, land control, and Southeast Asian crop booms

Abstract

This paper argues that research into the dynamics of land control in the contemporary ‘land grab’ can benefit from engagement with the literature on booms in the production of crops like cocoa, coffee, fast-growing trees, oil palm, rubber and shrimp in Southeast Asia. This literature can help answer three key questions: who seeks to exercise control over land for the purpose of growing export-oriented crops under boom conditions; how would-be producers bring tobear regulatory power, market power, force, and legitimation to gain control over land; and how booms differentially affect areas with secure and insecure land control relations.

Keywords:

• agriculture
• booms
• land grab
• power
• Southeast Asia

Notes

¹These are contested terms, and with good reason, but I will mostly avoid the use of scare quotes.

²These papers are available at http://www.future-agricultures.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=1547&Itemid=978

³I do not seek to explain why tenure relations do or do not turn out to be robust, but treat this as exogenous.

⁴The paper does not draw systematically on the literature on rubber, another key contemporary boom crop, particularly in mainland Southeast Asia. For recent work on rubber see inter alia Baird (2010), Cramb (2007), Dwyer (2007), Jitjan et al. (2009), Manivong and Cramb (2008), Miyamoto (2006), Peluso (2009), Ziegler et al. (2009).

⁵Lesley Potter (2001, 313) reports that when oil palm arrived in one district of Jambi, Sumatra, land prices rose by a factor of 300.

⁶On conversion of agroforests, see Feintrenie et al. (2010); on the relationship between intensification and expansion, see Cramb (2011).

⁷FAOSTAT figures downloaded 24 July 2008.

⁸FAOSTAT figures downloaded 3 August 2010.

⁹Expansion figures calculated from De Koninck et al. (2011a,Table 2.4).

¹⁰FAO FIGIS figures downloaded 5 October 2007.

¹¹On this dynamic in the context of the conversion of agricultural land in Southeast Asia to nonagricultural uses like urban development, tourism, and infrastructure, see Hall et al. (2011, Chapter 5).

¹²There is a large literature on this topic. For a recent statement, see Cramb et al. (2009, 328).

¹³See for instance ADB and ActionAid Vietnam (2003, 50).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Derek Hall

The analytical framework proposed and material covered in this paper derive in part from work done jointly with Philip Hirsch and Tania Murray Li in Hall et al. (2011). An earlier version was presented to the LDPI International Conference on Global Land Grabbing at the University of Sussex in April 2011, and a much earlier and substantially different version was presented to a workshop on ‘Rural Property and Inequality’ at the University of East Anglia and to York University's Department of Geography. I am grateful to the participants at those events, to two anonymous reviewers for JPS, and to Henry Bernstein, Jun Borras, Rodolphe de Koninck, Tania Murray Li, Christian Lund, John McCarthy, and Nancy Peluso for their comments. All errors are my own.