Gender and generation in Southeast Asian agro-commodity booms

Abstract

This article introduces the Special Issue on ‘Gender and generation in agrarian and environmental transformation in Southeast Asia’. The contributions to this collection focus on the intersecting dynamics of gender, generation and class in Southeast Asian rural communities engaging with expanding capitalist relations, whether in the form of large-scale corporate land acquisition or other forms of penetration of commodity economy. Gender and especially generation are relatively neglected dimensions in the literature on agrarian and environmental transformations in Southeast Asia. Drawing on key concepts in gender studies, youth studies and agrarian studies, the papers mark a significant step towards a gendered and ‘generationed’ analysis of capitalist expansion in rural Southeast Asia, in particular from a political ecology perspective. In this article we introduce the papers and highlight the importance of bringing gender and generation, in their interaction with class dynamics, more squarely into agrarian and environmental transformation studies. This is key to understanding the implications of capitalist expansion for social relations of power and justice, and the potential of these relations to shape the outcomes for different women and men, younger and older, in rural society.

Keywords:

• gender
• generation
• agrarian transformation
• land grab
• capitalist expansion
• Southeast Asia

Introduction

This collection brings together nine studies of the intersecting dynamics of gender, generation and class in Southeast Asian rural communities confronted with the expansion of capitalist relations, whether in the form of large-scale corporate land acquisition or other forms of penetration of commodity economy.¹

Most of the contributions to this collection were originally presented in two panels on ‘Gendered and generational experiences of Southeast Asia’s corporate rush to land’ at the conference on ‘Land grabbing, conflict and agrarian-environmental transformations: perspectives from East and Southeast Asia’. In another JPS collection derived from the same conference, Schoenberger et al. provide a comprehensive reflective overview of the evolution of ‘land grab’ studies in the Southeast Asian context. Land grab studies, they argue, established themselves quickly as a zone of engagement and ‘a politically charged, high-profile, coherent, diverse and open arena, and one which highlighted Southeast Asia as a core region of concern’ (Schoenberger, Hall, and Vandergeest 2017, 702). They also argue that land grab studies, with all their diversity, have constructed themselves around a ‘standardised package’ involving three core elements: the ‘global land grab’, the individual land grab or land deal, and ‘land grabbing’. Southeast Asian scholarship on agrarian and environmental transformation, however, has engaged with this package in nuanced and creative ways, emphasising in particular ‘the importance of history, context-specificity and surprising, contingent or contradictory motivations for land grabbing, rather than one that emphasises unification and common global drivers’ (Schoenberger, Hall, and Vandergeest 2017, 717). The same can be said about the papers in this collection, which can be placed only broadly under the umbrella of land grab studies, but all share an interest in looking at agrarian and environmental transformations from the perspective of their gender and generational dimensions – both relatively neglected dimensions, as can be seen from their complete absence in Schoenberger et al.’s otherwise comprehensive overview.

The importance of the gendered dimensions of agribusiness expansions and large-scale land deals was flagged in this journal some years ago (Behrman, Meinzen-Dick, and Quisumbing 2012). Some work on this has appeared in recent years (e.g. Doss, Summerfield, and Tsikata 2014; Julia and White 2012; Tsikata and Yaro 2014; White, Park, and Julia 2015), but it remains meagre in relation to the huge amount of research on almost every other aspect of land deals. Researchers and activists have given even less attention to generational differences and tensions in rural people’s engagement with corporate land deals and agribusiness. This neglect is surprising as intergenerational relationships and tensions have been a recurring theme in studies of agrarian change at other times and in other places, especially in Africa, although they consistently receive less notice than class and gender relations (Sumberg et al. 2012).

Why has research in these two areas been so slow to emerge, and why is it important to fill this gap? The case studies in this collection demonstrate that attention to gender and generational dimensions in their intersection with class dynamics is fundamental to the understanding of the reproduction of agrarian communities in their confrontation with emerging capitalist relations.

The contributions to this collection do not all share the same framework, but together they mark a significant step towards a gendered and generationed analysis of capitalist expansion in rural Southeast Asia, in particular from a political ecology perspective. Political ecology, in our view, does not replace political economy, but applies the basic political economy questions of who has what, who does what, who gets what, and what do they do with it (Bernstein 2010) to the production of environmental change (Robbins 2004); the gendering and ‘generationing’ of political ecology, in turn, treats gender and generation as critical variables in addressing these questions (Elmhirst 2011). The papers by Vanessa Lamb and colleagues on the Lower Mekong Basin region, and Rebecca Elmhirst and colleagues on East Kalimantan, both explore explicitly the potentials of a feminist political ecology approach, which ‘directs attention towards gendered processes underpinning the politics of resource access whilst at the same time, attending to the gendered agency of those struggling for justice and fairness in the face of transformation’ (Elmhirst et al. 2017). The papers by Clara M. Park and Margherita Maffii, and by Kristina Grossman, meanwhile cast their analyses in a ‘feminist agrarian political economy’ and a ‘material gendered political ecology’ framework, respectively.

Class, gender and generations in emerging capitalist relations

…‘community’ and its reproduction is always likely to involve tensions of gender and intergenerational relations. The former are widely recognised, the latter less so. (Bernstein 2014, 16)

Considering gender and generational relations means looking at how these relations and tensions play out, not only in (smallholder) farmer households, but also at different points in class-differentiated agrarian labour regimes, and at different points in agro-commodity chains. Women and men, older and younger, may be direct producers on their own account, or unpaid family workers in family farms (including contracted farms) or on the farms of others, including larger farms and commercial plantations; they may be wage workers on the farms of others (larger farms or industrial plantations); they may be actors (own-account, unpaid family workers, wage workers) in the upstream and/or downstream entities in agro-commodity chains; they may be consumers of food and other agricultural products which they have not themselves produced, and providers of care and food in households where one or more members are involved in agricultural production (cf. White, Park, and Julia 2015).

Class relations in emerging capitalist contexts intersect and combine with other social differences and divisions, so that alongside class-like dynamics and tensions, the reproduction of agrarian communities is also a gendered and ‘generationed’ process. Incorporation in capitalist relations (and resistance to it) is always a gendered process, shaped by historical and existing gender relations and divisions of labour, and in turn entrenching or ameliorating gendered inequalities. ‘Patriarchal’ power relations (in the original meaning: power of men over women and of old over young) and gender/generational inequalities in land rights, decision-making and voice, among others, may have a decisive influence in incorporation in and exclusion from expanding corporate agriculture as well as from emerging capitalist smallholder agriculture. These have been largely overlooked, in studies conducted from an agrarian political economy perspective.

Literature on corporate land acquisitions in different parts of the world highlights predominantly negative outcomes for women due to existing inequalities and power asymmetries in access to resources, voice and more general vulnerabilities (for example, Daley and Pallas 2014; Doss, Summerfield, and Tsikata 2014; Julia and White 2012; Tsikata and Yaro 2014; Verma 2014). While pointing in the same general direction, the papers in this collection provide a more nuanced picture.

Levien’s comparative analysis of gender dynamics in contexts of large-scale land dispossession – the only essay in this collection which looks beyond Southeast Asia for historical and contemporary cases from Europe (England), Africa (the Gambia) and South Asia (India) – finds both commonalities and differences across cases. On the one hand, it is abundantly clear that ‘dispossession rarely makes things better for rural women, and in most cases makes things worse’; ‘rare and limited gains [for women] were overwhelmed by a confluence of gendered exclusions and inequalities that shaped the process and outcome of dispossession’. Commonalities include the tendency for new regimes of access to reproduce women’s lack of land rights, and/or undermine their existing rights; their disproportionate marginalisation by the enclosure of commons and resulting losses of livestock; an increase in both state and domestic violence against women; and the important role of women in both overt and ‘everyday’ forms of resistance and opposition. At the same time, there are important variations, particularly in the consequences of dispossession for the gender division of labour (Levien 2017).

The same applies to within-country comparisons, even when the same commodity is involved. Rebecca Elmhirst and colleagues adopt a ‘conjunctural feminist political ecology’ approach to look at the differentiated outcomes of the interplay between different modes of incorporation into the oil palm sector and existing historical and ecological gender norms and social differences. Their comparison of four case study communities in East Kalimantan show how ‘different pathways of engagement with oil palm – adverse or otherwise – reflect the interplay between modes of incorporation into oil palm systems with landscape history, gender, life stage and ethnic identity’ (Elmhirst et al. 2017).

Among indigenous communities in upland Cambodia, gender relations – which were traditionally relatively egalitarian, and women’s and men’s roles complementary – have been greatly affected by the introduction of capitalist modes of production, the individualisation of access to land, and the influx of migrant settlers and patriarchal norms from mainstream Khmer culture. Increasingly estranged from traditional culture, farming practices and solidarity among both women and men are affected by patterns of social differentiation that hit hardest those with less-secure access to resources and labour. In spite of their traditional role as agriculturalists and farmers, women and girls are increasingly marginalised in the ‘un-commodified’, and thus undervalued, realm of reproduction (O’Laughlin 2009; Razavi 2009, 2011), and re-constructed discursively as backward and problematic (Park and Maffii 2017).

The discursive construction of the female farmer, as a legal subject with rights to land, in Myanmar’s new National Land Use Policy is at the centre of Hilary Faxon’s paper. By ‘rendering technical’ (Li 2007) gender and other potentially contentious issues, policymakers, development partners and civil society organisations participating in the process effectively opened the space for the female farmer to come to the fore, in contrast with dominant perceptions among rural women who are more likely to identify themselves as workers than farmers. The dialectical space between these two constructions offers fertile ground for both activist and scholarly work (Faxon 2017). Compared to other regions, few ‘land grab’ studies in the Southeast Asian region have focused on the issue of political reactions from below. Julia and White (2012) and White, Park, and Julia (2015) addressed women’s participation in protests and community decision-making, but it remained at the margins of their analysis. As may be expected, reactions (of acquiescence or resistance) are also gendered, with women and men responding, both individually and collectively, in diverse ways to the promises and threats of land deals (Hall et al. 2015, 468). This is illustrated by various contributions to this collection, including two in which the exploration of gendered protest and resistance is the central focus. Miranda Morgan explores women’s involvement in a rare case of successful resistance in West Kalimantan, which resulted in the District Head’s withdrawal of a 16,000-hectare corporate oil-palm concession. Despite dominant gender relations and discourse that tend to exclude women from politics and cast them as apolitical, their significant presence in protests shows how gender relations are subject to continual renegotiation, and in turn how ‘rural struggles around land and dispossession are also inevitably struggles over gender as well’ (Morgan 2017).

Women’s key roles in protest, however, do not necessarily translate into furthering of women’s rights agendas or ensuring their better access to governance structures. Exploring gender roles in a case of rural dispossession and subsequent post-eviction in Khsem, Cambodia, Lamb et al. note that ‘a dichotomy is reinforced which places women in public not for the power of their minds to tackle issues of eviction and social justice, but for the power of their bodies to deflect harm’. As the community engages in rebuilding, after being awarded a Social Land Concession, it is men who take on all governance activities and roles (Lamb et al. 2017). This is confirmed by Park and Maffii (2017) who further note that grassroots organisations have failed to put indigenous women’s rights on their agendas in spite of their key role in opposition and resistance to land grabbing. Nonetheless, Levien argues that ‘defensive struggles against dispossession may  …  be a pre-condition for more offensive struggles for gender justice and equality’. Evidence from other countries suggests that this is more likely to happen when additional support is available for women, for example through inclusion in ‘catalysts and support structures for dealing with other power formations within the economy’, such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs), progressive political parties, faith-based youth groups, and women’s groups (Agarwal 2015, 15; see also Deere 2003; Deere and León 2001; Rubin and Rubin-Sokoloff 2013; Stephen 2006).

Likewise, incorporation (and resistance to it) is ‘generationed’: younger and older men and women may respond to the promises of investors and state agents, the opportunities and threats of capitalist investment and the violence of dispossession in quite different ways. Current debates about ‘land grabbing’ are in fact debates between different visions of the future shape of farming and the fate of rural populations. If visions of a future smallholder-based agriculture are to be realised, and if young people are going to have a place in that future, generational relations have to be taken more seriously than has been the case in recent policy debate, and in recent research. In particular, the issue of intergenerational transfer of land rights – or, when that does not happen, intergenerational dispossession, when one generation’s land is ‘grabbed’ or sold off which ought to have been passed on to the next – deserves our attention.

While various contributions to this collection include a generational or life-course dimension, we are especially pleased to have included three which place the generational dimension in central focus. Many years ago, in this journal, Ghimire highlighted the neglected issue of ‘marginalized rural youth’ as a potential new social force in the countryside, and asked: ‘Does this young population find livelihood prospects in the countryside, and if not, how does [their] increasing social-economic marginality manifest itself in contemporary social movements struggling for political rights and other resources?’ (Ghimire 2002, 68). Nicola Ansell has aptly summarised the importance of the concept of generation in understanding these dynamics. Generation, no less than ‘gendering’,

serves as an exercise of power  … . This power is not only discursive but also material, shaping people’s economic contributions and access to resources.  …  It shapes people’s identities (intersecting with other relationships including gender and class), is lived by individuals and groups and has material effects. Inevitably, generationing is contested: the outcomes of contestations often lead to change – in some cases, arguably, to development. (Ansell 2016, 315)

Bringing together concepts from youth studies and agrarian studies, a relational approach to generation helps us to understand

how development  …  restructures generational social landscapes, and also how young people themselves, as constrained agents of development, renegotiate their role and position vis-à-vis others and in particular places and spaces of development. (Huijsmans 2016, 4)

The formation of gendered and generational identities and power relations, induced by a forest commodity boom, is the focus of Kristina Grossman’s paper on marginalised Punan Murung communities in Central Kalimantan. This is the only example in this collection of a commodity boom as yet unmediated by state regulation or corporate intrusion. Wild garahu (eaglewood), which can fetch prices up to USD 8000 per kilogram, is collected by groups of young men from increasingly remote forest areas, in expeditions taking three to four weeks. Gaharu expeditions can make young men suddenly wealthy, but if unsuccessful land them in debt. Patterns of differentiation among young men in two villages show the potential of the material and discursive dimension of the resource – defined as the wirkmacht (power) of gaharu – to shape the formation of positive masculine indigenous identities (Großmann 2017).

Tania Li argues that the potential negative and positive effects of oil palm expansion on local women and men in Indonesia are ‘built into the development pathway of a plantation zone’ and ignite ‘fundamentally dispossessory dynamics’. She notes that ‘the experience of a generation born into conditions of land scarcity is different from that of a generation living on a plantation frontier when new opportunities open up’. While smallholder dispossession for plantation agriculture or contract farming schemes may make some provision for existing smallholders in terms of (reduced) land allocation, generally there is no provision for the next generation. Li shows how plantation expansion in Indonesia often leaves the original landholders in place, tucked into enclaves on which farmers may be able to continue farming; the real squeeze begins a generation later, when land in the enclave proves insufficient for the needs of young (would-be) farmers (Li 2017).

Finally, Gilda Sentíes Portilla’s study of rural youth confronted by rapid expansion of large monoculture plantation in southern Laos is a welcome antidote to common assumptions that today’s young generation of men and women in rural Southeast Asia – whether affected or not by corporate agribusiness intrusion – are not interested in rural futures and all want to move to the cities to achieve modern lifestyles. Young people may migrate for temporary jobs, but they tend to prefer to return to their villages, where it is now possible to ‘seek out and enact a rural modern lifestyle’. The plantation concessions have opened up some employment options for young men and women, who may not be interested long periods of unpaid work on parental farms, but still envisage farming as a likely occupation in future, even if not their ideal choice (Portilla 2017).

A generational perspective thus adds another powerful reason to De Schutter’s arguments that large-scale land deals (whether for purchase or long lease) should be seen as the ‘last and least desirable option’ (De Schutter 2011) because they close off the smallholder option, not only for today’s farmers but also for members of the next generation, who face permanent alienation from land on which they, or their children, might want to farm, and in the absence of livelihood opportunities elsewhere (White 2012).

Together, the contributions to this collection amply confirm the importance of taking gender and generation into account in analyses of agrarian transformations. Not doing so means to ignore the ‘social relations of power and justice connected to cultures, ecologies and economies’ (Rocheleau 2015, 57) and thus the potential of these relations to shape the outcomes for different women and men, younger and older, and to perpetuate and aggravate existing inequalities at local and global level.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Clara Mi Young Park

Clara Mi Young Park is a PhD candidate at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, Netherlands. Her current research focuses on the gendered and ‘generationed’ political economy of climate change and resource grabbing in Myanmar and Cambodia. Clara also serves as the Regional Gender Rural and Social Development Officer with the Asia Pacific Regional Office of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Bangkok.

Ben White

Ben White is an emeritus professor of rural sociology at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Conference on ‘Land grabbing, conflict and agrarian-environmental transformations: perspectives from East and Southeast Asia’, Chiang Mai University, Thailand, 5–6 June 2015.