The biofuel boom and Indonesia's oil palm industry : the twin processes of peasant dispossession and adverse incorporation in West Kalimantan

Abstract

The sharp rise in global demand for biofuels and food has prompted widespread land grabbing in the Global South. In the case of Indonesia, it has prompted an unprecedented expansion of oil palm plantations that are expected to triple in land area over the next decade. The province of West Kalimantan has recently been targeted as the site of greatest expansion across the archipelago, giving rise to new social vulnerabilities and intensified conflicts over land. In the wake of large-scale enclosures of 'national forests' and `idle land', users of forest land under customary tenure are having to confront the pressures of neoliberal globalization and transnational circuits of accumulation and production linked to the oil palm sector. Field research conducted in Sanggau district has revealed highly uneven access to land and distinct labour regimes determined by on-going class differentiation within characteristic patterns of exclusion and various forms of inclusion, notably adverse incorporation.