Policy narratives, landholder engagement, and oil palm expansion on the Malaysian and Indonesian frontiers.(Report)

Introduction

A remarkable transformation has occurred over recent decades in the frontier areas of Malaysian Borneo and many areas of Indonesia outside Java with the rapid conversion of agricultural lands, fallows, and formerly forested areas into oil palm plantations. The area of oil palm in 'outer island' Indonesia has increased from 4.2 million ha in 2000 to almost 7 million in 2007. While in 1990, Iambi, a major Sumatran oil palm frontier, had only 44 000 ha under oil palm, this area has increased 10-fold to 409 000 ha in 2006. At the same time, provincial and district governments had also granted permits over a further 800 000 ha that have yet to be planted (Suara 2007). In Sarawak, now the main frontier for oil palm expansion in Malaysia, the Sarawak government has engineered a 10-fold increase since 1990 and aims to bring 1 million ha under oil palm by 2010 (Cooke 2006).

These changes follow increased global demand for vegetable oils. Palm oil is the second most consumed edible oil globally and, per unit area, the highest-yielding vegetable oil crop (Donald 2004). Increased demand from India and China, high oil prices, and the fact that biodiesel from palm oil is cheaper to produce than that derived from any other crop have led palm oil prices to more than triple between 2000 and 2008. With low-cost labour, available land, and the ecological suitability of the Southeast Asian archipelagic frontier to oil palm production, Indonesia and Malaysia have enormous opportunities. Government decisionmakers in the Malaysian and Indonesian frontier provinces are responding in specific ways to this global political economy of oil palm. For while Malaysia and Indonesia enjoy similar relative advantages within the global oil palm commodity chain, they both have to face the reality that 'maintaining low production costs' is a 'key to the continued profitability of oil palm producers' (Vorley and Fox 2004).

In this paper, we discuss the particular narratives that have held a lock on the imaginations of the decisionmakers and planners, constructing these 'frontiers' in a fashion that provides a rationale for the policy frameworks and interventions that help to drive the agrarian transformation

in both countries in a particular direction. Policy narratives have long depicted the poverty and 'backwardness' of preexisting agricultural practices, constituting a 'rural problem' of underdevelopment, defining its causes, and setting forth appropriate responses. These policy narratives have served as the point of entry for a variety of development schemes for, as Ferguson notes, blueprints for development involve the articulation of a dominant problematic or interpretative grid 'through which the impoverished regions are to be known' and which particular policies are to address (Ferguson 1994). By contrasting the problematic of 'backward' and 'unproductive' forms of agriculture, practised by undisciplined or 'lazy' local agriculturalists, with the desired form of rural modernity, these narratives have created a rationale for reordering smallholder practices in accord with particular concepts of rural modernity--transforming existing, extensive forms of agriculture into commercial, highly capitalised, 'more efficient' and intensive forms supported by new agricultural techniques and increasingly integrated into international markets (Doolittle 2001 n.d.).

We argue that paradigmatic policy narratives, in both the Malaysian and Indonesian cases, involve ways of 'imagining' or 'knowing' the frontier, in the process providing the grounds for its transformation--remaking existing land uses and patterns of livelihood in accord with a particular vision of rural modernity. As a reading of policy documents regarding plantation development suggests, policy does not necessarily construct developmental blueprints that target and build upon the specific problems faced by indigenous producers in these frontiers wishing to engage with the international market for plantation products. Rather, policy narratives tend to see the frontier in terms of absences: the lack of productive land uses, forms of modernised agriculture, and a disciplined labour force. The state policy lens in both cases has long viewed frontier areas as 'idle' or 'waste' land where shifting cultivation and extensive agricultural land use systems constitute less than optimal uses of vast areas that might best be put to other developmental purposes (Dove 1983; Golfer and Dudley 1993). The frontier then becomes somewhat like a tabula rasa, a blank page on which, with the implementation of the right policies, developmental agendas might be written. These paradigmatic narratives then avoid working with existing land uses, livelihoods and labour patterns, either overlooking them or selectively misreading them. In the process, they provide a rationale for transforming the frontier in accord with agendas of politico-bureaucratic and corporate actors that favour plantation development for particular economic and political purposes.

The ways in which these frontier areas have been conceived and transformed have been strongly influenced by shifts in global development paradigms. In the 1960s and 1970s, the dominant policy narrative centred on the need for state intervention to plan and implement the essential investments needed for rural development (Ashley and Maxwell 2001; Ellis and Biggs 2001). Peasant farmers were seen as responsive to economic incentives, but lacking in the capital investments that would enable them to intensify and modernise their production systems (Schultz 1964). This justified a clear role for the state in providing the resources needed for agricultural modernisation, including large-scale state investment in infrastructure, research, support for the adoption of new technology, and in 'the social investments required by integrated rural development programmes' and land development and settlement schemes (Ashley and Maxwell 2001, 401) (1). The large capital requirements of these projects were partly met by international donors, including the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, as well as through bilateral aid programmes.