After the land grab: Infrastructural violence and the “Mafia System” in Indonesia's oil palm plantation zones

Abstract

Plantations are back. Colonial-style large scale corporate monoculture of industrial crops on concession land is again expanding in the global south. The biggest expansion is in Indonesia, where oil palm already cover 11 million hectares, and 10–20 million more hectares are planned, most of it in plantation style. The land dimensions of renewed plantation expansion were thrust into public debate in 2008–9, when there was a spike in transnational land-acquisitions widely described as a global land-grab. The polemical term “grab” usefully drew attention to what was being taken away: customary land rights, diverse farming systems, and ecological balance. Drawing on ethnographic research in the oil palm zone of West Kalimantan, Indonesia, this article examines what happens after the grab, highlighting the violence embedded in the material, social and political infrastructure that plantations install. Promises to reform plantations through regulation and certification ring hollow as law, government, and livelihoods are subordinated to plantation logics; a trajectory that worsens over time as plantation zones expand and become saturated, and everyone is locked in. Indonesia's plantations cannot be redeemed, hence they should not be expanded.