Laborers becoming ‘peasants’: agroecological politics in a Sumatran plantation zone

Abstract

ABSTRACT Over the last two decades a group of rural workers on Sumatra's Aren Volcano worked with a self-proclaimed ‘peasant’ union to occupy and rehabilitate a bankrupt industrial ranch and plantation. Women and men worked together to cultivate diverse, economically-valuable agricultural forests on this erstwhile industrial site. In reclaiming a zone of ruined industrial production for small-scale natural agriculture, Aren's laborers transformed themselves into agriculturalists and the land into a smallholder agroforest landscape. I consider how the transformations that unfolded in Aren are agroecological because rural workers harnessed ecological processes to create their smallholder plots, and political because they addressed issues of collective land control, identity, and work. I find the linkage of these two concepts, ecologically-attune smallholder livelihood and social mobilization, to be the source of the durability of this rural workers’ land reclamation.