Boom Crops Research Articles

Boom and bust: Variegated livelihood pathways among rural households in the banana boom in northern Laos

Crop booms are a significant driver of change for both rural landscapes and smallholder livelihoods. Cavendish bananas have boomed in northern Laos and replaced maize, the previous boom crop, through land leasing contracts between farmers and Chinese companies. This study of two villages in Oudomxay Province explores rural households' participation in this banana boom and the conjunctures that shape variegated livelihood pathways and outcomes. Household participation in the banana boom depended on their assets (land and labour), livelihood context and social pressure. Household income in both villages generally improved, but differentially. The better‐off, and those with a wider array of livelihood options, used income from bananas to move to primarily non‐agricultural livelihoods, while many poorer households became dependent on wage labour in banana production, at the expense of their health. Women reported to be content to escape agricultural labour through land leasing; but many who contributed labour to banana production felt trapped in ongoing heavy labour, with attendant adverse impacts. These outcomes reflect how the conjunctures of different household, community and external elements, and crop boom‐bust cycles, lead to differentiated (‘variegated’) household livelihood trajectories and outcomes for households and for men and women, and suggest points of policy intervention.

Rural Roads Are Paving the Way for Land-Use Intensification in the Uplands of Laos

Road expansion has played a prominent role in the agrarian transition that marked the integration of swidden-based farming systems into the market economy in Southeast Asia. Rural roads deeply altered the landscape and livelihood structures by allowing the penetration of boom crops such as hybrid maize in remote territories. In this article, we investigate the impact of rural road developments on livelihoods in northern Laos through a longitudinal study conducted over a period of 15 years in a forest frontier. We studied adaptive management strategies of local stakeholders through the combination of individual surveys, focus group discussions, participatory mapping and remote-sensing approaches. The study revealed the short-term benefits of the maize feeder roads on poverty alleviation and rural development, but also the negative long-term effects on agroecosystem health and agricultural productivity related to unsustainable land use. Lessons learnt about the mechanisms of agricultural intensification helped understanding the constraints faced by external interventions promoting sustainable land management practices. When negotiated by local communities for their own interest, roads may provide livelihood-enhancing opportunities through access to external resources, rather than undermining them.

Crop Boom as a Trigger of Smallholder Livelihood and Land Use Transformations: The Case of Coffee Production in the Northern Mountain Region of Vietnam

Coffee is considered a boom crop in Southeast Asia. However, while it bears typical boom crop characteristics in many places where it has been grown, in other places it has contributed to agrarian transformation. This paper examines the context of coffee development in the Northwestern Mountain Region of Vietnam and describes how smallholder coffee growing has triggered an agricultural transition process, and corresponding land use changes, from subsistence-based to commercialized agriculture production. The research was conducted in a commune located in Son La province. Interviews with 46 selected households and three focus group discussions (10–15 people each) were conducted to understand changes in crop systems, corresponding land use, and labor use, due to the adoption of coffee (the boom crop). The research found that coffee has replaced swidden crops and enables a multicrop system, with less land devoted to swidden land use. The income from coffee is used to hire labor and to pay for the inputs needed to mechanize rice farming. The research findings show that the coffee boom has brought about livelihood transformation, changed land use, and transformed local livelihoods from subsistence to production for the market.

The great almond debate: A subtle double movement in California water

In 2014 journalists accused almonds of “sucking California dry” for using roughly one gallon (3.79 L) of water per nut during the state’s record drought. Eye catching statistics set off a cascade of articles elaborating the almond problem interspersed with retorts defending almond production from becoming the scapegoat of Californian’s accumulated water griefs. How and why did almonds become a water problem? This article charts the rise and fall of the almond debate through a media analysis of 87 journalistic articles spanning two years. While stunning statistics triggered alarm and policy changes buoyed interest in almond production, I argue almonds captured the attention of news writers and readers because they embodied a pervasive concern over the appropriate role of profit in water use. Almond anxieties centered on four disquieting market dynamics: the speed and scale of landscape transformation wrought by a new food fashion, the indifference of global trade to local troubles, the concentration of power in the food system, and a trend towards high-value permanent crops. Almonds remained in the public eye despite recharacterizations of their efficiency because they are a boom crop; exemplary of how neoliberal logics fail to address water as a public good. This paper rearticulates Polanyi’s theory of the ‘double movement’ as an ideologically diverse and relational process. A Polanyian analysis of the almond debate demonstrates the utility of this approach for synthesizing, validating and furthering meaningful dialogue on water politics.

Greening rubber? Political ecologies of plantation sustainability in Laos and Myanmar

Over the past decade, the cultivation of rubber trees has expanded rapidly throughout the Mekong region to non-traditional rubber growing areas of Laos and Myanmar. Prompted by rising prices from 1990 to 2010 and government agro-industrialization policies, farmers and investors have rushed to plant the new boom crop. A latex price crash in 2011, however, has made it more challenging for small-scale producers to earn an income, leading to uneven social-ecological transformations and economic consequences. Several proposals have been made to address these challenges by transforming rubber into a more economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable crop. In this paper, which emerged from one such project to investigate the potential for “green” rubber, we argue that the sustainability of rubber is a challenging and elusive prospect – particularly in resource frontier contexts like Laos and Myanmar. Concepts like “sustainability” or “green” production are vague and malleable. They can be imbued with a variety of contradictory meanings, which often do not address the most socially and environmentally problematic aspects of cash crop expansion. Sustainable rubber, if rigorously and specifically defined, would be exceedingly difficult to reach in both countries, due to the ways in which political-economic and governance factors interact with the biophysical and social characteristics of the crop. Instead, we recommend using sustainability as a political tool for highlighting the most harmful socio-environmental impacts of rubber and generating debate concerning the best ways to address these, thus limiting unsustainable practices.

The expansion of tree-based boom crops in mainland Southeast Asia: 2001 to 2014

ABSTRACTOver the past half century, countries of Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) – Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam – have witnessed increases in commercialized agriculture with rapid expansions of boom-crop plantations. We used MODIS EVI and SWIR time-series from 2001–2014 to classify tree-cover changes across MSEA and performed a supervised change detection using an upscaling approach by deriving samples from existing Landsat classifications. We used the random forest classifier and distinguished 24 classes (16 representing boom-crops) with an accuracy of 82.2%. Boom-crops occupy about 18% of the landscape (8% of which is rubber). Since 2003 74,960 km2 of rubber have been planted; 70% of rubber is planted on former forest land, and 30% on low vegetation area (mainly former croplands). Timing, patterns of change, and deforestation rates, however, differ among the MSEA countries and the high spatial and temporal detail of our classification allowed us to quantify dynamics and discuss political and socio-economic drivers of change.

A multiscale gaming approach to understand farmer’s decision making in the boom of maize cultivation in Laos

In Southeast Asia, the rapid expansion of boom crops like hybrid maize, rubber, oil palm, or banana, has brought about daunting environmental and socioeconomic impacts such as deforestation, land degradation, and indebtedness. Why do farmers engage in and keep on pursuing this farming strategy despite the adverse effects on local landscapes and livelihoods? In the context of the northern uplands of Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR), we developed an innovative approach to understanding the decisions that lead to the emergence of the maize boom. We successively studied the adoption, expansion, intensification, diversification, and abandonment of intensive maize practices in locations in which these phases were ongoing at the time of study. To better contextualize decision making, we designed and applied local, serious games with farmers in seven different villages that were going through a maize boom. Then we designed a metagame that summarized our findings across all decision phases and local games in a generalized form. National agricultural experts validated the structure of the metagame by taking on the role of farmers and they witnessed that their cumulative decision making within the metagame lead to a maize boom too. Core findings include: (1) the maize boom and bust can be reproduced in a game environment that simulates the change of six factor combinations; and (2) Farmers in northern Laos reinvest maize profits into their long-term, socioeconomic goals. The approach presented combines micro- and macrolevel analysis of land-use change. On the one hand, it allows the exploration of the local, social-ecological contexts of land-use decisions. On the other hand, it provides a systematic procedure to scale up, generalize, and test the contextual knowledge and systemic understanding of a complex, large-scale land-use change process.

Mysterious ginger: Enclaves of a boom crop in Thailand

Ginger (Zingiber officinale) is a perennial herb revered as one of the most popular and valued spices of the world. Ginger is the main cash crop supporting the livelihood and improving the economic level of many ginger growers of India, Indonesia, Nigeria and Bangladesh. Although Thailand was the fifth highest ginger producing country in the world, documentation and general recorded information on ginger cultivation, both for domestic production and export value trade, is very limited. The ginger production system is also confounding. Moreover, ginger in Thailand has received little attention from researchers. There is no research or publications about Thai production of ginger and ginger farmers in both Thai and English publications. This paper is an initial attempt to establish a ginger story in Thailand by using the Plaba sub-district in Loei province as a case study to document this overlooked story and bring attention from researchers or government officials who are interested in the possibility of identifying new agriculture possibilities and recognize potential crops for further development to support rural livelihoods.

Framing China’s role in global land deal trends: why Southeast Asia is key

ABSTRACTAs Chinese investment in foreign land and agriculture expands dramatically worldwide, a growing body of research has emerged on the prevalence of land deals in Latin America and Africa. Southeast Asia, however, has only recently begun to receive significant attention in these discussions. A deeper exploration of the Southeast Asian context offers crucial insights into understanding the puzzle of global land deals (why, where, how they occur) more broadly. This paper frames this exploration via an overview of regional land deal trends – focusing particularly on China’s emergence as a prolific investor in the Global South, and why Chinese investment is increasingly targeting Southeast Asia, especially vis-à-vis expanding flex and boom crop production. This paper aims to provide a broader contextualization for recent Southeast Asian case studies, and to highlight why more research in the region is key in deepening our understanding of global land deal trends.

Mapping the Expansion of Boom Crops in Mainland Southeast Asia Using Dense Time Stacks of Landsat Data

We performed a multi-date composite change detection technique using a dense-time stack of Landsat data to map land-use and land-cover change (LCLUC) in Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) with a focus on the expansion of boom crops, primarily tree crops. The supervised classification was performed using Support Vector Machines (SVM), which are supervised non-parametric statistical learning techniques. To select the most suitable SMV classifier and the related parameter settings, we used the training data and performed a two-dimensional grid search with a three-fold internal cross-validation. We worked in seven Landsat footprints and found the linear kernel to be the most suitable for all footprints, but the most suitable regularization parameter C varied across the footprints. We distinguished a total of 41 LCLUCs (13 to 31 classes per footprint) in very dynamic and heterogeneous landscapes. The approach proved useful for distinguishing subtle changes over time and to map a variety of land covers, tree crops, and transformations as long as sufficient training points could be collected for each class. While to date, this approach has only been applied to mapping urban extent and expansion, this study shows that it is also useful for mapping change in rural settings, especially when images from phenologically relevant acquisition dates are included.

REDD+ for Red Books? Negotiating rights to land and livelihoods through carbon governance in the Central Highlands of Vietnam

In Vietnam, initial programs to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) have proliferated through international finance and new governance regimes for climate change mitigation. National capacity and legal frameworks have been adjusted to make the country eligible for REDD+ financing. In some local areas, activities have been implemented to ‘produce’ carbon credits intended for the international voluntary carbon market. Through a case study of a pilot REDD+ project in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, we examine how REDD+ has intersected with property rights institutions and agrarian change to influence changing property relations and commodity markets. Our findings show that REDD+ implemented through state and local institutions has articulated with the local political economy to coproduce conditions that embody local norms, needs, and desires. Specifically, local actors negotiate state-sanctioned tenurial instruments used for REDD+ governance, not for the purposes of carbon sequestration but instead in order to reassert their rights to land and forest for the cultivation of boom crops—the antithesis of REDD+ objectives. In the fine balancing act of adjusting local forestland holdings, REDD+ implementation has effectively facilitated increased opportunities for upland villagers to strategically claim land titles from local political authorities in the form of communal land certificates for forests called ‘Red Books’. In securing communal Red Books, villagers redefine or co-constitute the purpose of REDD+ to secure land for cash crop and commercial timber production. As with other forms of environmental governance, REDD+ is thus co-constituted locally in line with state and local institutions and histories and present day realities.

Cooperation and resistance: Negotiating rubber in upland Philippines

The production of rubber has encountered varied reactions among upland smallholder populations in Asia—some have cooperated while others resisted. While the general scholarship on smallholder behavior vis-à-vis rubber production has extensively examined perspectives in political economy/ecology, few have studied the role of environmental constructions, discourses and practices in elucidating spatial politics associated with rubber. This paper offers a case of indigenous smallholders’ varied response to rubber based on their multiple understandings of and practices in upland environments in the Philippines. Based on qualitative field research in one rubber-growing community in Palawan, findings suggest that many indigenous smallholders have consented the expansion of rubber production areas in fallow lands and shifting cultivation systems, but opposed expansion in tabooed forests inhabited by invisible entities. The multiple meanings indigenous populations accord to different environments correspond to variations in political reactions and land-use decisions on the ground, thus highlighting the nuances of cooperation in and resistance to boom crops production regimes.

“Ginger is a gamble”

Responding to agrarian crisis at home, cash crop cultivators hailing from the South Indian district of Wayanad increasingly engage in the seasonal production of ginger in other states of India. This is a purely profit-based and unsustainable crop boom that takes a toll on both labor and the environment. This ethnographic analysis of speculative ginger cultivation situates this emerging economic complex in the regional political ecology, farming practices, individual farmers' hopes and aspirations, and in relation to the qualities of ginger as a cultivar. It argues that ginger is a special kind of boom crop and that its cultivation on large tracts of leased land is the manifestation of a moment of agrarian uncertainty and the neoliberalization of agriculture in South India coproduced by the properties of ginger. As a neoliberal boom crop, ginger exemplifies a regime of flexibilization of agrarian accumulation that has proved a profitable move for some, but has brought financial ruin and debt traps for many others.

Southeast Asia. Powers of exclusion: Land dilemmas in Southeast Asia. By Derek Hall, Philip Hirsch and Tania Murray Li. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2011. Pp. 257. Figures, Maps, Bibliography, Index.

Southeast Asia. Powers of exclusion: Land dilemmas in Southeast Asia. By Derek Hall, Philip Hirsch and Tania Murray Li. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2011. Pp. 257. Figures, Maps, Bibliography, Index. - Volume 43 Issue 3

WHERE THE STREETS ARE PAVED WITH PRAWNS

As the proportion of the gross domestic product of Southeast Asian countries accounted for by agriculture continues its long-term decline, it is natural in studying regional migration flows to emphasize the ways people are moving away from farming. Across the region, however, millions of people continue to migrate both within and across international borders to take part in agricultural production. Many of them are moving to grow “boom crops” like cocoa, coffee, oil palm, rubber, and shrimp, all of which have seen rapid expansion over the last two decades. In this article, the author provides a comparative survey of the links between crop booms and migration in Southeast Asia, arguing that this migration has taken three main forms: relatively autonomous and “spontaneous” migration by households or individuals looking to set up as boom crop–growing smallholders; a “transmigration” model in which parastatal agencies or private corporations with state support help migrants to relocate so that they can take part in organized farming schemes with at least some smallholder component; and migration for the purpose of working as waged laborers for plantations or richer smallholders growing boom crops. The importance of these types of migration has varied across crops. In the conclusion, the author makes several points about the politics of migration and crop booms.

The 2008 World Development Report and the political economy of Southeast Asian agriculture

This article seeks to determine what light the literature on the political economy of agriculture in Southeast Asia can shed on the analysis that underpins the World Bank's 2008 World Development Report, Agriculture for Development. It argues that work on Southeast Asia highlights gaps and problems in the Bank's account relating to the dynamics of boom crops, to the nature of social and political mobilisation around agriculture, and to the conceptualisation of agrarian transition.

Re‐thinking frontiers in Southeast Asia

Re‐thinking frontiers in Southeast Asia

The International Political Ecology of Industrial Shrimp Aquaculture and Industrial Plantation Forestry in Southeast Asia

This paper compares the trajectories over the last two decades of two export-oriented ‘boom crops’ in Southeast Asia: industrial shrimp aquaculture and industrial plantation forestry. It focuses on differences in the establishment, operation and politics of these sectors to explain why they have experienced very different kinds of ‘booms’.

Investigations into the Factors Affecting Underleaf Cover Using the Boom and Nozzle Crop Spraying Installation Fitted to the Dragonfly Helicopter

Investigations into the Factors Affecting Underleaf Cover Using the Boom and Nozzle Crop Spraying Installation Fitted to the Dragonfly Helicopter