During colonial-capitalist urbanization cities emerged as the engines of growth, so it is not surprising that in the face of the ecological polycrisis, the attention of the media, business, and the state is focused on metropolitan spaces, neglecting the living conditions of rural people, who still make up about 40 percent of the world’s population and in many ways provide the resources for the urban engines of growth. This urban-rural divide is particularly problematic in the case of palm oil plantations in Indonesia, as Tania Li shows in her article for the “Kin City” series.
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In 2022, my co-author Pujo Semedi and I gave a talk at Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency in Jakarta. It was one of series of talks we organized to launch the Indonesian translation of our book, “Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia’s Oil Palm Zone.” After the presentation, a social scientist in the audience approached us with these words: “Thank you for bringing this situation to my attention. I had no idea.” The Indonesian title of the book translates as “Living with Giants,” drawing on a metaphor often used to critique excessive, irresponsible power. A giant is greedy and careless; it is quasi-human, but it is impossible to forge a normal human relation with it. The book title hit a nerve; we could feel the audience at our presentations shudder as they pictured living next to a giant that could trample them at will.
Our goal with the talk series was to generate some media attention and stimulate public debate about the fate of millions of rural Indonesians in the oil palm plantation zone who live under conditions we dubbed ‘corporate occupation.’ Oil palm plantation companies now hold government-issued renewable concession licenses covering one-third of Indonesia’s arable land. Former landholders who live in plantation zones suffer not only from corporate occupation of the farmlands and forests that previously sustained them; they also lose access to citizen rights as the corporations undermine their local institutions, turn village headmen and government officials into collaborators, and break the law with impunity. Villagers are forced to live with giants but have no way to hold the giants to account for the harms they impose.
Corporate occupation
Attendees at the talks we gave were surprised by our findings. At the National Research Agency in Jakarta, among a non-specialist audience, ignorance of the effects of corporate occupation was complete. When we spoke in the capital cities of provinces blanketed by oil palm plantations, attendees were aware that corporate land acquisition sometimes provokes conflicts over land which may result in the arrest, injury or death of protesters at the hands of police and the army. These kinds of stories make their way into provincial newspapers. But they assume that such cases are exceptional – the work of bad actors.
Most urban Indonesians never visit oil palm plantations and they know nothing about what goes on there. If they take an interest, their main sources of information are reports in national media that tout the benefits that palm oil brings to Indonesia. No doubt these are significant: exports of palm oil are Indonesia’s largest source of foreign exchange, netting the country nearly US$30 million in 2022. Industry supporters quote unsupported but optimistic statistics about the millions of jobs created by this industry. The news in the city, in short, is mainly upbeat.
The positive messaging about palm oil within Indonesia is not incidental. It is part of a government-backed media campaign designed to counter what oil palm industry supporters call the “black campaign” by environmentalists in Europe. These environmentalists, the story goes, are more concerned with the fate of the orang utan than with poverty alleviation in Indonesia; or, more sinisterly, they are a front for European edible oil producers using the alibi of concern about forest loss to protect their own less competitive products. Faced with the suggestion that Europeans are back to their neocolonial tricks – criticizing Indonesia while continuing their own greedy and destructive habits – most Indonesians rally behind the industry with patriotic pride and look no deeper.
A rural-urban disconnect
The profound disconnect between what is happening in rural Indonesia and urban peoples’ knowledge of rural spaces has several causes. Spatial disjuncture is one. Plantations are not easy to visit. Most are located far from cities along rugged, barely passable roads. The plantations themselves are huge – 3.000 hectares on average – so just traversing from one side to the other can take an entire, grueling day. There is no public transport so a visit is expensive: the visitor needs access to a truck or motorbike and money for fuel, which sells at a premium.
Plantation corporations also guard their privacy, and do not admit visitors except on official business. There are guards at plantation gates, and once inside there are no signposts to guide a visitor. All the plantation blocks look the same, and plantation roads are numbered, not named. Worker housing blocks are also numbered, distant one from the next, and hard to find. Hence part of the urban-rural disconnect is infrastructural; it is built into the spatial arrangements of the plantation zone.
A second source of the rural-urban disconnect is cultural and political. Indonesia does not have a cultural tradition in which rural people hold pride of place as representatives of the national spirit. Viewed from the city, peasants are innocent, honest and hardworking; if they live in remote parts of Borneo and Papua, they are primitive, irrational, and wild. Counternarratives generated in the city may attempt to reverse these images (e.g. rural people as environmental stewards or guardians of tradition) but these narratives can backfire.
When Semedi and I took dozens of students from Gadjah Mada University to Borneo to participate in our plantation research, these middle-class Javanese urbanites expressed disappointment. Traveling upriver by boat, we passed massive floating log rafts destined for saw mills, bauxite mines and unbroken swathes of oil palm. Their rural dreamscape was displaced by an industrial landscape, leading them to question the value of traveling so far from home.
The political history of Indonesia intensifies the disconnect. In the 1950s a strong communist party – the third largest after China and the Soviet Union – was starting to redraw social and spatial boundaries. One of the largest affiliated unions, the Peasant Front, had seven million members, and through party newspapers city folk gained more understanding of the challenges faced by rural people. They were encouraged to think of them as kin: as brothers and sisters involved in a shared national project with social justice at its core. Tragically, all this came to an end in 1965-66 when the army engineered the massacre of half a million people who were treated not as kin but as ‘animals or devils;’ and since then, argues Benedict Anderson, the rural and urban masses continue to be viewed as mere ‘objects,’ ‘possessions,’ ‘servants,’ and ‘obstacles’ for the Ogre of predatory power.
The disconnect I have described here is not unique to Indonesia. Some city-dwellers, especially in China, left their villages in recent decades and they have a good understanding of what goes on there. For other city folk, rural Asia – home to half the population – is out of sight, out of mind. Viewed from Europe, rural Asia is even more obscure and viewed most often through the lens of environmental risk (forests burning, rivers flooding). The everyday lives of people who live in these rural spaces does not make the news.
No kinship without acknowledgement
If we know nothing about a group of people, it is hard to acknowledge them as kin. What does it mean to be acknowledged? Anthropologist Johannes Fabian addresses this question by dwelling on the concept of recognition, rendered in one word in English but three words in German: “Erkennen… as in ‘I know these persons or objects when I see them’ (an act of cognition); Wiedererkennen, as in ‘I know these persons or objects because I remember them’ (an act of memory); and Anerkennen, as in‘I give these persons or objects the recognition they ask for and deserve’ (an act of acknowledgement).”
Unlike classification or memory which are brought along as fixed schemes and preconceptions (e.g. rural people are primitive), acknowledgement requires knowledge, and knowledge for Fabian can only be generated by ‘coeval participants’ engaged in communicative exchange. Acknowledgement cannot be ‘doled out like political independence or development aid’ nor set in place by legal fiat. It is the fruit of exchanges that transform people and redefine the relationships between them.
Bridging the urban-rural disconnect and forging kinship demands communicative exchange of this kind. Recycling schemes forged in the city and bringing them along on rural field trips will not generate new knowledge. The exchanges that count demand a lot more work.
Note from the editors: More articles on the palm oil industry in the Berliner Gazette by Max Haiven, Salma Rizkya, and Hariati Sinaga.