SEMINAR: Palm Oil Fever

A recent feature story in the Indonesian news weekly, "Tempo", announces "palm oil fever" as the latest focus of people's aspirations for economic development in the country. However, it is questionable whether the development of oil palm plantations actually represents villagers' hopes, as opposed to simply governmental and corporate priorities. This paper traces the post-timber boom conversion of land to oil palm plantations in Central Kalimantan, situating this transformation in the context of wider political and agrarian changes catalysed by the introduction of regional autonomy. It traces the rapidity of this conversion of the landscape to this monoculture regimen to the need of regency heads (bupati) for real regional income (pendapatan asli daerah or PAD), in some cases in order to demonstrate the viability of new regencies within a two-year trial framework. The paper takes as a case study this transformation in Kabupaten Seruyan, focusing in particular upon Lake Sembuluh, where the bupati has granted a dozen concessions in the last few years. It focuses on the impact of these concessions, which now ring the lake, on the inhabitants of Sembuluh I and Sembuluh II villages, paying particular attention to the collapse of the boat building industry and consequent changes in the local gendered division of labour in these villages, including the increased trend for outmigration by males. The paper ends with a consideration of why organised resistance to these plantations has so far been so unsuccessful, relating this failure to the erosion of local custom (adat) as a warrant for making land claims due to the influx of large numbers of Banjarese migrants. It explores the consequences of the community's lack of affiliation to the Indonesian indigenous peoples' movement (gerakan masyarakat adat), which has supported analogous claims to community based property rights in other contexts.