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Between Land Grabbing and Farmers'Benefits: Land Transfers in WestKalimantan, IndonesiaPujo Semedi & Laurens BakkerPublished online: 08 Jul 2014.

To cite this article: Pujo Semedi & Laurens Bakker (2014) Between Land Grabbing and Farmers'Benefits: Land Transfers in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology,15:4, 376-390, DOI: 10.1080/14442213.2014.928741

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Between Land Grabbing and Farmers’Benefits: Land Transfers in WestKalimantan, IndonesiaPujo Semedi and Laurens Bakker

Rapid growth of oil palm cultivation in West Kalimantan, Indonesia has increased boththe pace and size of land transfers from farmers to big companies and city-basedinvestors. This process has been widely conceptualised as ‘top-down land grabbing’ butthis perspective largely neglects the agency of the farmers. This paper seeks to shed lighton the agency of farmers with respect to how they respond to land transfer schemes.Through a study of land transfers under nucleus estate schemes (NES), schemes thatwere introduced by the Indonesian government in which smallholding farms areintegrated parts of a modern, large size plantation company, we will show that agrariandynamics are shaped by notions of what is ‘fair’ and ‘just’.

Keywords: Land Grabbing; Palm Oil; Social Justice; West Kalimantan; Indonesia

Introduction

Land grabbing, ‘the large-scale acquisition of land or land-related rights and resourcesby corporate entities’ (White et al. 2012, 619) is not a new phenomenon in thewestern half of Kalimantan, Indonesia. In the neighbouring Malaysian regions ofSarawak and Sabah, land grabbing dates back to the end of the nineteenth centurywhen British and other European investors laid out extensive tobacco plantations(Cleary 1992; Doolittle 2003). In the Indonesian provinces of West and SouthKalimantan, Dutch colonial planters established rubber plantations in the 1920s,while from the late 1960s onwards the logging industry obtained rights to access anduse extensive plots of forest. The scale of logging diminished by the mid-1990s whenthe provinces had almost run out of primary rainforest. Whereas loggers grab the

Pujo Semedi is an associate professor at the Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Arts and Humanities,Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. He teaches Economic Anthropology and in the last four yearshe has been focusing his research on the agrarian dynamics in Indonesia. Laurens Bakker is a lecturer andresearcher in anthropology and law at the University of Amsterdam and the Radboud University Nijmegen.Correspondence to: Pujo Semedi, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta,Indonesia. Email: pujosemedi@ugm.ac.id

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 2014Vol. 15, No. 4, 376–390, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14442213.2014.928741

© 2014 The Australian National University

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forest rather than the land and move on to new areas after the forest is cleared, the oilpalm plantations that emerged in their wake clearly required the land for a longerperiod of time. This obviously had a significant impact on the livelihood of localfarmers as they began to face a sizeable decrease in available farmland and swiddens.By 2010, 326 oil palm companies held concessions to 4.8 million hectares of land, orabout one third of West Kalimantan’s territory (Setra 2013).Such numbers can, however, be misleading because much land grabbing is virtual.

Many land grab plans fail to materialise as originally planned (McCarthy, Vel andAfif 2012, 541) while commercial crops introduced for cultivation in large estatestend to get adopted by local smallholders. Overall the history of cash crop farmingshows that actors, crops and territories often become mixed, making it impossible toderive from figures alone which actors are farming which crop on plantation lands.For example, when rubber (Hevea braziliensis) plantations were introduced in WestKalimantan in the early twentieth century, local farmers integrated this global marketcrop into their plots within a decade (Dove 1998, 25). In other parts of Indonesiasimilar adoptions by local farmers of plantation crops such as tobacco, coffee andsugarcane took place (Pelzer 1982). Today, it is quite common for smallholdingfarmers who live near large-scale plantations to grow large amounts of the plantationcrops—either as a private initiative or in the form of contract farming. They tend tosell their harvest to the plantation company to generate disposable cash income (see,for example, Ketterings et al. 1999; Simmons, Winters, & Patrick 2005).The relationship between farmers and investors can be harmonious and beneficial

to both sides but, as we will demonstrate in this article, things depend on both sideshaving access to land and control over the crops. While land grabs are often seen as ‘aregressive land reform where governments take land from the poor and give (or sellor lease) it to the rich’ (White et al. 2012, 620) and a ‘zero sum game of possessionand dispossession’ (Hall, Hirsch, & Li 2011), it is important to nuance suchgeneralisations. Following McCarthy, Gillespie, and Zen (2012), we will underpin thispoint by focusing on local agency with respect to governance and access and rights.We will push this point even further by showing that it is illuminating to take intoaccount notions of justice and fairness as they are expressed by the local farmers inrelation to issues of land control. In doing so, we will consider control over land asaimed at fixing or consolidating land-based wealth (see Peluso & Lund 2011) which isclosely related to—but not the same as—access to land: that which Ribot and Peluso(2003, 153) define as the ‘ability to benefit from things’.Below we will present an overview of the development of nucleus estate oil palm

plantations in the Buayan area in West Kalimantan and discuss the strategies thatlocal farmers deploy to benefit from both land and plantation companies. We will seethat the farmers frequently move against the interests and intentions of companiesand government alike in ways which they themselves see as just. We will then try toanswer the question as to what these actions tell us about the concept of justice inrelation to farmers’ strategies and will argue that justice is not expected from the state

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or from higher authorities but resides below: in access to land and control over thefruits of one’s labour.

Buayan and Colonial Ventures

The Buayan area lies in the upper Meliau sub-district of Sanggau Regency, roughlybetween the Buayan and Embuwan rivers that are both tributaries of the KapuasRiver. The two rivers stretch some 20 km upstream where smaller streams in thePerahu Bolah hill range feed them. Between the two rivers lies an area ofapproximately 400 square km that is traditionally inhabited by various Dayak tribesas well as by smaller Malay and Chinese minorities who reside in riverside hamletsand often work as traders. Amid the Dayak groups live Javanese transmigrants whoarrived mostly in three main migration waves during the 1930s, 1980s and 1990s.Appell (2008, 244) conceptualises land tenure among the Dayaks as ‘durable

usufruct’ by which he means that once a farmer has cleared a spot of forest land forhousing or cultivation, he obtains the exclusive right to that area and this right isinherited by his descendants. The farmer plants fruit trees that would form atembawang, a fruit garden that remains the exclusive right and symbol of the family’sownership, which they continue to hold even if they move to another region later on.As a result, for swiddens long overgrown following decades of abandonment, aspiringnew cultivators still need permission from the original users and make paymentscalled pengganti mata beliung to them ‘to indemnify the adze’s edge’ (Semedi &Binariyanto 1996, 38). At the same time, primary and uncleared forests would also besubject to claims by locals based on their extraction of resin, latex and wild honey.And uncultivated lands within a village’s territory are generally reserved for exclusivefuture use by villagers, but over time intermarriage and inheritance often causes it tobecome the subject of common access (Dove 1993, 139).The right of the first farmer’s descendants to the land he has cleared is still

recognised locally today, but at present the enforcement of that right comes closer toan official ownership right than to durable usufruct. This is as a result of the fact thatthe current generation is often keen to bequeath or sell such lands to third parties,which is unlikely to be permitted with land under less certain forms of traditionalownership (cf. Bakker 2009a). As a result, customary as well as state law derived landtitles exist side by side. Whereas custom tends to emphasise collective land rights ofthe community versus the rest of society, state law gives space to individualenterprise. As such, the collective and the individual become central elements indelineating the rights, freedoms and the ability to benefit for those involved.Since its introduction around 1910, rubber rapidly spread into the hinterlands

along the Kapuas River (Dove 1998, 24). Rubber provided a more attractive source ofcash revenue to farmers than other forest products, as rubber tapping involved lesslabour, fetched good prices and was therefore a regular and reliable source (see Sellato2007). As the trading volume increased, traders established permanent shops inriverside hamlets and these traders became economic patrons, locally known as tokeh

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(boss). Tokeh typically provide credit to their clients when rice harvests fail. Thesecredits are given in exchange for future payments for rubber slabs. The patrons alsooften acquired land through payment in cash, goods or in settlement of overduedebts. In this way, Komeng, a Chinese trader back in the 1930s, managed toaccumulate some fifty rubber tree fields where he employed tappers on a 30:70sharecropping base. In return the tappers were obliged to sell their rubber slabs tohim. Seemingly inspired by Komeng’s success, Gondir, the chief of the Nek Sawakhamlet during the Japanese occupation, promised his villagers cash payment foropening up rubber fields for him. The villagers cleared an area approximately 1 kmlong and 100 metres wide. Although Gondir never paid the promised money, therubber field made his family the wealthiest household in the village until the 1960s.The introduction of rubber thus brought about socio-economic differentiation thatbecame manifest in new titles, new power positions, the accumulation of wealth andland ownership.In the early 1930s, the land ownership system in the area was revisited again when

a private Dutch rubber plantation company, NV Kapoewas Rubber Maatschappij,secured a seventy-five year lease for 12,257 hectares of lands around the hamlet ofKuala Buayan on the banks of the Kapuas River, roughly 9000 hectares on the southbank and 3000 hectares on the north bank (Brinkgreve 1947). In those days, leasedlands were governmentally defined as waste lands, but as Kuala Buayan was a livelytrading hub it seems likely that NV Kapoewas’s concession included swiddens andfallow lands belonging to villagers. This hypothesis is sustained by the fact that thewhole hamlet of Sei Mayam was evicted from the concession land. Sei Mayamvillagers were resettled on the other side of the river, where they can be found today.Further development of NV Kapoewas was hampered by the global economicdepression in the 1930s. By the mid-1940s, the company had managed to establishonly 652 hectares of rubber fields (Brinkgreve 1947, 49). The remainder of theconcession was used by local farmers who were allowed to lay out swiddens as long asthey would not claim ownership of the land and agreed not to plant rubber in orderto avoid overproduction. As rubber was the main source of cash for the farmers, theycontinued its production outside the concession area, in rather remote fields. InDecember 1957, NV Kapoewas was nationalised and handed over to the military-owned company NV Agris. Farmers using the concession land were ordered to pay30 kg of rice annually by way of rent. Many submitted irregular and smaller amounts,blaming the deficit on pests and bad harvests.

National Dispossessions

In the early 1980s, PT Perkebunan Nusantara XIII (State Plantation Company XIII)was granted a lease of 5700 hectares of government land to establish an oil palmplantation on the north bank of the Kapuas River (PTPN XIII 2008). This concessionincluded the former NV Kapoewas/Agris land that farmers had begun to use. Forthese farmers, their first encounter with oil palm was thus challenging as it brought

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about considerable loss of land and crops. The company bluntly refused farmers’requests for compensation arguing that the farmers had illegally occupied govern-ment land. Having lost their main means of production, many farmers wereimpoverished. Some became plantation labourers, some migrated across the borderto Malaysia, others went to the provincial cities of Sanggau and Pontianak to eke outa living from whatever job they could find there.A decade later, two private sister companies, PT Harapan Dharma (HD) and PT

Sawit Permata (SP), arrived on the scene. These companies had obtained permits tocultivate a total of 38,810 hectares of oil palm—18,576 for PT HD and 20,234 for PTSP—under nucleus estate schemes (NES) (Bappeda Sanggau 1995). This area roughlycovers all of the Buayan River region and its tributaries. Development in NES meansthat 20 per cent of the plantation area is managed directly by the companies to ensurea minimum harvest and operation of the venture as a model plantation. The land forthis venture is government-owned and leased to the company. The remaining 80 percent of the concession is owned, managed and cultivated by smallholder farmers inwhat are known as plasma fields. In this plantation model, the company working thenucleus area provides the farmers owning the plasma field with support and expertisein exchange for which the farmers sell their harvest to the company. The harvests ofboth nucleus and plasma fields are processed in two company-owned CPO processingplants.The companies faced two immediate problems. First, the local population of Dayak

and Malays were unfamiliar with oil palm cultivation and overall not very interestedin risking the step of moving from their multi-crop, combined swidden and rubbergarden farming to oil palm monoculture. The farmers were enthusiastic aboutclearing unused lands and planting trees for immediate cash payments, but as theprice of palm oil was low and it takes three years for a tree to bear its first fruits, fewcared about the actual cultivation. The resulting labour supply problem was solved byinviting transmigrant farmers from Java, Bali and East Nusa Tenggara. Thesemigrants were housed in transmigrant villages in numbers equal to the number ofplasma farmers. Each migrant village was assigned to a farm unit. The secondproblem was posed by the companies’ need for plantation land. This was solvedthrough collaboration with regional government in which local farmers weresubjected to a policy of serah kebun or ‘land handovers’. Farmers possessing landin areas that were unilaterally designated by the government as suitable for palm oilwere to give up 7.5 hectares in exchange for a package comprising 2 hectares of oilpalm field, 0.5 hectare of housing land, a timber house and living rations for twoyears. The remaining 5 hectares would be split into an identical package fortransmigrants, with the remaining 2.5 hectares for a company nucleus field, roads,offices, a processing plant and housing for plantation staff and workers. Farmersparticipating in this scheme were forced to agree to a bank loan of Rp 11.6 million inorder to cover the expenses of converting the old farmlands into oil palm fields.Most local farmers were reluctant to participate in the scheme. ‘It was blatant

cheating,’ some farmers bitterly said. A few farmers tried to protect their land by

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putting up crossed beams as signs of no entry; others patrolled their fields with baremachetes or cocked matchlocks. All these individual actions failed to achieve theexpected result. All farmers were displaced. They now lament that there had not beena compact social body and that they failed to organise collective action. When afarmer rose up against the company, his neighbours stayed back because they wereafraid to offer support. The companies smartly ensured the support of local officialsas land transfers were an official government responsibility and they recruited villageelites and strongmen as foremen and public relations staff tasked with convincing therest of the farmers that oil palm cultivation would be good for their future and wasnot to be opposed. During a number of so-called sosialisasi (information sessions)they deployed friendly speech, paternal counsel and often outright coercion.One way to convince farmers to hand over their lands was by pointing out the state

plantation company’s Javanese workers across the river as example. These workerslived in good compounds and received regular wages that allowed them to invest infarmlands and send their children to high schools and colleges. These workers wereconsidered to have progressed, to be ‘maju’ (developed), and ‘makmur’ (wealthy)families. As the company public relations staff told the farmers:

See, the Javanese workers in Sungai Dekan, they live a good economic life and theyare merely workers of a plantation, not oil palm field owners. You can calculateyourself, how affluent you will be if you own oil palm fields.

When soft approaches failed to work, pressure was applied. ‘Pak Samuel, you knowthis is a government program. Are you opposing government? That’s fine with me,but if something happen to your family, don’t blame me,’ recalled Samuel ofSengkuang Daok as he recited the sub-district head’s words. Intimidated by thethreat, Samuel gave up several pieces of land and advised other farmers to follow suit.Samuel was immediately rewarded for his change of attitude with a lavish jobcontract as a land clearing foreman and an appointment as hamlet chief. Heeventually went on to become chief of the Farm Unit II village of Bakti Jaya.

Justice and Consent

In Buayan, villagers do not consider the arrival of the companies and theestablishment of plantations to be unjust, but they express their dissatisfaction withthis state of affairs becoming normalised. They suggest that they are used to thesekinds of things: outsiders wielding more power and redistribution of resources tobenefit new elites, and limits to access to land (and profit) for the local population.Samuel’s case shows how his acquiescence lead to improvement in his personalposition, whereas poorer and less wealthy farmers did not pursue this strategybecause of other priorities, and the realisation that not all can obtain a job contractlike Samuel’s due to the particular set of skills required. Next to social status,geographic location is a key factor in how farmers’ livelihood strategies are enabled orconstrained. With no expectation of redress or immediate benefits, farmers and

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communities throughout the area attempt to gain maximum benefit from the landtransfers.When the two companies and the NES arrived on the scene in the early 1990s, the

Buayan farmers were not enthusiastic about oil palm cultivation. They felt that theywere forced to give up land and questioned the idea of focusing on a less profitablecrop. But as the companies had official permission to start operating the farmers werenot given a choice. Dealing with the companies became a matter of maximising gainand minimising loss, in which the injustice of pressured collaboration brought aboutpragmatic calculations of benefits.An example of this is the collective processing of land transfers in each of the

hamlets. Hamlet chiefs were mandated by the companies to register the landstransferred to the companies and to list the contributing farmers as capes—candidateparticipants of the NES. The registration would then move up to the village, sub-district and regency offices after which the regency head would issue the provincialgovernment and the plantation companies with the official list of capes, the locationsof the fields they contributed and the farming units to which they belonged. Farmersfrequently inflated the size of the lands they contributed because measuring land inhectares was an unknown system to them and no previous surveys had been carriedout. Neither farmers nor chiefs thus knew the exact size of plots and when the

Figure 1 Field research site [based on Bakosurtanal 1993].

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companies required measures in hectares without providing surveying assistance,plots were often smaller than reported as well as occasionally too large. Hamlet chiefswere only too happy to learn about the over-reporting of plot size since the more landthey provided, the greater their bonus.Most of the transferred lands appeared to be unsuitable for oil palm plantation.

Farmers had kept the best lands to themselves and handed over less fertile orinaccessible plots located in swamps, peat bogs or on steep slopes. Others contributedgood swiddens or rubber fields but located in government-designated forest areasand, as such, officially not legally accessible for plantation purposes. The hamletchiefs were of course aware of the status and conditions of these lands but generallysided with the farmers by registering the lands contributed and giving the farmerscapes status. Notably in the upstream areas the farmers contributed only the absoluteminimum amount of land required. When company representatives requested moreland, the farmers told them to ‘work on that land first, the rest will come later’.Many hamlet chiefs opportunistically used the occasion to ensure benefits for

themselves. They inflated the size of their own contribution to obtain candidate statusfor their children and other family members. Samuel, for instance, claimed to havecontributed 45 hectares, which would entitle him to six candidate plots for him andhis five children. According to his neighbours, the size of fields concerned did noteven amount to 15 hectares. Chief Ibeng of Dekan Merah adamantly claimed that hisfamily had handed over more than 60 hectares and was therefore entitled to ninecandidate plots of oil palm fields. Hamlet chiefs could inflate their claims by using thevillages’ land surpluses as well as by registering other farmers’ contributions as lessthan they actually were and putting the difference in their own name. Moreover,chiefs received bribes from farmers to get them registered as candidates withoutcontributing sufficient (or even any) land. As contributing farmers protested againstsuch registrations, the chiefs replied that they were just helping poor local farmers toprofit from the companies. In the same way, however, district and sub-districtofficials appeared on the hamlet lists as candidates.Some of the farmers reported that in retrospect, they considered the situation at the

time to be chaotic and comical. No party knew for sure the size of the land they weregiving, what was registered and what they would receive in return. The companies’business permits were based on a topographic map that did not show the actual landsituation on the ground. Such inaccurate methods allowed villagers to use thecompanies’ lack of knowledge to strategically designate contributed lands. Farmersreflected that the companies were in for a surprise once they realised the land theyhad accepted, and that the method of land appropriation by the companies had beeneffectively answered by the local population. On the former NV Agris lands, mapsand knowledge reflected the real situation. Here, all the lands on the west side of theBuayan River—some 3000 hectares in total—were taken by the companies. Mostfarmers lost their swidden and rubber fields in exchange for a 2.5-hectare plasma plot.To the dismay of these farmers a plot of oil palm field proved a poor substitute fortheir old fields. As the young oil palms were not yet bearing fruit, they proved a

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constant drain on the farmers’ meagre resources due to the need to buy fertilisers andherbicides. Lacking the financial means to maintain the young palms, 28 per cent or78 out of 282 farmers in the main farm unit of the area, Farm Unit II Bakti Jaya, losttheir oil palm plots and were reduced to casual work in the nucleus field.Farmers in the zone beyond the nucleus area were luckier. Especially in the upriver

area where population density is lower, farmers were able to dispose of larger plots tobegin with. They thus managed to retain more remote farmlands where theycontinued to cultivate rubber. Some even managed to retain large rubber plots rightin the middle of the area designated for oil palm. Most farmers in the area would thuscome to enjoy revenues from both oil palm and rubber. Revenue from rubber helpedthese farmers get through the early stage of oil palm cultivation, allowing far morefarmers here to succeed than in the nucleus field. The fact that they had land to sparealso meant that these farmers were in a good position to expand once the price ofpalm oil started to rise.Farmers on the remote slopes of the Perahu Bolah hill range enjoyed the largest

space for manoeuvre. Here, farmers possessed large plots of land because of the lowerpopulation density, while their distance from the nucleus area put them on the fringeof the companies’ attention. Many farmers here stated that their participation in theoil palm estate scheme was motivated more by their desire for road infrastructurethan by the need to earn extra revenue. Before the advent of plantations in the regiontheir only way of transport out of the area was the river, which meant that theydepended on water levels and paid dearly for petrol. In the dry season or followingheavy rains, this rendered the area isolated. The new road provided better andcheaper access to health services, educational institutions and the market. Particularlyfor the upriver hill farmers, the prospect of a road inclined them to participate in oilpalm cultivation. Farmers ‘guided’ the road by handing over plots along a walkingpath connecting hamlets. Although this caused the initial amount of land to beconsiderably lower than envisaged by the companies—Farming Unit VIII in the areastarted with only 382 hectares whereas 900 where targeted—the rising price of palmoil and the secure supply of fertilisers and chemicals by road has brought farmers toexpand their plots and increase production.Farmers in the various parts of the Buayan area sought several ways to profit from

the handing over of their lands. Most saw the companies as parties undeserving of thelands received as the farmers were pressured into collaboration. As such, they felt thatsuch an injustice legitimised them to optimise their position by handing over smallerplots or poor lands only. The mythical idea of justice at play here shows a quid proquo approach to the land transfers. Overall, farmers feared that such an agrarianadventure was highly speculative, and they would be disproportionally disadvantagedif it failed. At the same time, these farmers’ response to the injustice entailed in theland transfers also amounts to ‘passive resistance’. Their partial boycotts, theirsubversion of the system and their divestment put moral pressure on the companiesand the state.

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From Land Transfers to Land Accumulation

At the end of the land transfer period in 1997, the management of PT HD and PT SPwas shocked to realise that of the intended 38,810 hectares for which they hadreceived permits, the companies had obtained only 20,433 hectares. It becamepainfully clear that farmers, especially in the upriver areas, had refused to hand overmore land than absolutely required by government pressure. According to the initialplans, the target was 6811 hectares of nucleus fields, one third of the total of 20,433hectares. When palm oil plasma plots were distributed, the companies discovered aland shortage of hundreds of hectares in relation to the number of farmers who hadcontributed land and were listed as participants in the NES. To these farmers thecompanies’ land shortage was irrelevant: they demanded fulfilment of the agreement.Calculations showed that on average, local farmers handed over around 5 hectares

of land rather than the required 7.5 hectares, but this was considered a companyproblem that should not stand in the way of the rights of individual farmers. Inseveral instances, the companies’ lack of control during the registration process cameto be mobilised against them. When a candidate who had not contributed any landreceived an oil palm plot, angry farmers pressed the company and said: ‘Why did thatman get a plot, while we who handed over land do not receive anything yet?’.Embarrassed and worried about possible accusations of corruption and clientelism,the companies gave in and turned 2978 hectares of the nucleus field into plasmaplots, leaving the companies with 3833 hectares. Farmers who still received no plotwere asked to be patient; the last of them finally received their plot in 2003.The 16,600 hectares of plasma fields were to be cultivated by 8300 farmer

households of which half would be transmigrants. This number proved hard to reach.Exact information on the number of transmigrants is hard to obtain, but ourobservations indicated that out of the eighteen farming units only eight containedtransmigrant inhabitants next to local farmers. All others were fully local. There arecurrently around 1500 transmigrant households living and working in the Buayanarea. Attracted by the prospect of work and land, many more arrived in the early1990s. During the first two years as plasma farmers, these transmigrants receivedbasic living rations to sustain them while they raised their oil palms to fruit-bearingage. Life, however, was hard even with such support. Many of the transmigrants havean urban background and were thus not familiar with agricultural work. For others,the conditions of life in the hinterland of West Kalimantan often proved toouncomfortable. While some succeeded in finding additional work in the nucleusestate plantation or began to grow vegetables for sale, others gave up and departedfrom the area. Transmigrants from Jakarta and other cities in West Java were amongthe first to abandon the transmigration hamlets to find easier living in the nearbytowns. From the 125 transmigrant families sent to Kayu Ara, for instance, only tworemained by 2010, while from seventy-five transmigrants given plots in DekanBuayan, only four remained.

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Although Buayan farmers and transmigrants generally get on well, each migrantleaving meant a plot of oil palms becoming available for those who stayed. Somedeparting transmigrants chose to sell their plots to other transmigrants, whichinfuriated Buayan farmers. One farmer told Semedi:

They are welcome here. If they don’t like to stay, that’s also fine. But since theycame without carrying a hand of soil, they don’t have any right whatsoever to sellthe land when they leave. If they leave, the land must be returned to us.

Generally, the local farmers would close ranks and reclaim the field. In order to avoidconflicts, transmigrant buyers generally accepted this outcome. As a result, most ofthe palm oil fields abandoned by transmigrants were taken by local farmers.Perhaps inspired by the success of such unilateral actions, a group of village

strongmen began to harass transmigrants by forcing them to adhere to customaryland rights that traditionally governed land access in the area. The group exploitedcollective indigenous Dayak identity as a political tool (cf. Bakker 2009b), spreadingthe rumour that once the plantation concession ended in the late 2020s, the landwould revert back to local indigenous farmers and plantation companies and thetransmigrants would have to leave. A few transmigrants publicly replied that it wasup to the government to decide whether they could stay or must depart, whichresulted in their fields being ransacked and their harvests stolen. Similar actions areoccasionally carried out to intimidate the companies, when Buayan strongmen stealoil palm fruits from the plantations’ nucleus fields and blend them into their ownharvests.Whereas the Buayan lands had already been divided up into numerous plots under

the customary land rights system, further fragmentation of lands into thousands of oilpalm plots governed by state law invited accumulation by individuals. Buayanfarmers began to realise that oil palm farming had the potential to make them richand this motivated wealthier farmers to invest in more plots. When poor farmers inthe nucleus field area found themselves in financial difficulties in the mid-1990s, localtraders bought up their fields for prices as low as Rp 1.5 million per plot. By the early2000s, every hamlet had a few wealthy farmers who owned more than five oil palmplots that had been generally obtained from departing transmigrants or local farmerswho found themselves in financial difficulties. Deo of Kerawing hamlet, for instance,was initially opposed to oil palm farming but changed his mind once he realised thepotential. He currently cultivates twelve plots that he bought relatively cheaply fromfarmers in need of cash. Deo and other wealthy local farmers also have share tenants,for whom they provide pesticides and fertiliser in exchange for half the harvest. Suchshare tenants are frequently obtained through the advance selling of harvest, which islikely the softest way to accumulate land.Confronted with a pressing need for cash, a farmer approaches a wealthy

neighbour and obtains cash from him in exchange for his coming harvest. Whilethis might be one-off and temporary, an ongoing financial need might result inadvance selling moving from one to two months, and so on. In this way, several

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unscrupulous farmers have considerably extended their lands as well as theirinfluence over local farmers. In May 2010, robbers made off with Rp 1.4 billion ofharvest payments from Farming Unit IV. Rumour had it that Buan of the village ofDaok lost many million rupiah in the heist, money he had advanced against theharvests of fifty plots in the unit.From 2000 onwards, the rising price of palm oil also brought interested urban

investors to the Buayan area. They purchased plots from plasma farmers throughlocal middlemen and, when plasma plots became hard to get, moved to buyingswidden and rubber fields to convert into oil palm fields. Nowadays mini oil palmestates of 50 to 300 hectares are located throughout the area. The turnover of suchsmall enterprises is not bad as one well-maintained hectare of adult palms produces ayearly harvest of 24 tonnes on average, which equalled around Rp 26 million (theequivalent of AUS$ 3750) in 2010. A medium holding of 50 hectares would give IDR1.3 billion rupiah (the equivalent of AUS$ 187,500) turnover per year. Even if half ofthat sum is needed to cover production costs, the profit is still considerable. A decadeinto oil palm cultivation under the auspices of the two private companies, the Buayanarea farmers now find themselves living and cultivating in a highly profitable oil palmarea. With trees matured and productive, harvests have increased while the price ofpalm oil has continued to rise. In 2010, around 3792 plasma farmers from PT HDjointly received a monthly average of Rp 6.4 billion for their harvests, or Rp 1.7million per household per month. People can afford goods they could only dream ofa few years previous, and many farmers have given up swidden rice farming becausethey can ‘do swidden in the grocery store’ as one respondent would have it.The power of the ‘tribal slot’ (cf. Li 2000) is brought to bear on reclaiming ethnic

rights to rural land and threatens the exclusion of non-indigenous farmers. The large,government-supported companies that run the plantation schemes appear quitepowerless in the face of this claim, as they depend on local farmers’ support for theirproduction. Moreover, the formation of a local class of village-level land owners whoextend their territories by obtaining the plots of those indebted and in financial need,act as middlemen to urban investors. Through such ‘piecemeal dispossession’ (Li2010), poorer farmers and those with only one plot are gradually losing out. Whilemany Buayan farmers in general have been quite successful in accommodating thearrival of oil palm plantations into their livelihood strategies and have avoided large-scale exclusion from land access or expropriation of their farm lands, they are nolonger a group but an evolving economic class. Small-scale farmers are still able to docomparatively well even with one plot of oil palms, but increasingly run the risk oflosing their land if they become indebted. Increasing economic class difference, itseems, is currently a key dynamic in Buayan livelihoods.

Conclusion

Oil palm is, as McCarthy (2010, 826) puts it, ‘a rich farmers crop’. It requiressignificant financial means because of the need for pesticides and fertilisers.

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Moreover, one has to wait a long time until the young palms begin to bear fruit. Thedevelopment of oil palm plantations in large company schemes requires access touncultivated available lands, or cultivated lands which the users are to some extentwilling to give up. At the same time, the uncertainties and pressure that the projectsentail for the users make them view such developments as tinged with injustice, andthis generates their resistance. The company views the situation with optimismhowever. The NES are intended to combine the interests of companies and those oflocal farmers and provide the latter with access to the capital and chemicals thatwould ordinarily be beyond their reach. They also provide smallholder farmers withthe opportunity to develop a secure lifestyle based on a regular income. From anagrarian justice perspective, this means that farmers’ access to the means necessary toproduce their crop is limited by the power of the company, which puts the farmers ina disadvantaged and dependent position. Resisting this injustice, Buayan farmersreport falsely about their land and retain land outside the plantations, which limitstheir dependence on the plantation schemes. Not all are successful in pursuing suchstrategies: a group of farmers lacking land reserves lost their plots once financialdifficulties arose.Those with land to spare did not resent the arrival of the companies and did not

resist the new crop. As our discussion shows, farmers throughout the Buayan areawere often willing to exchange lands for infrastructure, or for an increase in revenues.Rather than experiencing a limitation of their possibilities, for them the trade-offgenerated new access to markets and the means to exercise their agency to furthertheir own needs and interests. The arrival of the oil palm plantations thus benefitedsome groups of the population while harming the livelihoods of the less advantaged.This difference creates an ambiguous situation in which only a relatively small part ofthe population is decidedly losing out. This group of landless poor includes migrantswho live with the threat of militants calling for ethnic rights, as well as small holderswho lack the financial means to sustain financial setbacks.Notions of justice in this context refer to unhampered and sufficient access to land,

to resources and markets, as well as to the capacity to act independently fromplantation companies and landowners. This is not a fixed quality available to all, noris it guaranteed or protected by the state. In the Buayan area’s oil palm plantations,justice starts with access to land. This demands recognition by customary rules—which are not recognised by the state—in which customary lands are consideredunalienable but which state law allows to be sold as private property. The practice ofachieving what is ‘just’ hence depends on one’s agency in land affairs, and one’s localpower and wealth, as well as on such arbitrary aspects as the geographic remotenessof one’s village in relation to plantation companies’ nucleus areas. These elementslack the universal qualities and legal ideal inherent in legalistic approaches to justice,but are instead formed and maintained by local socio-economic circumstances.

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Acknowledgements

Fieldwork for this article was conducted as part of the project ‘Production of Wealthand Poverty in New Indonesian Rural Economies, 2010–2011’ and involved a numberof students from the Departments of Anthropology at Universitas Gadjah Mada andthe University of Toronto. Pujo Semedi is grateful to Tania Li, the project initiatorand leader, for giving him the opportunity to participate.

Funding

Pujo Semedi’s Fieldwork in West Kalimantan was funded by the Social Sciences andHumanities Research Council, Canada. Grant number 410091183. Laurens Bakker’scontribution to this work was supported by WOTRO [grant number W 01.65.334.00]as part of the research project ‘(Trans)national Land Investments in Indonesia andthe Philippines: Contested Control of Farm Land and Cash Crops’.

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