The expansion of oil palm cultivation in the Asia-Pacific region in the past half century has engendered a major agro-environmental transformation with significant implications for rural livelihoods. The transformation has taken different forms within and between countries, depending on local contexts, as well as involving an important transnational dimension in terms of regional flows of labour and capital, transboundary and global environmental impacts, and efforts to build international governance structures. This special issue is devoted to seven comparative case studies from across the region to highlight the complexity and diversity of the processes underway. In this introductory paper, we provide an overview of the major economic, social and environmental issues, the different modes of production that have been employed and the varying ways in which land, labour and capital have been mobilised in the region. This overview contextualises the specific studies that follow and emphasises the insights that arise from comparative analysis.
Using the example of smallholder oil‐palm production in Papua New Guinea, this article illustrates how elements of a market economy and modernity become enmeshed and partly transformed by local place‐based nonmarket practices. The persistence, even efflorescence, of indigenous gift exchange, in tandem with greater participation in the market economy, challenges conventional notions about the structures and meanings of development. The introduced market economy can be inflected to serve indigenous sociocultural and economic goals by place‐based processes that transform market relations and practices into nonmarket social relationships. These kinds of inflections of the market economy are common and widespread and therefore worthy of consideration for their theoretical insights into processes of social and economic change and the meanings of development. The article concludes by outlining some preliminary thoughts on how development practice could be modified to provide more scope for this process of inflection, so that development strategies accord better with indigenous sociocultural meanings of development.
Over the past century the cultural and physical landscape of the Shire of Denmark on the south coast of Western Australia has been transformed by successive waves of in-migrants. The paper examines the period since the early 1970s when alternative lifestylers and early retirees, attracted by the district's natural beauty and low land prices, began moving in and acquiring former Group Settlement holdings. The activities of these and subsequent 'alternatives' and 'cashed out' early retirees settling in the district have raised the marketability of the Shire's cultural capital. These changes have occurred in association with broader processes of rural restructuring and changing notions of 'rurality'. Increasingly, Denmark's cultural and physical landscape has become a highly marketable product for consumption by Perth's af uent middle classes. In recent years land prices have risen rapidly as speculators and nanciers seek to 'cash in' on the 'cashed out' society. The paper explores these issues and relates them to broader processes of economic and social change occurring at the national and international levels.
An unprecedented increase in oil palm developments may be underway in Papua New Guinea (PNG) through controversial "special agricultural and business leases" (SABLs) covering over two million hectares. Oil palm development can create societal benefits, but doubt has been raised about whether the SABL developers intend establishing plantations. Here, we examine the development objectives of these proposals through an assessment of their land suitability, developer experience and capacity, and sociolegal constraints. Our review reveals 36 oil palm proposals with plantings planned for 948,000 ha, a sevenfold increase over the existing planted area in PNG. Based on our criteria, however, we estimate that only five plantations covering 181,700 ha might eventuate within the foreseeable future. We conclude that most of the developers are clearing forest with no intention of cultivating oil palm, and that a large-scale land grab is therefore occurring in PNG under the guise of oil palm development.
The village tradestore in rural Papua New Guinea is a physical expression of modernity in the heart of the village and is symbolic of the new economic and social formations associated with incorporation. This paper examines how the village tradestore is positioned in relation to these processes of change by considering the management and operation of several tradestores in the Wosera sub-district, East Sepik Province. The paper reports on the ways in which values, relationships and behaviours associated with both the introduced market economy and the precapitalist socio-economy become articulated through the ostensibly modern phenomenon of tradestores.
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