Resistance and Contingent Contestations to Large-Scale Land Concessions in Southern Laos and Northeastern Cambodia

Abstract

Over the last decade, there have been considerable concerns raised regarding the social and environmental impacts of large-scale land concessions for plantation development in various parts of the world, especially in the tropics, including in Laos and Cambodia. However, there is still much to learn about the various connections and interactions associated with reactions to what are often referred to as "land grabs", and the ways they are associated or not associated with broader social movements and networks opposed to land grabbing. There is also the need to develop language for discussing these circumstances, something I aim to contribute to in this article. Here, I present four different cases of types of resistance, or what I refer to as contingent contestations, to land concessions in southern Laos and northeastern Cambodia (two from each country), focusing on the perspectives and associated strategies of smallholder farmers, but without ignoring broader issues. I consider the roles of locals in these contestations, through emphasizing the importance of histories, identities/ethnicities, politics, and geography in determining the types of responses to these land deals that emerge, and the strategies that are adopted for contesting these developments.

Direct and indirect land-use change caused by large-scale land acquisitions in Cambodia

“…More than 49 Mha have been leased globally to transnational investors in tracts greater than 200 ha, known as large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs), and another almost 20 Mha are pending [1,2]. While LSLAs have become common practice within an increasingly globalized and teleconnected world system, LSLAs are unique among agricultural commodity production practices in their potential for rapid and large-scale deforestation [3] and displacement of local communities [4][5][6][7][8]. Due to a lack of transparency and geographic specificity in reported LSLAs, there are few quantitative estimates of the scope and magnitude of environmental impacts of LSLAs [3,[9][10][11], and these focus mainly on direct land-use changes (LUC) associated with LSLA implementation.…”

Archetypical pathways of direct and indirect land-use change caused by Cambodia’s economic land concessions

“…Large-scale land acquisitions may also be strategic responses to energy and water crises and food price spikes by governments, transnational firms, or domestic investors (Zoomers 2010, Baird 2014, symptomatic of an increasingly globalized and teleconnected world system. Such responses disproportionately affect rural, poor, and/or indigenous communities with precarious land tenure (Borras and Franco 2011, Baird 2017. The result is often the displacement of land from smallscale production in regions already facing food security issues and placing it in the hands of well-capitalized investors that may not use it to produce food when such issues arise.…”

Smallholder telecoupling and potential sustainability

“…Rapidly expanding telecoupled systems are also propelled through urbanization (Seto et al 2012, Seto and and the governance-knowledge nexus of policy and management that is increasingly global (Zimmerer 2006, Liu et al 2013, Zimmerer et al 2015, Lenschow et al 2016. To date the "sending systems" assessed in telecoupling analysis are large-scale forests Meyfroidt 2011, Meyfroidt et al 2013) as well as agricultural plantations (DeFries et al 2013, Baird and Fox 2015, Friis et al 2016a,b, Friis and Nielsen 2016, Baird 2017, Sun et al 2017). The telecoupled social-ecological sending system is often focused on large-scale spatial occurrence, e.g., the large acreage of telecoupled soy fields in the Brazilian soy boom, that can be evaluated using remote sensing images and public data.…”

“…The HLPE uses the definition of smallholders as agricultural land users with holdings smaller than 2 hectares. Periurban populations were estimated by calculating using GIS buffer layers of radius set in direct proportion to the city population and the gridded global population (SEDAC gridded population of the world, V.3; http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/collection/gpw-v3) Globally, the demographic presence of smallholders remains significant notwithstanding the powerful, marginalizing counterforces of land and resource grabs as well as the corporate industrialization of agri-food and resource sectors (Wolford et al 2013, Baird and Fox 2015, Baird 2017. Smallholders are a large, persistent, and internally diverse group that defies overly narrow definition and that overlaps but is not equivalent to the category of family farmers (Turner and Brush 1987, Netting 1993, Darnhofer 2014, van Vliet et al 2015, Graeub et al 2016, Lowder et al 2016.…”

“…In recognizing extra-local interactions, this integrated approach highlights the relevance of conditions that are both internal and external to the smallholder individual and household per se. It also engages approaches, e.g., biodiversity conservation and agrifood systems (Brondizio et al 2016, Baird 2017, Kok et al 2017, Zimmerer and de Haan 2017 demonstrating that nearly every social-ecological system, however remote and small scale, is coupled to global forces.…”