Plantations

Plantations are assemblages of trees, shrubs, or plants deliberately established on an area of land. Plantations can also be understood as a system of agro-economic production. Plantations represent a dominant mode of industrial organization and social-ecological production in modern agriculture and forestry.

As an organizational form, the plantation has a significant colonial and postcolonial history. Between the 18th and early 20th centuries, tropical plantations were a primary form of colonial enterprise, organized around the cultivation of globally traded commodities, including sugarcane, bananas, coconuts, tea, cocoa, cotton, spices, and rubber. Different labor regimes became associated with the colonial plantation. In the Caribbean and the U.S. South, indentured and slave labor was widespread, while in the Netherlands East Indies and British Malaya, plantation labor regimes were based on organized transfers of people from South Asia. Labor control in colonial plantation development often involved a radical restructuring of preexisting social relations; this history, in many cases, continues to influence ethnic politics in contemporary societies.

Scholars have long made the linkage between plantations and the characteristics of “total institutions.” Political ecologists such as Nancy Peluso have analyzed colonial and postcolonial teak plantations in southeast Asia as an expression of state control and political-economic power. For James Scott, plantations can be understood as an emblematic form of agricultural “high modernism,” amenable to state rationalities of simplification, legibility, calculation, and control. The plantation as a social and economic technology has also been linked to state initiatives to suppress rural insurgencies, as in Malaysia and Myanmar.

While there are many organizational forms, large-scale plantations typically involve variations on the following characteristics: appropriation and control over land and property, a disciplined labor regime, corporatist or state-led management structures, the commodification and improvement of high-yielding planting material, [Page 2193]and the employment of industrial technology and finance capital. Not all plantations have been organized along logics of entrepreneurial capitalism and surplus reinvestment. The hacienda form of plantation development, which emerged in Latin America and the Philippines, was essentially a precapitalist form, involving the direction of surplus toward powerful oligarchic ruling families. Contemporary plantations typically involve state-led reforestation schemes or private sector firms integrated with global capital flows and markets.

The Great Depression led to a collapse in global plantation commodity prices through the 1930s. World War II, followed by anticolonial struggles, ended the age of colonial plantation regimes. In some postcolonial countries, successful “land to the tiller” reforms were initiated. New global development institutions such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations were closely involved in the establishment and promotion of plantations in the postwar period. New plantation boom crops, including oil palm, eucalyptus, acacia, teak, rubber, coconuts, sugarcane, soybeans, coffee, and cocoa, have radically reshaped tropical forest environments and have been associated with widespread deforestation. In Indonesia through the 1990s, the clearing of peat swamps for oil palm plantations, in association with El Niño climatic events, was identified as the primary source of uncontrolled forest fires, which blanketed southeast Asia in haze. Biofuels (including sugarcane, [Page 2194]corn, oil palm, and cassava) have emerged in the past decade as a new plantation boom crop linked to rising global energy prices. The convergence between agricultural and energy commodity markets is predicted to have negative implications for land use conversion, deforestation, and food security in many developing countries, although the rising prices of these agricultural commodities may also benefit some farmers.

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