Migration, Agrarian Transition, and Rural Change in Southeast Asia

Philip F. Kelly, Philip F. Kelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317995036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi sull'etnia

Rural life in Southeast Asia is being transformed by new and intensifying processes of migration and mobility. Migration out of rural areas creates new forms of class mobility, familial relations, production processes and income. Migration into rural areas creates a new and sometimes marginalized workforce, contestation over resource access, and the juxtaposition of culturally different groups. At the same time, everyday mobility stretches the spatial boundaries of village and family life. The bounded space of the village is no longer adequate to understand the dynamics that are driving (and resulting from) rural social change.

This collection of original studies explores the cultural, economic and environmental dimensions of intensifying migration and mobility in rural Southeast Asia at multiple scales. Diverse processes are explored including rural-urban flows, rural-rural movement, everyday mobilities, and international migrations into regional and global labour markets. Drawing on fieldwork in six countries across the region, these essays also explore what migration means for our understanding of class, citizenship, gender and the state in a rapidly changing part of the world.

This book was based on two parts of a special issue of Critical Asian Studies.

1. Where the Streets are Paved with Prawns

Crop Booms and Migration in Southeast Asia

Derek Hall

AS THE PROPORTION OF THE GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT of Southeast Asian countries accounted for by agriculture continues its long-term decline, and as agriculture shrinks in importance as a component of livelihoods, occupations, and identities even in rural areas,¹ it is perhaps natural in studying regional migration flows to emphasize the ways people are moving away from farming. Such an approach would highlight the relocation of farmers to industrial or service jobs in other rural areas, in urban and periurban areas, and overseas. Remittance flows from this migration might support or transform agriculture back home,² but the overall story would be one of “de-agrarianization.” While there is much to recommend such a picture, we should not lose sight of the ways in which people continue to migrate in order to take part in agricultural production. This is particularly important in Southeast Asia, where—in contrast to most regions of the world—agriculture is still undergoing substantial spatial expansion. FAO statistics show that between 1990 and 2005, the amount of land farmed in the Philippines and Thailand did not change much, but Indonesia saw an expansion of 24 percent, Cambodia, of 36 percent, Vietnam, of 39 percent, and Malaysia, of 46 percent.³ This growth obviously means that people in the region continue to move to new areas in order to engage in agriculture. The endurance of this dynamic within a broader context of de-agrarianization underscores the diversity of types of and motivations for migration in Southeast Asia.⁴

Much of this agricultural expansion is taking place through growth in the production of “boom crops.” Crop booms are defined here as taking place when two conditions are met: large areas of land are rapidly converted to monocropped (or nearly mono-cropped) production of a new crop and the land use transformations involved have time horizons of more than a year, usually because the crop is a tree crop that will take time to begin producing.⁵ In Southeast Asia, key boom crops include cocoa, coffee, fast-growing trees (such as eucalyptus), oil palm, pepper, rubber, and shrimp. Crop booms have played a critical role in agricultural expansion in Southeast Asia for centuries, and during the 1990s and 2000s millions of people have continued to migrate to “frontier” areas to take part in them.⁶ Some of this migration is fairly local; some is long distance but takes place within national borders; and some is international. It is also striking that some migrants are not just undertaking risky journeys to engage in agriculture, but are doing so enthusiastically. This enthusiasm is reflected in the nicknames given to some of these crops. Coffee is the “dollar tree” or the “golden bean” in Vietnam, oil palm is “green gold” in Malaysia, and in the Philippines the shrimp boom was called a “prawndike.”⁷ Indeed, in some cases (notably coffee farming in Vietnam and shrimp farming across the region), people have given up nonagricultural, urban occupations to throw themselves into booms.⁸ Migration for boom-crop production is thus an enormously important part of the contemporary Southeast Asian agricultural landscape. We have, however, little comparative sense of its dynamics. This is so in part because the comparative study of crop booms in the region is relatively rare,⁹ but also because the existing literature often focuses less on labor than it does on questions of land, environment, and social conflict between producers and nonproducers.

In this chapter, I use existing material on labor and migration in the literature to undertake a comparative analysis of the ways in which crop booms and migration go together. The chapter is divided into three sections on the basis of the different types of migration that have been associated with booms. The first section takes up what is arguably the classic pattern in Southeast Asia: relatively autonomous and “spontaneous” migration by households or individuals to frontier areas for the purpose of setting up as boom crop–growing smallholders. This type of migration is characteristic of the cocoa boom in Sulawesi and of coffee in Sumatra and (to some degree) Vietnam. The second form, most notable in Indonesia but also important historically in Malaysia, is the “transmigration” model in which parastatal agencies or private corporations with state support help migrants to relocate so that they can take part in organized farming schemes with at least some smallholder component. Oil palm–producing projects that are part of the Indonesian transmigration scheme have received the most attention, but during the 1990s shrimp-farming projects were also established. Transmigration projects have also contributed to booms in other, more indirect ways, for instance by encouraging people living close to them to take up boom-crop production. In the third type of migration, people relocate (either on their own or with state/corporate assistance) to work as waged laborers for plantations or richer smallholders growing boom crops. This pattern is common in shrimp farming in Thailand and elsewhere, but its most spectacular current manifestation is the hundreds of thousands of (mostly Indonesian) foreign workers on Malaysian oil palm plantations. In the conclusion, I use the material covered in the chapter to make four points about the analysis and the politics of crop booms.

Before moving on, I would like to call attention to three important elements of the relationship between crop booms and migration that are not taken up in detail in this chapter. First, not all boom-crop production is undertaken by people who migrated for this purpose. Many of the participants in the booms discussed below have been people who were in the area (in situ) before the boom began. Rice farmers in Thailand have converted their paddy fields to shrimp ponds, smallholders in the vicinity of palm oil mills in Sabah have taken up oil palm, and upland swiddeners in Sulawesi have planted cocoa on land previously devoted to other crops. States and corporations, too, have used such mechanisms as agricultural extension, contract farming, credit provision, infrastructural and market development, and the creation of “nucleus and plasma” schemes (discussed below) to encourage in situ smallholders to shift to boom-crop production. Migrants growing boom crops thus very often do so in close proximity to people who were previously in the area and who are similarly engaged. This distinction itself, however, should not be pushed too far. We will see below that in many cases, the people who were in situ when the boom started had not been there for long. Southeast Asian populations are mobile enough that dichotomies between “migrants” and “locals” are often unhelpful, in part because many “locals” continue to have access to the same kinds of networks and extra-local connections and knowledge that are usually seen to characterize “migrants.”

Second and relatedly, crop booms can inhibit, as well as stimulate, migration. When booms make local agriculture more profitable, they can encourage people in situ to stay put (or return home) and grow the boom crop rather than migrating in search of better options elsewhere. Tania Murray Li argues, for instance, that the occurrence of a cocoa boom in a Lauje area of upland Sulawesi transformed the local “prestige system.” While seasonal migrant wage labor on coastal farms was a source of male status before the boom, once cocoa took off, “men’s migrant labor was redefined as wasteful: why work for others, when you could build up a secure future by developing a productive cacao garden at home?”¹⁰ Suwat Jitjan and his coauthors, meanwhile, have argued that a key driver of the expansion of rubber in northeastern Thailand (Isan) has been the return of migrant workers with knowledge of production techniques from rubber-growing areas in eastern and southern Thailand. Once rubber was introduced, the higher income it provided persuaded some of these migrants to return home and grow the crop themselves.¹¹ While the impact of crop booms on decisions not to migrate is not extensively discussed in the literature (perhaps because of the dog-that-didn’t-bark nature of the phenomenon), this dynamic should be borne in mind.

Third, booms do not last forever. In some cases, indeed, they come to abrupt and traumatic ends—busts—as a result of falling prices or disease outbreaks. Examples include the price collapse that Vietnamese coffee growers experienced at the end of the 1990s, the recent spread of a fungal infection through cocoa-producing areas of Sulawesi, and the various price- and disease-induced crashes that have hit shrimp farming across the region. Producers and workers can respond to busts in a variety of ways. Some try to hang on and keep growing the boom crop; some look for different ways of using the land, including, perhaps, trying to grab the next boom on the way up. Another response is, of course, to leave the area in search of alternate employment. Both people who migrated to take part in the boom and those who were in situ before it began may thus turn to migration when the boom ends. While some work has been done on what happens to the people ejected by booms,¹² this is another question that would benefit from further research.

Smallholder Migration

The pattern of relatively autonomous/spontaneous migration of smallholders to set up boom-crop production in frontier areas is a common one in Southeast Asian history. To say that this migration is “spontaneous” is not to say that states and corporations have had no impact on it, but it does mean that the migrants are not part of state-organized movements. In recent decades, coffee, cocoa, and shrimp have seen particularly notable spontaneous booms. Jeffrey Neilson frames cocoa expansion in terms of “the emergence of ‘pioneer fronts,’ as migrant farmers carve out swathes of primary forest to establish new production centres,”¹³ while Lesley Potter quotes a description of coffee as “everywhere a frontier crop eating the forest.”¹⁴ David Gaveau et al. write of an “unplanned mass migration to the mountainous areas of southwest Sumatra” in response to high coffee prices in the late 1970s. The move involved around 100,000 people, mostly from Java.¹⁵ Shrimp farming’s spectacular expansion in Southeast Asia during the 1980s and 1990s also derived in part from movements (some very local) of people into mangrove forests and other coastal areas. In this section, I briefly introduce two of the most dramatic recent “spontaneous” cases—cocoa in Sulawesi and certain elements of the coffee boom in the Central Highlands of Vietnam—and then discuss how migrants get access to land and analyze the networks that support their migrations in the context of these two booms and of other examples in the literature.

Sulawesi’s recent history of cocoa planting is a classic example of a Southeast Asian agricultural boom. The island’s cocoa exports went from nothing in the late 1970s to 300,000 tons in 1999. Production accelerated dramatically during the 1990s, just as Malaysia’s previously larger production was beginning its long-term decline.¹⁶ The combination of high prices, the relative ease of establishing smallholding cocoa fields, and large amounts of “available” land and labor in Sulawesi contributed to the speed with which land was converted from forest and swidden to mono-cropped production. The boom was driven mainly by migrants, especially ethnic Bugis, but also Balinese. François Ruf and Yod-dang have traced the routes by which “[t]ens of thousands of Bugis families migrated from southern Sulawesi to the plains and forest-covered mountains of the western, central-southern, central and northern parts of the island to plant [cocoa].”¹⁷ In situ upland farmers also participated in the boom in many areas. Li’s research shows two quite different trajectories in the Lore Lindu area, where land was rapidly alienated to Bugis migrants, and in a Lauje-speaking area that saw no migration and where the shift to cocoa was internally driven (but no less dramatic).¹⁸ The cocoa boom generated substantial wealth for some previously quite poor smallholders, but it also gave rise to dynamics of dispossession and differentiation.

Certainly the most spectacular example of smallholder migration for boom-crop production in recent decades, however, is the explosion of coffee production that took place in the Central Highlands of Vietnam during the 1990s.¹⁹ Between 1993 and 2000, the area of harvested coffee land in Vietnam increased more than 6.5 times. The boom profoundly changed life in the Highlands, with coffee coming to dominate much of the landscape and huge areas of garden, swidden, and forestland converted to coffee. The mid 1990s was the peak period of migration into the Central Highlands, as ethnic Kinh, Hmong, and Tay-Nung families poured into the region, largely to grow coffee. This smallholder-driven boom is a good example of the ways in which the types of migration discussed in this chapter can be difficult to separate. While migration to the area during the coffee boom was largely “spontaneous” (that is, not government organized), it was certainly affected and stimulated by government policy and infrastructure provision. More profoundly, migrants had been pouring into the Central Highlands—a region that state officials had long identified as ripe for migration and agricultural expansion—since well before the coffee boom.²⁰ Between reunification and the doi moi economic reforms of 1986, migration to the area took place primarily through a state-sponsored program, but after 1986 unorganized movements dominated. Many of the first participants in the boom were thus these earlier migrants, though migration did accelerate as coffee fever spread.²¹ Upland minority groups also took part in the boom.

How did the migrants who took part in these booms get access to land?²² Some received it from the state, as discussed above for coffee, and as we will see for cocoa in the next section on transmigration. Others cleared forest and set up as homesteaders. Stan Tan argued in 2000 that the “social availability of land on the Dak Lak frontier is such that the migrants can ‘instantly’ convert it into abundant production of export coffee.”²³ Yet others purchased land from people who were already in place.²⁴ Both the cocoa boom in Sulawesi and Vietnam’s coffee boom saw very rapid alienation of swidden land to migrants, with extensive sales taking place before locals came to realize that land had increased in value, a fact that later created tension. Tran Van Con cites 1998 survey data from T.H. Nguyen that show that 4 percent of migrants to Dak Lak received their land from the government, 47 percent purchased it, and 46 percent cleared it.²⁵ Purchase here need not mean purchase from “locals”: newly arrived would-be smallholders can purchase land from earlier migrants. Ruf and Yoddang describe a dynamic in some Sulawesi cocoa areas in which some farmers “decided to sell their small cocoa plots at a high price in order to get land at a low price on the new fronts,” and Ruf, Yoddang, and Waris Ardhy describe a similar strategy being pursued by Bugis coffee growers in Sulawesi.²⁶

The boundary between access to land through sale and through forest clearing, however, is not as clear as it might seem. Given the persistence of swidden cultivation in the uplands, some of the “forest” that migrants in Vietnam had cleared was in fact land that Highland villagers claimed. Migrants often either did not know of these claims or chose to ignore them.²⁷ The knowledge that migrants might simply grab swidden land under insecure tenure has spurred land sales in the Central Highlands and in Sulawesi’s cocoa zo...