Smallholders on the move: Crop booms, growing conditions, and mobility in Sulawesi’s changing climate

Keywords: Agrarian Change, Crop Booms, Land Use Change, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, Smallholders
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 38

Abstract

Global commodity prices have resulted in crop booms initiating significant land use changes and transforming forests. Rubber, palm oil, cacao, coffee, and others are fixed features of Southeast Asia landscapes, which expand and wane due to particular conditions. Each of these tree and other commodity crops have their own stories of change, refracted through a constellation of networks and processes of why there, and why then. Crop booms can be anticipated, particularly those related to large scale projects, but some take root in surprising and unexpected ways, especially when viewed from the variegated hillsides of Sulawesi. This paper brings together explanations from above that create the conditions for a crop boom, with the networks that produce and initiate a boom from below, situating climatic conditions that allow for new growing conditions, or make others untenable. I specifically focus on the clove boom of South Sulawesi, which began to dwindle on the hillsides of Bulukumba due to worsening growing conditions, but which smallholders took on the move to the neighboring frontiers of Southeast Sulawesi province. This study is framed in the context of research on the plantationocene but situates analysis within the mindsets of smallholders compelled to move by calculating prices, hedging supply chain networks, and responding to climate changes. While the broader view of climate change characterizes rural migrants seeking out wage labor in urban areas, this case shows the opposite trend of smallholders migrating on the roots of tree commodities, seeking out new frontiers of cultivation and profit.