In Between Agro-industries and Family Business Farms: Ephemeral Smallholder Family Plantations in Indonesia
Résumé
Smallholder family oil palm plantations made their appearance in Indonesia only in the 1970s, about 60 years after Western plantation companies introduced the crop to the country. In this chapter, we start by studying the history of large Indonesian plantations to help us understand this form of family farming. We show that independent smallholder plantations can be closely linked to these large plantations. The model of the large colonial plantation was introduced to Asia in the nineteenth century. In the Dutch East Indies, which prefigured present-day Indonesia, the agriculture law of 1870 allowing private investment in agriculture became the driving force behind the growth of large plantations in the cuulturegebeid, the coastal belt colonized by European and American cultivators in the northern part of the island of Sumatra. It was not until 1911 that the oil palm was introduced to the colony (Pelzer 1978) and the production of palm oil remained confined to the cuulturegebeid until the 1970s. The development of large plantations was closely linked to the organization of labour displacements: the reliance on organized and unorganized migrations was an integral part of this production model adopted in sparsely populated areas where access to labour was a limiting factor. In addition to its demographic aspects, this practice was based on the idea that managing men is easier when they are relocated to an unfamiliar environment (Breman 1990). During the first hundred years of the development of large plantations in northern Sumatra, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Javanese was organized by plantation companies to meet their labour requirements. The work and private lives of these people was tightly controlled, leaving little scope for individual freedoms. Until 1979, all entrepreneurial initiatives of plantation workers and their families were suppressed and they were prohibited from investing in any small productive or S. Barral (*)