Commodity Frontiers Initiative, by way of Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, invited me to present my work on Indonesia’s palm oil economy in correlation to labor. While I have worked with workers, I made a political and deliberate decision not to become and identify as a labor scholar a long time ago, and it is unlikely to change. When it comes to writing about labor, I adamantly prefer to collaborate with someone else who is more studious and set about labor politics and scholarship. Thus, when the invitation came, it’s only natural that I co-partner with Salma: a young, brilliant organizer and ethnographer of oil palm workers. Salma has tirelessly and selflessly worked for the welfare and justice of women plantation workers. Salma, Hariati, and I co-founded Sawit Womxn Educational Group, and this space has been the most sobering and insightful to soften my standing for/against labor studies, sharpen my intellectual journey, and ground my political vision. May every queer and womxn researcher in predominantly male and masculine space be able to find their kins.
I will be quite brief in this presentation because I’d prefer more time for us to have discussions. The bottom line of my presentation, as written in our abstract, is that labor exploitation is not just a matter of bad policies, but it co-constitutes plantation logic and one that helps sustain the expansion of palm oil. To use the words of Hendro Sangkoyo, labor exploitation is the vein in which the blood of plantations flows. I am sorry, and we are unlucky that we couldn’t have Salma here right now in Cambridge, who would offer sharper and more detailed field stories that exemplify our argument presented here.
So let’s begin with some basic facts, which we think would help ground and demystify the mighty narrative of Indonesia’s palm oil economy. At first, Indonesia reported that it had 17 million hectares (16,8) by 2020, as many activists and scholars had argued and found that by that time Indonesia had leaned closer to twenty million hectares. Not until 2022 did the government finally admit that more plantations were not registered – “illegal” oil palm plantations. In terms of mills, there isn’t a clear number of how many Indonesia has had. One certain thing: number of mills is not proportional to the size of Indonesia’s concessions. According to the state calculation, for every 6,000 hectares, there should be at least one mills which means with 22 million hectares, Indonesia should have had around 3,500+ mills. We can zoom in for this expectation. Riau, the largest palm oil producer in Indonesia, only has 285 mills (“legal” ones) for 3.4 million hectares of oil palm concessions.
With Transnational Palm Oil Solidarity, our research and organizing groups initially started with the focus on occupational safety, especially for women workers in oil palm plantations who are mainly maintenance workers. Meaning they are exposed to agrochemicals or toxins for at least seven hours per day. We collected stories of health concerns among women workers, and just like many stories about pesticide drift and exposure, women noticed the rise of cancer, Parkinson’s, and tumors among their peers. Partnering with local public health scholars and practitioners in two villages of South Sumatra, we sampled lactation of twenty women who worked as toxins dusters, sprayers, and land clearer. And in the summer of 2023, we had to make twenty phone calls telling these mothers that their breastmilk contained mercury, lead, and copper. The women, of course, did not take this revelation lightly. Between their bawling, they told us that they could not wear their uncomfortable protective suits that might have saved them from toxin exposure. Marina (pseudonym), one of the women, told me that “It’s either I die because of cancer, or I die because of heat. Either way, I will suffocate.”
The first dead body in the plantations is a tragedy; the second is an accumulation. Labor in oil palm plantations exemplifies a term that Vinay Gidwani has mentioned in his case of waste pickers in urban India and what anti-imperialist scholar Ali Kadri called “accumulation of waste” when referring to dead bodies of war in the “Middle East.” While both have specific cases in understanding waste, altogether, the waste here refers to the disposability of workers’ labor and their bodies, ones that have been exploited for the production of another and more valued commodity – by cash crop market — that is palm oil. Their lives, their bodies, are not wasted simply for accumulation. They are embedded to lives of palm trees without any acknowledgement and their valorization occurs under a vulgar concept of value, or an “accounting of slavery” for profit and efficiency. Thus, some commodities are more equal than others. In Indonesia, palm oil plantation companies love to boast about how their industry create jobs for Indonesians. But of course, these are dead-end jobs, one that also centers around death.
One of the questions tackled by Commodity Frontiers is similar and different patterns of commodity production. Labor regime may have changed from colonial times – from unfree labor, indentured servitude or whatever to contract, periodical labor. Allan Souza Queiroz has aptly reminded us that commodification and the commodity blur this free/unfree labor. Alas, at the very least, the formality concerning labor has changed, but what remains is the corporeality of these workers. In the picture here, you see different placards. Every morning, the plantation manager and operator would line up workers and classify them into these placards that say, “coming late,” “do not fill the daily quota,” “underweight quota.” The whipping and other corporal punishments against workers allowed by Poenale sanctie/coolie ordinantie have transformed into a ritual of physical mockery and humiliation that directly corresponded to plantations’ bookkeeping.
This [company name #1] is the second oldest plantation company in Indonesia. Its founder, E.B., was actually the first investor of [company name #2], the oldest plantation company in Indonesia, before he left company #2 and built his own (#1). E.B. is a Belgian planter who was a close associate of King Leopold II, and his business supported the enslavement of Congolese and the colonial rubber trade. Hence, the history of oil palm is a constellation of good imperial proponents.
Question of labor also brings us to put bodies as a “frontier” and in addition to the confusing and contested process of reterritorialization and deterritorialization of commodity production that transcends nation-state, borders, boundaries. Expansion of the commodity and its frontier also requires scale-bending at the level of the body. Oil palm must be harvested every two weeks, and there are standards that follow (3 tons/month/hectare). Biweekly, these workers must carry hundreds of kilograms of fresh fruit bunches on their backs. Joni (pseudonym), the worker on this picture, joked to me that city people didn’t need gym subscription, just work in plantations if they wanted to have great bodies (“like his”). If workers consistently are subjugated, sometimes “we” (academes, people with convoluted theories, or anyone adjacent) also get carried away with the question of chicken and egg. If oil palm were the golden eggs that workers produce as their goose, then the assumption is that there’s a clear demarcation in the line of production, thus reproducing the hierarchy of commodity value between palm oil and labor. For Salma and me, it has become clearer that both palm oil and workers have co-produced one another under the command of the cash crop market. Otherwise, the social engineering and the level of scale manipulation in monoculture to justify, prolong, and perpetuate labor theft and worker exploitation would not be this perpetual.
As a concluding remark, I am thinking about Marion Fourcade’s seeing like a market. It seems that there’s a problem in seeing labor questions in commodity production through the eyes of market: filled with the imperative of data, using it as an organizational device, and eventually leading to the stratification effect. The “classification” that comes out of this framework obscures the process that deepens commodity production and expands the frontiers. Unlike Salma who is a student of labor, I am quite adamant not to want to be identified nor I want to present myself as a labor scholar. Still, I find it fascinating that focusing on labor ends up not necessarily demystifying the commodity. However, it certainly does help us understand how commodity production and the frontiers where it is being produced are also furthered, hidden, and manipulated. By that I mean no amount of sob stories about workers abuse will ever deliver us to a campaign at the level of, for example, orangutan and elephant, that has given birth to transnational private regulation that initially only focus on more measurable dimensions such as deforestation, carbon offset, not killing orangutans and elephants. But it does help us understand the transformation of capital – the changes in production and labor regime – that perpetuates and expands commodity frontiers.
I make three points about the obscuring of capital transformation:
- I see the limits of rights, be it “normative labor rights” “human rights.” I want to make it clear that I would never blame any labor activists and scholars who demand such rights for workers. The conditions in plantations are so dire, that asking for normative rights is a radical act. As a matter of fact, it is mandatory for people to live with dignity and without conditions that wouldn’t deprave them from being humans. Having breastmilk that is not contaminated by mercury should not be collateral damage or an occupational hazard. However, under plantation logics, rights have been a ceiling of how much amount of death that the imperialist cash crop market has deemed acceptable not to exploit. I am thankful for Bathsheba Demuth and Andrew Curley’s keynotes that strengthen this suggestion to move from rights to responsibility. If possession is indeed nine-tenths of law, we have every reason to be suspicious that any legal infrastructures surrounding plantations, including labor rights, are a question of managing properties, which include workers’ bodies that have been embedded into the palm trees’ life cycles.
- We may now start thinking about sustainability standards. The forum now have been familiar and even focused on greenwashing. In many discussions Salma and I have, calling such things “greenwashing” is not necessarily helpful especially when there’s a conflation about being performative and being fake. Being performative doesn’t mean fake. Performance is prescription, a speculative zone in which nostalgic ideas of wealth (such as owning land, being part of a $63 billion economy) are brought back, and futures of endless accumulation pools are reinforced. (notes: Additional point I didn’t say during my presentation: the idea of companies do not “care” about environment is a bit baseless. In my research, plantation M-level and C-level leaders often said that they “cared about protecting the environment.” The problem here is not if they said the truth. Two problems are set here: their care is under the logic of capital maintenance, and the fact that care is not necessarily the antithesis of violence (please refer to Nik Setiadarma’s dissertation research).
- Still talking about standards, in my dissertation I found that standards reinforce class war or class antagonism in plantations, especially between workers and smallholders. Smallholders indeed are able to access and benefit from premium pricing (30% higher than national benchmark for crude palm oil and fresh fruit bunches). This is not the case for workers. If anything, in many auditor visits, workers complained that they had to buy protective suites and other standardized equipments. These performances, that eventually add values to companies’ portfolios by ways of certifications, have not always been compensated fairly. Another pocket of labor theft. Maybe as someone who is not studying labor, my naïve question would be: who exactly does the labor of sustainability? How should we pay it? Without a proper and radical framework that will stop the reproduction of wage relation in plantations, the conversation of commensuration will bring us back to the first deadlock of rights.
And I think that’s how I’d like to conclude my presentation. Thank you very much.
Pravda Palma 
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