Frontier commoditisation in post‐socialist Southeast Asia

Abstract

The articles in this special issue examine processes of commoditisation in the frontiers of post‐socialist Southeast Asia. Focusing on livelihood transformations in the borderlands of Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand, the case studies reveal how relatively understudied actors, networks, flows and conjunctures initiate and shape commodity booms. Exploring how borderlanders engage, resist, cope with and survive commoditisation, the articles chart associated changes in values and in people's relations with each‐other and their environment. This introductory article contextualises this new research and discusses the implications of the findings.

Land-use change in a telecoupled world: the relevance and applicability of the telecoupling framework in the case of banana plantation expansion in Laos

“…Political ecology has indeed been shown to facilitate a deep understanding of how various constellations of Lao state actors, foreign investors, and local middlemen assemble to gain and maintain access to land by invoking images of virgin land, underdevelopment, and the need for agricultural modernization (Lestrelin et al 2013), as also hinted at in our analysis. The Southeast Asian crop boom literature, in turn, presents valuable insights for analyzing the processes leading to rising values of land for a particular cash crop and the practices that allow various actors to exercise and maintain control over land and crop production (Hall 2011, Taylor 2016. Such insights can facilitate a deeper understanding of how and why certain regulatory responses might be failing (see also Friis and Nielsen 2016).…”

“…The growth in global volumes of biomass trade, for example, attests to the increasing distance between the places of demand and places of supply for land-based products , Kastner et al 2014. The intensified connectedness of places and people, cities and their hinterlands, and sites of production and consumption often manifests itself as rapid and unexpected landuse change, especially in forest and agricultural commodity frontiers, where economic, political, and sustainability agendas converge to create multiple overlapping and conflicting claims to land (van Vliet et al 2012, Gasparri et al 2016, Taylor 2016. Understanding contemporary land-use changes thus requires a conceptual framework geared toward capturing not only the place-based and site-specific factors of change, but also the multidirectional flows of capital, produce, and information linking it to processes in distal places.…”

Rural Roads Are Paving the Way for Land-Use Intensification in the Uplands of Laos

“…The combined process of agricultural intensification and expansion disproportionately facilitates accumulation of land and capital for better-off farmers thanks to access to credit, and traps poorer farmers in cycles of debt that can easily lead to distress diversification, dispossession and their forced engagement in wage labor [16,23,24]. Farmers' initial access to assets such as land, labor and social connections with local elites largely determines their capacity to engage in boom crop production [15,20,[24][25][26]. In these crop boom stories, the focus lies on things roads facilitate, such as the introduction of commercial seeds, agrochemicals, transport to market, but roads are the foundation to all these things.…”

Spices as the saviour? The complex vulnerabilities of three commodity crop booms and ethnic minority livelihoods in Yunnan's agrarian frontier

“…In the Asian context, there is a small but important body of literature focusing on crop booms in agrarian frontiers, a political‐economic concept that frequently overlaps with a state's borderlands (Taylor, 2016; Junquera and Grêt‐Regamey, 2019; Kong et al ., 2019). Agrarian frontiers are important sites to study changing engagements with crop commodities due to the added constraints and vulnerabilities of environmental enclosures, economic and political marginalisation and – most notably when located in the state's geographical margins – territorialisation (Sturgeon et al ., 2013; Eilenberg, 2014; Turner et al ., 2015; Mahanty and Milne, 2016).…”

“…Agrarian frontiers are important sites to study changing engagements with crop commodities due to the added constraints and vulnerabilities of environmental enclosures, economic and political marginalisation and – most notably when located in the state's geographical margins – territorialisation (Sturgeon et al ., 2013; Eilenberg, 2014; Turner et al ., 2015; Mahanty and Milne, 2016). Simultaneously, studies of rural livelihoods and commoditised crop production in Asia's frontier zones have illustrated the agency and resistance strategies of local populations, many of whom are ethnic minorities in their respective countries (Li, 2002; Turner et al ., 2015; Taylor, 2016; Yin et al ., 2019).…”