Where the Streets Are Paved With Prawns

Domestic Crop Booms, Livelihood Pathways and Nested Transitions: Charting the Implications of Bangladesh's Pangasius Boom

“…Crop booms take place when ‘large areas of land are rapidly converted to mono‐cropped (or nearly mono‐cropped) production of a new crop and the land use transformations involved have time horizons of more than a year’ (Hall , 508). The drivers and consequences of a variety of South‐East Asian booms in the production of crops including palm oil, cocoa, coffee, rubber, fast‐growing trees such as eucalyptus, and shrimp have been thoroughly reviewed by Derek Hall and colleagues (Hall , ; Hall et al ). In this literature, crop booms are characterized as leading to widespread conversion of land, often resulting in dramatic changes in the rural landscape and associated social transformations and environmental degradation.…”

“…This makes decisions to enter production difficult to reverse. A commitment to monoculture and relatively heavy capital investment can also make investments risky, with the result that booms often end in busts caused by falling prices or disease outbreaks (Hall , ; Hall et al ).…”

Frontier commoditisation in post‐socialist Southeast Asia

“…With the official endorsement of commodity trade, the consolidation of land use rights and the roll‐out of infrastructure, the frontiers became a desirable migratory destination. Migrants from the lowlands played a key role in logging and the non‐timber forest trade and in the succession of crop booms – coffee, rubber, pepper, cashews, sugar cane, cassava and shrimp – that transformed the landscape of post‐socialist Asia (Hall, ). Drawing on favourable connections to lowlands markets and local authorities, benefiting from facility in a nationwide lingua franca, and spurred on by government programmes to stimulate export commodity production, migrants turned the obscure peripheries of some of Southeast Asia's poorest countries into a frenetic and indeed notorious centre of global commodity production.…”

“…In Cambodia and Laos, scholars have focused on the large state, quasi‐state and corporate actors, often acting in collusion with corrupt local authorities, who engineer land grabs and are responsible for much of the deforestation taking place along the borders (Le Billon, ; Baird, , ; Hall, ; Milne, ). In Vietnam, researchers have highlighted the central role played by migrants in frontier commodity booms (De Koninck, ; Agergaard et al ., ; Hall, ). Some attention has been given to the trade and investment activities of upland and ethnic minority actors centred within frontier regions and the small scale commodity networks that traverse borders (Taylor, ; Schoenberger and Turner, ; Sturgeon, , ; Singh, ; Turner et al ., ).…”

Reworking the land: A review of literature on the role of migration and remittances in the rural livelihoods of Southeast Asia

“…Intensifying market demands and economic incentives have led to increasing commercialization and homogenization of land use across wide swaths of Southeast Asia and the increasing importance of off-farm employment (Winkels 2008;Rigg and Salamanca 2009). As economic development is leading to increasing de-agrarianization, large numbers of people continue to undertake risky and expensive migration (domestically and internationally, temporarily and permanently) to take part in crop and forest product booms (De Koninck 2003;Hall 2011). The effects of migration and the flow of remittances from migrant labor could have potentially significant impacts on forests and land-use investments.…”