Agrarian Class Formation in Upland Sulawesi, 1990‐2010

Abstract

Since colonial times, there have been reports of rapid class formation on Southeast Asia’s forest frontiers, when people start to plant cash crops and became indebted to co‐villagers and traders. Colonial officials were often alarmed at the enthusiasm of highlanders for the latest boom crop, and their neglect of food production. Stable mixes of food and cash crop production did emerge in some areas, especially where land was abundant, but where land was scarce, class differentiation could be steep and rapid. This paper provides an ethnographic account of class formation, tracked over a period of twenty years in one corner of highland Sulawesi. In 1990, the indigenous highlanders all had access to ancestral land on which they grew rice and corn as food, together with tobacco or shallots for cash. By 2009, the land was covered in cacao and clove trees, and few people were growing any food at all. Some farmers had accumulated large areas of land, while many of their neighbours and kin had become landless and jobless too, as there is little demand for their labour. In contrast to lowland areas in which class‐based divisions are entrenched, highlanders had no previous experience with agrarian differentiation. Hence, they had no mechanisms to prevent the accumulation of land in a few hands, claim a right to work, or spread the profits. The paper explains why the transition occurred so quickly, and how the highlanders handled the increasingly unequal social world their actions created. It also considers the consequences of landlessness at a conjuncture where the forest frontier has closed, and there is no industrial development to generate new jobs. A truncated agrarian transition in which exit from agriculture is not followed by entry into wage work, makes livelihoods radically insecure.