State, Capital and Coercion in Indonesia's Food Estates

From colonial times to the present, the Indonesian state has continuously attempted to re-organise nature, technology and relations of production by establishing large-scale food monocrop farming or “food estates”. As Indonesian food production has largely been based on petty commodity production by small farmers, including a minority of petty capitalists and a large majority of marginal farmers, we ask why food estate initiatives have been persistently reproduced in different times and places despite a century-long history of failure of such projects. As we show through historical and contemporary examples of food estate programmes, the Indonesian “outer islands” have been the main sites of accelerated corporate land grabbing and coercion in both wage labour and contract farming labour regimes. We argue that the persistence of food estate visions and initiatives can be understood as an enduring colonialism, structured through the idealisation of modern industrial agriculture, the view of small farmers as ‘racialised others’, backward and inferior and the systematic denial of customary land rights. This is made possible by the integration of corporate agribusiness in the state's food self-sufficiency project, producing labour regimes sustained by the state coercion as evidenced by the increasing military involvement in food estate projects.