Papers (Part 1)

• Cross-Border Spillovers of Maize Booms in the Mekong Uplands Pin Pravalprukskul University of Copenhagen

  Thailand is the world’s top exporter of processed chicken. Maize is a key component of poultry feed; growth in the poultry industry has therefore dramatically expanded smallholder maize cultivation in the northern uplands of the country over the past few decades. These maize booms have been heavily supported by agricultural development policies such as subsidies for hybrid seeds, microcredit programs, and pledging schemes. However, the maize feed supply chain is changing dynamically due to fluctuating domestic maize prices and recent negative media attention on the environmental and health impacts of maize cultivation (deforestation and seasonal haze). In response, major Thai agribusinesses are turning to sourcing maize feed from neighboring countries, such as Lao PDR and Myanmar, and wheat from Europe and Argentina to supplement poultry feed. The agribusinesses, Thai government and NGOs are addressing the environmental impacts through exclusionary market practices, strict land use policies, and interventions intended to promote sustainable development. All these drivers are thought to be causing maize booms in neighboring countries where land use policies are less stringent, with environmental and socio-economic impacts and possible feedback effects. Using a telecoupling framework, this study traces the changing flows of maize between Thailand, Lao PDR and Myanmar, and the associated land use and environmental outcomes, to paint a clearer picture of the complex cross-border connections between these land use systems.

• Implications of Melon Boom in Myanmar-China Cross-Border Trade on Smallholders Koji Kubo Japan External Trade Organization

  China's ravenous appetite for fresh fruits has instigated the melon export boom through cross-border trade in Myanmar. The annual melon export in 2017 exceeded 800,000 tons and rivalled the country's traditional export crop of rice, whereas the bulk of the trade was unreported in China, implying the opaque status of fresh fruit imports from Myanmar. Drawing on key informant interviews and observations from extensive fieldwork in the production areas and the cross-border market, this paper offers an analytical narrative of the melon export boom with a focus on the intersection of Chinese entrepreneurs and Myanmar smallholders.

  Two features of melon production and trading are particularly influential in framing the constellations of actors and shaping the growth path of the melon value chain. One is that the wholesale market in the Myanmar-China borderland governs the melon trading. Chinese consumers do not yet attach weight to credence attributes—attributes not directly observable from products such as food safety (i.e., use of harmful pesticide on farms) and social conditions (i.e., farms' compliance to the minimum wage legislation)—of fresh fruits. This makes a stark contrast with the Western countries where consumers' preference to credence attributes frames the supply chain to tightly incorporate farm production to preserve traceability of products, which empowers retailers to control farmers through specialized distributors, as exemplified by the Western supermarket sector. For Myanmar's melon export to China, brokers in the wholesale market orchestrate production and cross-border trade to mobilize commodities at low costs sometimes in unofficial ways, which facilitate smallholders' access to the Chinese market. As the wholesale market entails sharp price fluctuations, however, there has been a high number of entries and exits of smallholders' melon cultivation.

• Out of Mind, out of Sight? Regulating Maize Trade in Huaphanh Province, Lao PDR Isabelle Vagneron French Agricultural Research and International Cooperation Organization

  The deepening of economic integration allowed by dynamic regional policies (e.g., Greater Mekong Subregion, Asian Economic Community) has created new opportunities and new challenges at the margins of Southeast Asian States. As a locus of the aggressive expansion of market capitalism, many Southeast Asian margins can be simultaneously viewed as transition spaces towards the experimentation and consolidation of new models, where new ways of doing things and new relations between people are being invented and tested –e.g., new production processes, labor relations, land uses. At the same time, these experimental areas are also embedded in pre-existing social networks, and relations of power and authority.

  On the other hand, margins are also spaces of exclusion as they are often areas of great vulnerability for those who cannot make their voices heard –e.g., local communities, migrant workers, smallholder farmers. These stakeholders are often invisible to public policies either because they are not targeted by their programs, actors and practices, or because they are muffled by more powerful voices. Ultimately, the outcome and impact of what happens on the border depends on how individuals from the area and from outside, endowed with different types and levels of capital, are able to negotiate the web of relationships within which they live and work.

  This paper explores how the rules of the game are designed, translated, locally negotiated and implemented at the margins of the State. Namely, it focuses on the interactions between Vietnamese traders, Laotian maize farmers and local government in two villages of Huaphanh Province (Lao PDR) that sit literally on the border with Vietnam. In these villages, we investigate how trade arrangements and local policies (e.g., herbicide ban, custom duties, trade agreements) are negotiated and implemented at the local level. In these areas, which are in many ways out of the sight of the central authorities, we examine how actor strategies take into account, abide by, avoid or circumvent provincial and national policies. Ultimately, we highlight the paramount role played by non-Laotian stakeholders on the Laotian side of maize value-chains, and the difficulty for Laotian authorities to make their voice heard when market forces prevail.

• Variegated Transitions of Agrarian Capitalism: The Rubber Boom and Bust in Northern Laos Miles Kenney-Lazar National University of Singapore

  Over the past 15 years, the government of the (post-)socialist Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR or Laos) has conceded more than one million hectares of “state” land – an area equivalent to five percent of the country’s territory – to capitalists for resource extraction and commodity production projects, such as mining, hydropower, logging, and agricultural plantations. The allocated land ostensibly owned by the state is in fact customarily used, occupied, and managed by Lao peasants and indigenous peoples for generations. Thus, its violent expropriation at the behest of corporate actors has displaced rural people from the lands, forests, and rivers that constitute their means of subsistence and production. Facing a coercive and repressive authoritarian state apparatus that jails its citizens for political activity perceived as regime-threatening, Lao peasants have resorted to creative political strategies of contestation that I refer to as resisting with rather than against the state. “Resisting with the state” does not suggest that peasant and state interests and goals are aligned (this could not be further from the truth as the state is expropriating peasant land on behalf of foreign capital), but that peasants are working within the hegemonic power relations of the state to protect access to important lands. Employing data from 20 months of ethnographic field research in Laos, I show how different groups of eastern Savannakhet province near the Vietnam border have sought to protect agricultural and forest lands from expropriation by a Chinese paper-pulp company planting eucalyptus and acacia trees and a Vietnamese rubber enterprise.

Papers (Part 2)

• After the Boom: Proliferating Market Networks in the Cambodia-Vietnam Borderland Sango Mahanty Australian National University

  In a panel that sets out to examine the risks, opportunities and transitions wrought by crop booms in Southeast Asian borderlands, this paper explores the important question of what happens ‘after’ a crop boom. I focus on a relatively established agricultural landscape that spans eastern Cambodia (Tbong Khmum) and southwest Vietnam (Tay Ninh). This post-frontier landscape is an ideal location to understand how crop booms evolve over time. The borderland was wracked by conflict in the 1970s and early 1980s, before being resettled during the 1990s. Market-oriented agriculture started booming in the early 2000s as the Vietnamese and Cambodian economies liberalised. Farmers in Tbong Khmum were among the first in eastern Cambodian to adopt cassava (manihot esculenta) en masse, before the crop advanced to other provinces in Eastern Cambodia. Over the border, starch processing factories in Tay Ninh came to rely heavily on fresh cassava from Tbong Khum and other eastern provinces. Between 2014 and 2018, however, Tbong Khmum farmers started turning to other commodity crops such as cashew, rubber and pepper. This paper explores why and how these transitions to new crops occurred, and the effects of these proliferating market networks. I explore multiple causes, including dramatic shifts in cassava price, the emergence of Cassava Mosaic Disease, and growing indebtedness among farmers. Farmers’ decisions on crop transitions responded to available land, labour and capital, as well as community trends and personal aspirations. The borderland context also ensured that developments and relationships in Vietnam and beyond actively shaped market opportunities. Ultimately, these conditions framed a post-frontier market with rhizomic and interconnected commodity networks that at times deepened, and at other times fractured, resurfaced or branched out along different trajectories. In relation to the panel themes, the paper speaks to the spatiotemporal dynamics associated with borderland crop booms and, particularly, their transitions over time.

• Borderland Crop Booms: Political Ecologies of Rubber, Banana and Maize Booms in the Borderlands of Laos Cecilie Friis Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Juliet Lu University of California, Berkeley

  Laos is a frontier in the expansion of commercial agriculture in Southeast Asia, and policies enacted by the Lao government throughout the 2000s opened and incentivized foreign investment in large-scale agribusiness deals. Commercial crops have been taken up sometimes cautiously, but more often in dramatic booms by a mixture of local smallholder farmers, domestic companies, and foreign investors. Crop booms are especially dynamic and common in the borderlands where capital and market demand from neighboring countries heightens the incentive for Lao producers to participate. But vast differences emerge in the spatial and temporal patterns of crop booms depending on which actors are involved. This paper is focused on how three crops – bananas, rubber, and maize – were promoted in the Lao borderlands by three very different types of investors: rubber by large, state-supported Chinese companies, maize by small- and medium-scale Vietnamese contract farming investors, and banana by Chinese family or small-scale outgrower operations. We present a robust comparison between the drivers, spatiotemporal patterns, and on-the-ground networks through which these booms played out. This comparison bring us to argue that two often understudied factors: the political ecology of the different crops (how their material characteristics dictate where, through what investment or production cycles, and by who they are planted) and the structure of cross-border exchange (by which we mean the cross-border sociocultural networks of exchange, the physical realities of moving products, people, and knowledge across the border, and the geopolitical history of the border region) shape the characteristics and resulting implications of crop booms.

• Untangling Crop Boom-Bust Mechanisms in the Mekong Region Jean-Christophe Castella Institute of Research for Development

  Based on comparative analysis of crop-boom related studies across the Mekong region the presentation will address the mechanisms of spatial displacement of crop commodities across the region along least effort pathways. I investigate how the increasing demand for commodities results in rapidly moving boom-bust cycles depending on local conditions, e.g. political support to economic development, weak governance in contexts of abundant resources, and labor requirements fulfilled by temporary or long-term migrations. As a consequence, the same ‘boom’ phenomenon happens again and again across the region, e.g. current maize pioneer front in Shan State (Myanmar) is very similar to what happened in Battambang (Cambodia) and Sayabouri (Laos) in the 2000s and in Son La (Vietnam) and Kanjanaburi (Thailand) in the 1990s.

  This displacement phenomenon of boom-bust cycles happens at all scales: across villages within districts, across provinces within countries and across countries of the Mekong region, and applies to all individual commodities. I explore the specificities of the commodities in term of displacement, i.e. annual crops such as maize and cassava are more ‘mobiles’ than perennial crops such as rubber and palm trees. Beside spatial displacements, commodity crops succeed to each other along pathways of natural resource exploitation. For example, cassava may come after maize once the soil fertility levels are not sufficient for maize anymore (bust phase) thanks to the deep rooting system of cassava that allows pumping nutrients in the deeper soil horizons and to exploit the remaining soil fertility. Once the land is degraded, farmers may turn to tree crops or pastures for large livestock. The sequence of crop commodities is highly dependent of commodity prices and export mechanisms, e.g. closing border gates depending on countries trade policies.

  The proposed framing of crop displacement mechanisms allows drawing lessons from past crop booms in neighboring countries. Indeed, we can anticipate that the same processes will happen again in the next agricultural frontiers leading to potential boom prevention and/or early warning systems. Cross-country comparisons in time and space also bring useful insights about how local agriculture can evolve in the aftermath of a crop boom. A dedicated learning alliance of academics and practitioners may thus emerge to support the necessary shift from an unregulated, displacement-based boom regime to a higher level of governance that would ensure more sustainable commodity supply chains across the region through maintenance of complex landscape mosaics and less resource extractive agricultural production models.

Abstract

Keywords

• Agriculture
• Borderlands
• Economy