UC Berkeley

Since the 1980s, Sulawesi, Indonesia has been the site of one of the most significant smallholder cacao booms in recent global economic history. Beginning in the early 2000s, however, conditions of boom turned to bust. With pest and pathogen outbreak driving significant yield losses, many producing households began to find that the costs of production outstripped revenues. In this context, there have been significant investments in a “sustainable intensification” of smallholder cacao production, generally involving the dissemination of new planting materials; the establishment of farmer field schools; and movement towards more direct trade relations between smallholders and agribusiness. My dissertation responds to these developments, advancing an historical, multi-scalar and integrated socio-environmental assessment of cacao expansion and associated development policies and politics over the past four decades.

Chapter One draws on over 150 Landsat images from 1972-2014 and a novel cloud-based computing platform to reconstruct patterns of land cover change in Southeast Sulawesi, the site of 16% of cacao production in Indonesia and the focal site of my analyses. I use these data to demonstrate the significant relationship between smallholder cacao production and forest cover loss over the past four decades, particularly in alluvial lowland regions. I also show, however, that smallholder tree crop plantings helped to revegetate long-fallowed grasslands, driving gross rates of tree cover gain three times higher than gross loss rates from 1972-1995 and equal to gross loss rates from 1995-2014. These results demonstrate the multiplicity of land cover change trajectories in tropical commodity frontiers and advance the use of novel remote sensing methodologies in capturing fuller histories of landscape change.

Chapter Two grounds these dynamics in fourteen months of ethnographic research to identify the antecedent practices, policies and institutions which drove cacao expansion. Challenging the notion that the state played a “hands-off” role throughout the course of cacao boom, these data suggest that state actors and institutions played a critical role in shaping expansion pathways at nearly every step of the way, simultaneously driving high rates of forest cover loss and high differentiation along lines of class and ethnicity. These results highlight the need to more fully recover histories of state engagement in agricultural landscapes, even as corporate and civil society actors come to play a larger role in shaping agricultural development policies.

Chapter Three turns to contemporary policy propositions, focusing on how sustainable intensification initiatives are shaping ongoing processes of agrarian change. Drawing on in-depth interviews and land surveys, I demonstrate how current policies maintain a narrow sectoral focus on cacao in this region, albeit this time in service of corporate-driven rather than state-led development agendas. I show that despite the proliferation of support for and investment in smallholder cacao production over the past fifteen years, growers are largely turning away from the crop, transitioning to new commodities. These data illustrate that even high levels of public and private buy-in and investment will not enable greater sustainability in Sulawesi’s cacao production landscapes if current initiatives do not address local labor constraints and better compete with smallholders’ emergent market opportunities.

This dissertation thus supports three key findings about the nature of sustainable intensification initiatives in Sulawesi. First, my findings illustrate how current initiatives emerge out of and respond to earlier practices and effects of state territorialization, or strategies to control land, people and resources. Second, my findings demonstrate that current policies in the sector are failing to achieve many of their stated goals, i.e. an intensification of cacao production, and through this, improvements in smallholder livelihoods and reduced smallholder clearances of forested lands. Finally, my analyses show that while the dominant narratives surrounding cacao expansion and development are not necessarily untrue, they are partial, obscuring other important dynamics that have shaped socially and spatially differentiated trajectories of cacao boom and cacao bust. These data thus speak broadly to diverse debates surrounding agricultural expansion and development, simultaneously advancing a methodological approach for the integration of remotely sensed analyses and ethnographic data.