Who’s Producing Your Tea (and Other Tropical Crops)?
After ten years in Hawaii at a time when sugar and pineapple still largely supported the islands’ economy, I thought I had growing tropical crops for export to the countries in the temperate regions down pat. It was all about large plantations and imported labor.
Well, no, it turns out.
Derek Byerlee, whom I met at the Borlaug100 conference just sent me a paper he published recently called “The Fall and Rise Again of Plantations in Tropical Asia: History Repeated?“ It’s a survey of both historical and contemporary research, with full notes and bibliography.
(Have I mentioned, by the way, that the very best thing about publishing a book is the chance to meet interesting and knowledgeable people you’d never have bumped into otherwise?)
And for me it was an eye-opener, a reminder of the complexity of the world’s farming and how little I know about it.
Harvested clusters of orange palm oil seeds from smallholders, Malaysia. BBC.
Byerlee takes four tree crops–tea, rubber, oil palm, and cassava–and shows that although these all started out as plantation crops in the late nineteenth century, following World War I they began reverting to smallholders, a process that was complete by the mid-1980s.
Why did these tree crops producing tea, rubber, cooking oil, and starch start off at plantation crops?
OIl palm plantation in Indonesia. Wikimedia
1. The need for quick processing after harvest of all except rubber favored large-scale operations until a network of small facilities could be built up, perhaps with state support.
2. As new ventures (except cassava), local people were not familiar with ways of cultivating or processing the plants.
3. High world prices for the products encouraged speculation, while colonial policies of making land available cheaply to Europeans and of encouraging landless laborers to migrate from densely populated area also favored plantations. And there was a belief that plantations were inherently more efficient (perhaps because of the example of sugar, I speculate).
And why didn’t this last?
Well, prices fell. As early as the 1930s, colonial texts recognized that smallholders could compete with plantations. Colonial powers departed. The costs of importing and managing labor were high. Local smallholders could grow food between the trees and get a cash income from the export crops, with the additional advantage that rapid deforestation was less likely. It was discovered that more egalitarian land ownership reduces poverty and encourages investment in education and infrastructure.
So now:
Rubber. Thailand is the world’s largest rubber exporter, all from smallholdings, yields have increased four-fold since 1980, and rubber supports 10% of the population. OK, it’s not food, but then farming has never been just about food, something very important to remember.
Tea. In northeast India (the largest tea producing area in India) in the last 30 years, 70,000 smallholders produce 30% of the tea with much higher yields than the surviving plantation estates.
Oil palm. Smallholders have 40% of the holdings in Indonesia, the largest producer and 80% in Thailand, the third largest producer.
Cassava. Enjoying a new boom as export for animal feed, starch, and biofuel. $3 billion in exports from smallholders in Thailand and Vietnam in 2011.
The kicker. In Myanmar (Burma), Cambodia, Laos, Sumatra, Borneo, and New Guinea there has been a land rush to establish new plantations since the 1990s.
So my questions are these. If incomes continue to rise in Southeast Asia, can smallholders continue to make a living competitive with those in the cities? And will machinery be developed that replaces human labor as it does for sugar and pineapple?
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