By John McCarthy, Suraya Afiff and Jacqueline Vel

In August 2010 Indonesia’s ministry of agriculture launched a giant project to create a $5 billion agricultural estate spanning three districts in the province of Papua in response to perceptions of a food security crisis. This paper sets out to contextualize these new food estate initiatives within a wider trajectory of land use change. By comparing the new food estate schemes with earlier large scale rice , oil palm and jatropha schemes, we argue for developing a nuanced appreciation of land development trajectories. While the new developments appear to resonate with descriptions of the ‘global land grab’, contextualizing these developments within a historical trajectory of land use change suggests the need to reappraise the ‘land grab’ scenario. State developmental policies and private investment agendas have long depended upon the statutory separation of forms of property considered ‘legal’ and modern from their antithesis, long standing embedded forms of property relations rendered ambiguous and uncertain. At times these have privileged large-scale, capital-intensive models favoured by the private sector. However, with large areas of land either already under land use concessions or subject to ‘fuzzy’ land rights, access to land involves complex commercial land transactions with local landowners, state officials, brokers and agro-industrial enterprises working at various scales. Further, in contrast to descriptions of processes driven by direct international investment from the outside, agricultural development in Indonesia tends to occur within decentralized global production networks that involve national companies along with domestic and international investors in transformative processes. In some cases these schemes imply exclusion and marginalization in a fashion reminiscent of the ‘global land grab’ scenario. However, in many cases these scenarios are problematised, resisted and only partially realised as schemes confront existing land uses, patterns of resource access, ecologies and shifting political economies. Such outcomes suggest the need to substitute large scale estate schemes with approaches that more explicitly privilege local landowners and suit local land uses and ecologies while taking into account shifting political economies.