The gendered politics of dispossession: oil palm expansion in a Dayak Hibun community in West Kalimantan, Indonesia #

by Julia and Ben White

This paper explores the gendered politics of monocrop oil-palm expansion in a Hibun Dayak community in Sanggau District, West Kalimantan (Indonesia). The expanding corporate plantation and contract farming system has undermined the position and livelihoods of indigenous women in the already patriarchal community. The shifting of land tenure from the community to the state and the practice of the “household head” system of smallholder plot registration has eroded women’s rights to land and women are becoming a class of plantation labour. At the same time, as in other cases of expansion of agrarian corporate commodity production, we can discern a familiar pattern of ambivalence between the attractions of regular cash income on the one hand and on the other the loss of resource tenure and autonomy, exploitation and intimidation, which helps to explain the community’s gendered experience of coercion, intimidation, consent and resistance.