‘We don’t eat those bananas’: Chinese plantation expansions and bordering on the Northern Myanmar's Kachin borderlands

Title‘We don’t eat those bananas’: Chinese plantation expansions and bordering on the Northern Myanmar's Kachin borderlands
Annotated RecordAnnotated
Year of Publication2023
AuthorsSarma J, Rippa A, Dean K
Secondary TitleEurasian Geography and Economics
Pagination1-27
PublisherRoutledge
Key themesDispossession-grabbing, FDI
Abstract

Over the past two decades, the Yunnan-Myanmar borderlands in Kachin State have become a major investment frontier for large-scale agribusiness. Chinese private capital, supported by state-led opium substitution programs, has turned thousands of hectares of forests into plantations. As in many such cases across Southeast Asia and beyond, this rapid development has come at the expense of local communities and displaced persons relying on these lands for their livelihoods and refuge. Caught between Chinese market expansion, and an ongoing war between the Myanmar Army and the Kachin Independence Organization/Army (KIO/KIA), plantations have become sites of often overlooked confrontations, compromise, and conflict operating behind the more spectacular politics of the grand infrastructures like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in this region. Moving across plantation sites, armed bases and border markets; and building on interviews with Chinese entrepreneurs, Kachin leaders, and farmers, the paper explores how plantations have transformed not only environmental space but also social-political dynamics of Kachin State in ways, we argue, that are more difficult to reverse than previous or ongoing military territorialization. In doing so, we aim to localize and contextualize the plantation as a key force rapidly transforming Asian borderworlds, over which broader socio-political struggles, environmental transformations, nature loss, connectivity and developmental become imbricated with bordering space.
URLhttps://doi.org/10.1080/15387216.2023.2215802
Availability

Copyrighted journal article
Countries

Myanmar
Document Type

Journal Article

Annotations

Overall relevance: 

Drawing on concepts of “plantationocene” and “ceasefire capitalism”, the paper discusses complex political and economic dynamics on the Yunnan-Myanmar borderlands that have enabled the rapid expansion of Chinese funded banana plantations in Kachin State, Myanmar. Discursively presented as a “development” solution, the plantation economy in Kachin has facilitated the transnational mobility of capital and labor, increasing regional connectivity to global markets and brought opportunities for revenue generation. However, this connectivity and relations with China has come at a high environmental, social and political cost for the Kachin. The article highlights the largely irreversible transformations of monoculture production on environmental space and the devastating impacts of large-scale land acquisitions on the livelihoods of people displaced by these plantations. Displaced Kachin experience a form of territorial entrapment where they have few options other than being part of the plantation economy as cheap laborers and farmers. Overall, the article examines how the plantation economy has reshaped social, economic and political structures and deepened economic dependence on plantations not only among displaced locals and laborers, but also among leaders of Ethnic Armed Organizations who have become dependent on plantation revenues and other Chinese investments and infrastructure connectivity. As such, banana plantations have become an instrument for Burmese-military state making and transnational capitalism, affecting land use, local livelihoods and the environment in border areas.

Key Themes: 
  • FDI and land access: economic land concessions, contract farming, short term and long term renting - The Yunnan-Myanmar borderlands in Kachin state have, over the past two decades, become a major investment frontier for large-scale agribusiness. Chinese private capital, supported by state-led opium substitution programs and a legal framework that facilitates the government to designate land as fallow and lease it off to agribusiness, has turned thousands of hectares of forests and smallholder farmland into, first rubber, and later banana (and other agribusiness) plantations. Although plantations are posed as a “development” solution, in contrast to earlier histories of extractive and illegal trade relations and ceasefire capitalism, they are inextricably linked to past histories of conflict and resource extraction. As shown in the paper, plantations replicate previous patterns of exploitation of Kachin natural resources amidst ongoing conflict between the Myanmar military and the Kachin armed struggle for political autonomy spearheaded by the Kachin Independent Organization (KIO). Like in the past, the plantation economy combines Burmese-military state making, securitization of ethnic controlled ceasefire areas, and capital accumulation by all actors. The dependence on plantation revenues, as well as the interconnectivity of the KIO controlled borderlands with China, have turned individual landholders and leaders of Ethnic Armed Organizations into collaborators in negotiations with Chinese investors, even while they lose control over the Chinese presence, as seen by the failure of previous efforts by the KIO to ban plantations.
  • Land dispossession/land grabbing - The article notes that much of the land that has become Chinese agribusiness areas was seized via the forceful displacement of people (generally from non-KIO jurisdiction regions), while a smaller proportion is land that was deforested by timber production (in KIO territories) before being passed out of Kachin smallholder hands through land sales to plantation traders. Having been displaced by land grabs that led to development of plantations, local populations have been left with little choice but to work as laborers on plantations due to the absence of any alternatives. While bringing jobs to locals, plantations have led to the trapping of a large number of local populations, refugees, and laborers into an exploitative cycle of dispossession, displacement, poor health through heavy pesticide use, and environmental degradation, albeit not on equal measures for everyone and not withstanding some profit due to local elite capture.
Research basis: 

The research is based on ethnographic field research, drawing on fieldwork on both sides of the Kachin-Yunnan borderlands conducted in-person before the COVID-19 pandemic between 2015 and 2019, and through virtual and telephone follow-up with interlocuters after the 2021 Myanmar coup. The paper traverses various sites of Chinese agribusiness and infrastructure expansions in Myanmar, where both long- and short-term fieldwork was conducted. Interviews were conducted in Myitkyina, Waingmaw, Chipwe, Laiza and Mai Ja Yang in Kachin State (Myanmar), and Wanding, Ruili and Yingjiang, Tengchong county in Yunnan (PRC). Additionally, several field trips were taken to Houqiao, Diantan, Zizhi, and Laiza border crossings, through which most of the trade between Yunnan and Kachin State is carried out. The paper has also benefited from prior research done on plantations in Southeast Asia. (Provided by Ben Fan)