The Expansion of Oil Palm Smallholders and Migrants’ Upward Social Mobility in a Frontier Area of Riau Province, Indonesia (English Translation)

Abstract

This study discusses the dynamics of migrants’ frontier society with the case of L Village in Riau Province, Indonesia, where oil palm cultivation is dramatically expanding. In the late 1980s, a private company developed a large oil palm plantation in the village, after which a large number of migrants from North Sumatra Province started moving to the village. The migrants’ purposes could be roughly divided into two aspects: the first was to start oil palm cultivation, and the second was to work at a company’s plantation or smallholders’ farmland. Interestingly, in L Village, landless plantation laborers could also buy land with their savings and start cultivating oil palm. Some of those initially poor migrants gradually expanded their farmland and finally became large-scale smallholders with more than 10 ha of farmland. Two conditions enabled migrants to grow to become large-scale smallholders: they had to start cultivating oil palm before and up to the 1990s when the land price was low, and they had to accumu-late additional funds from other income sources such as running general stores or timber sales businesses. After the 2010s, when no more land was available in L Village, many migrants re-migrated to other frontiers in search of new land for oil palm cultivation. This indicates that these cyclical migrations are very characteristic in Riau Province as an unintended side effect of oil palm expansion.