Hunger as more-than-human communicative modality on the West Papuan oil palm frontier

Large-scale agribusiness developments across the Global South are often framed in state and corporate discourse as necessary to meet the food and fuel needs of the world's growing population. In response to this rising demand, monocrop plantations—a hallmark of the Anthropocene—are spreading relentlessly across the tropics, wreaking havoc on native ecosystems and exacerbating climate change through soaring rates of greenhouse gas emissions. Rampant biodiversity loss and environmental pollution in these zones of capitalist extraction are often accompanied by the forced relocation of Indigenous and other local communities from their customary lands and territories, who become deprived of the vital natural resources that they depend upon for their economic livelihoods, cultural continuance, and collective physical and psychological well-being. State and corporate rhetorics of development, modernization, and progress thus obscure the systemic and violent forms of dispossession, displacement, and disempowerment experienced by Indigenous peoples on the ground. They also communicate a deficit-based narrative of Indigenous peoples and foodways as backward and in need of advancement and transformation. In the process, such top-down narratives efface the diverse local modalities through which Indigenous people communicate the effects of capitalist violence on their more-than-human relations, ecologies, and communities.

Indigenous communicative modalities of hunger among Marind in West Papua offer a powerful example of the human and more-than-human idioms through which peoples inhabiting the shadow places of capitalism understand and articulate the form and effects of agro-industrial expansion. In rural Merauke, a district located in the Indonesian-controlled in West Papua province where I have been conducting fieldwork since 2011, Indigenous Marind communities have seen some 1 million hectares of their customary forests razed and converted to monocrop oil palm plantations in the last decade (Chao, 2022). These agro-industrial developments are promoted by the Indonesian government in the name of achieving national food sovereignty, meeting renewable energy targets, and transforming Merauke, as the slogan goes, into the “nation's rice bowl” that will “feed Indonesia and then the world” (Awas MIFEE, 2012; Jong, 2020). On the ground, however, rampant deforestation to make way for oil palm plantations has resulted in unprecedented rates of food insecurity among Marind, who traditionally depend on the forest for their subsistence. Stunting, wasting, and chronic protein-energy malnutrition are particularly high among women and children, rendering them vulnerable to pneumonia, parasitism, bronchitis, and a range of gastrointestinal and musculoskeletal diseases. As native ecosystems give way to monocrop plantations, nutritionally diverse foodways composed of game, fish, fruits, sago starch, and tubers are being substituted with nutritionally poor imported commodities, including instant noodles, rice, canned meats, and fizzy drinks.

Hunger is a central communicative modality through which Marind construct and critique the present-day health and justice crises they are experiencing in the face of large-scale land grabbing and growing food insecurity (Chao, 2021; Chao, 2025). Known as kelaparan in logat Papua (the Papuan creole of Indonesian and lingua franca among different ethnic groups across West Papua), hunger in Marind parlance describes a condition of being that is at once biological, affective, moral, cultural, and symbolic in its form, distribution, and effects. In this respect, kelaparan transcends the notion of “hunger” as a putatively universal condition, experienced primarily in bodily terms and provoked by the sustained lack of “food” defined in generic or purely quantitative terms. Instead, it communicates hunger as a symptom of deteriorating social and ecological relationships that may be mediated by, but are never limited to, humans or humans’ guts.

For instance, Marind often describes hunger's deleterious bodily and health impacts in conjunction with their collective feelings of sorrow, grief, pain, and anger. Central to Marind's experiences and narratives of hunger, these sentiments are provoked by the loss of forest foods deemed meaningful and nourishing because they derive from sentient plants and animals with whom Marind share intimate and ancestral relations of kinship through common descent from spirit-beings, or dema. Dema express their presence within the sentient ecology of the forest through a range of every day eco-semiotic phenomena (Kohn, 2013), referring here to signs and processes that undergird and render manifest ecological states and transformations—from seasonal changes, monsoonal rains, and shifting animal and plant reproduction patterns to the changing gloss and sheen of avian and mammalian feathers and fur, the swelling girth of starch-filled flourishing sago palms, the spread and senescence of bamboo clusters in the grove, and the ebb and flow of meandering streams and riverways. Each of these eco-semiotic manifestations communicates to Marind vital knowledge about the well-being of the forest, the changing needs of its diverse more-than-human dwellers, and the consequent acts of care required of humans themselves—for instance, which types of game they should hunt, which species of vegetation they should fell, and which rivers and paths they should travel or avoid.

In stark contrast to the rich communicative valences of sentient forest ecologies, or what one might call sylvan animacies, the condition of hunger comes to mark and diagnose the destruction of the ecosystems, soils, and water that these plants and animals depend on to survive and thrive in mutual relations of eating and being eaten that operate across species lines. Hunger also communicates the erosion of traditional food procurement, preparation, consumption, and exchange practices that imbue forest foodways with moral significance and that create or affirm the social ties between individuals, families, villages, and clans. As imported, processed foods flood the villages, hunger is further exacerbated by commodities that are said to be bland and tasteless because their origins and producers are alien and unknown.

The lack of energy experienced by an individual suffering from hunger is said to be contagious to those in her or his presence. These individuals may begin to feel their own bodies weaken, their concentration fall, and their desire to move and interact decrease. Hunger, then, is less a private, individualized, or internalized phenomenon than one that is signified by and distributed across the broader collective, in a form of transcorporeal and affective transference. Hunger, in other words, is not just a metabolic condition, but also a communicable disease. As Kristal, a middle-aged Marind woman, explained to me, “When people go hungry, they make other people feel hunger too. It's like an illness. Even if you have eaten food, you lose your strength when you see others in want, because you feel their pain and their hunger.”

Hunger as a communicative modality is further deployed by Marind in beyond-human terms to describe the plight of their plant and animal kin who, together with their human counterparts, form shared “communities of fate” (Rose, 2004) in the face of mass deforestation and agribusiness expansion. While Marind face growing food insecurity and malnutrition in the villages, nonhuman organisms, too, go hungry as their biodiverse forest ecologies are replaced with fenced-off homogeneous monocrops and their rivers and soils contaminated with pesticides, fertilizers, effluents, and mill runoff. Wild pigs and tree-kangaroos starve as sago groves and other vegetation are cleared through cutting or burning. Cassowaries and birds of paradise who enter the plantations in search of food are often poached by plantation workers, their lives rendered captive to wildlife trade circuits or their bodies butchered and sold as tourist trinkets in souvenir shops in the city. Severed from their customary forests and swamps, Marind themselves are no longer able to nourish their nonhuman kin—for instance, the hematophagous critters like leaches and mosquitos that feed on the blood of forest travelers, the birds and mammals for whom Marind scatter fruit, nuts, and sago flour, and the juvenile creepers and bamboos whose growth Marind support by selectively clearing or thinning the canopy to allow sunlight to reach the undergrowth.

Hunger as a more-than-human condition manifests as a register between human and nonhuman beings in many guises. Marind read its presence in the blemished fronds of sago palms that grow in rivers contaminated by palm oil mill effluents, in the dull hides of pigs whose waterholes have been redirected to irrigate the plantations, and in the greasy scales of fish that float to the surface of polluted streams by the hundreds, their bodies poisoned by toxic pesticides and fertilizers. The hunger of the forest is also expressed in the plaintive laments of birds—the sorrowful call of the increasingly endangered bird of paradise, the shy whistle of a black-crested bulbul by the side of the highway, and the deep grunt of the male cassowary roosting its eggs in precious patches of forest that have survived the bulldozers and chainsaws.

The more-than-human ecology of hunger animating the West Papuan oil palm frontier encompasses other consequential nonhuman entities. Marind, for instance, often describes oil palm—an introduced cash crop in the region—as a “hungry” (lapar) being who relentlessly devours the lands and forests without giving anything in return to its human and nonhuman dwellers. Infrastructures accompanying the spread of plantations, such as roads and urban centers, are also often characterized by Marind as “hungry” places that symbolically consume the bodies, identities, and sense of territorial and cultural belonging of those who travel or encounter them. The destructive ontology of hunger manifests also in Marind's description of the government and corporations as “greedy” entities whose seemingly insatiable hunger for land, power, profit, and natural resources undermines the material and political possibilities for Indigenous survivance, justice, and self-determination in the colonized region of West Papua.

Marind idioms and experiences highlight the importance of attending to hunger as a socially constructed (Scheper-Hughes, 1992), historically situated (Vernon, 2007) and politically imbued (Phillips, 2018) condition of being—one whose subjects and objects include both human and other-than-human entities, bound in uneven and changing relations of eating and being eaten, and communicated through the affective materiality of transforming bodies and behaviors. Such situated understandings of hunger call for “ethnonutritional” approaches to food, food systems, and food security that take into account the moral, symbolic, and affective dimensions of hunger as a localized phenomenological symptom and a meaningful communicative cultural medium (Burnett et al., 2020). In Merauke, food and hunger accrue material and semiotic force in the form of intergenerational stories, narratives, idioms, and metaphors that cannot and are not accounted for in the simplifying and colonizing rhetoric of state and corporate policies and regulations. These communicative mediums are also always already produced with and through the more-than-human world, as read by Marind through its changing physical manifestations—its organismic and interdependent forms of growth, senescence, proliferation, and annihilation. Grappling with the ontology of hunger, satiety, and nourishment in an age of intensifying anthropogenic change—one in which food security discourses often serve to legitimate the expansion of technocapitalist monocrops—thus calls for an eschewal of human-only stories about capitalism, diet, food, and ecology. Instead, they demand a reckoning with the more-than-human subjects and objects of hunger, as they accrue cultural, material, and symbolic significance through interspecies relations of feeder, fed, or food.

Reframing the story of hunger in multispecies terms brings us to interrogate what it means to eat well in a more-than-human world. It invites attention to the consequential agency and relations of nonhuman beings that animate and sustain Indigenous food-based identities, ecologies, and socialities. In an age of self-devouring growth that threatens the very possibility of multispecies flourishing at a planetary level (Livingston, 2019), attending to hunger as lived experience, cultural idiom, and more-than-human condition further reveals important truths about the global economic forces and national food security discourses that exacerbate nutritional structural violence (Ulijaszek & Strickland, 1993; see also de Castro, 1952) by dictating which bodies and ecologies must be consumed in order for others to be fed.