This blog entry is a reformatted version of a final paper I submitted for my Economic Anthropology post-graduate class back in 2018. I’ve changed very little from the original paper. While much of what I’d said here still stands, I realize that much of what I had said was underdeveloped. I see this as a record of how I had thought when I was much younger, and a reminder that I will always have a lot of learning left to do.

In Brgy. Atmurok, Polomolok, South Cotabato, Ye[1] Ana[2] a T’boli woman leader, recounted how her family and many other families in her community signed “growership” contracts with a Philippine subsidiary of the Dole Corporation. The contracts stipulated that the company would lease lands in their ancestral domain at approximately PhP6,000 per hectare per year, and those occupying the areas in question would continue to stay there, provided they could be employed by Dole at PhP125 per day to plant pineapples on their properties. No portion of the land they occupied could be used for subsistence crops, and given the wages provided and the rates at which the lands were leased, many families could barely have their basic needs met.

“We couldn’t grow any rice or vegetables for ourselves, and we barely had enough money to buy what we had once been able to grow and harvest for free. So what could we eat?” Ye Ana said, “Pineapples? Pineapples morning, noon, and night? We’d burn holes in our stomachs.”

Land grabbing occurs when one party unilaterally seizes or gains control over a piece of land that had previously been identified with a different group or individual, such that the latter is displaced or deprived of the ability to interact with the land in the ways to which they had been accustomed. It is a part of Ye Ana’s life, and the lives of many others throughout the world, from Africa and South America, to former Soviet Union countries and Southeast Asia.

Land grabbing has existed since humans began adapting sedentary lifestyles and tying their identities to territory. It had been an integral part of the Philippine colonial experience, and the colonial experiences of many other nations of the Global South. It goes on today in many different forms.

In June 2008, GRAIN, an agricultural and food rights NGO, published a report entitled, “Seized! the 2008 land grab for food and financial security.” It explored the phenomenon they referred to as the “global land grab,” detailing how, in the wake of the global food crisis of 2007 to 2008 and the global financial crisis of 2008, the governments of “developed” and “emerging” nations of the global North, such as the USA, Japan, Britain, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and China, developed food security policies that “outsourced” agricultural production to the global South, “developing” countries where land was cheap and natural resources were relatively plentiful, but finances were limited. In line with these policies, large corporations and state agencies began buying up or investing in massive tracts of land in countries such as Sudan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Brazil, and the Philippines. (GRAIN, 2008)

The definition of “land grabbing” encompassed by this phenomenon has since grown. A 2017 paper cited Borras and Franco, “[who] reframed land grabbing as ‘control grabbing’ that did not necessarily involve direct land acquisition and insisted that the scale not just of the land but of the capital involved had to be considered… post-grab land uses are ‘largely determined by the accumulation imperatives of capital.’” (Schoenberger, Hall, & Vandergeest, p. 701)

Often, the lands invested in –usually classified by local governments as “marginal,” “unclassified,” or some variation of public property and therefore available for a government to allocate for commercial use- are under customary regimes that are not recorded on official documents, and actually tilled and occupied by subsistence farmers, indigenous communities, or other marginal groups. In many cases, those occupying the land are greatly disenfranchised by these large-scale investments; many lose control over how they can use the land, or they are displaced altogether.

The alienation and commodification of land to be used for export agriculture has long been a technique employed by colonizing forces. This had been done to enrich colonial coffers at the expense of the food security and political and economic welfare of the peoples under colonial rule. And despite the fact that many groups have emerged from the colonial yoke as nominally sovereign nations, colonial structures continue to buttress the post-colonial economies of most. The agricultural policies of many former colonies continue to limn to old economic models built for export, rather than domestic food security or economic development, and factors such as international economic policy and staggering amounts of foreign debt have left many countries of the global South beholden to international financial institutions that ultimately favor the priorities of the global North. (International Land Coalition, 2011)

 The recent global land grab phenomenon could be described as a new manifestation of colonialism in the 21^st Century. As Borras and Franco have pointed out, “Certainly, the contemporary global land grab represents both continuity and change from previous historical episodes of enclosures” (2012, p. 35). There is continuity in that the enclosures occurring today often occur in former colonies, where existing political and economic structures follow colonial models that ultimately redound to the benefit of entities from colonizer-states –many of which incidentally benefit from the global land grab phenomenon’s recent large-scale land acquisitions. The contingencies and circumstances of each contemporary acquisition are unique, but there are consistencies among them that speak to a wider trend, one where control and access to territory and resources are consolidated to the benefit of powerful corporate bodies. Since GRAIN’s 2008 report, many NGOs, academics, and policymakers concerned with environmental and agrarian transformations have turned their attention to large-scale land grabs and similar phenomena to develop an emerging field referred to as “land grab studies” (Schoenberger, Hall, & Vandergeest, 2017).

While many of the papers on large scale land acquisitions focus on macro-level, global analyses, Marvin Joseph F. Montefrio’s paper, Land control dynamics and social-ecological transformations in upland Philippines, points out that more “recent publications highlight the need to investigate the complex local dynamics of land control and exclusion” (2017, p. 796). It likewise emphasizes the importance of examining not only the economic and political implications of large-scale land acquisitions, but the social-ecological transformations that occur alongside them as well. It “provides an empirically rich case of how local-level land control dynamics (involving oil palm expansion and conservation enclosures) and social-ecological transformations in swidden systems reinforce each other to create conditions for exclusion of indigenous peoples in the Philippines” (p. 797).

Here, Montefrio describes how the relatively sustainable swidden system –involving planting rotations and long fallow periods- employed by the Pala’wan have been constrained by “anti-swidden” and “idle lands” discourses employed by both government and civil society. These discourses pressure kaingin-style cultivators to sedentarize, and to avoid leaving land fallow to regenerate. This often compels them to lease out or plant the lands under their control far more intensively, often for cash-cropping purposes.

In southern Palawan in particular, oil palm has become a massive business, with Christian and Muslim migrant settlers and absentee landlords increasingly dedicating their lands exclusively to the cultivation of palm oil for the benefit of a local palm oil company. Montefrio’s paper details how the relatively resistant Pala’wan face intense pressure from multiple fronts to follow suit.

Many such stories are echoed throughout the Philippines, and the contested land is sometimes seized through questionably legal –even violent- means. In northern Negros Occidental, my own field research with the Ata Negritos and the Bukidnon of the municipality of Don Salvador Benedicto reflect similar patterns of pressure. However, whereas in southern Palawan, the allure of fast cash promised by the recent boom in the oil palm industry in the province provided the main impetus for lowland settlers’ and absentee landlords’ shift, in Northern Negros, deforestation and displacement by lowland settlers and large landowners have, over the decades, pressured the indigenous groups to change their relationships with their environment and communities from one of subsistence and sharing, to that of market exchange.

In both Palawan and Negros, as well as in South Cotabato, a significant reduction in biodiversity can be observed, even in the face of reforestation and conservation efforts by governments and NGOs. Swidden cultivation, as practiced by most Filipino indigenous peoples, has been a part of the Southeast Asian tropical ecosystem for centuries (Barker & Janowski, 2011). Whereas before, soil regeneration had been effected by the long fallow periods allowed by the availability of vast tracts of available territory, today pressure to farm more intensively in progressively smaller, more constrained areas has forced many smallholders to turn to chemical fertilizers and herbicides (Montefrio, 2017) (Sayson, 2018).

Regardless of the ways through which the lands occupied by marginalized communities and individuals are seized and controlled, the end results are quite consistent: already marginalized groups physically occupying a particular area are disenfranchised further, and far richer and more powerful bodies are financially enriched.

In Ye Ana’s case, under the Dole lease agreement, she and others in the area defined by her tribe’s Ancestral Domain can only use their land to plant Dole’s pineapples. While Dole and the local Dole subsidiary holding their lease agreements benefit from access to the fertile, untouched land of that T’boli community’s Ancestral Domain, Ye Ana and others like her can no longer interact with their territory in the ways the generations before them had done.

Her experience and other instances that make up the continuing global land grab often begin in developed or emerging countries, where multinational corporations are headquartered. The lands being grabbed by these entities are located in developing countries whose governments are often beholden to the demands and needs of the developed world’s governments and corporate entities and the supranational entities that they heavily influence.

The global land grab can be seen as a manifestation of the core-periphery dynamics outlined in the world-systems perspective first articulated by Immanuel Wallerstein. World Systems Theory, or more accurately, world-systems analysis, is not strictly an economic theory. It is a multidisciplinary perspective that challenges the researcher to take history, political science, economics, and other academic disciplines into consideration in their analyses, and allows students of different fields of study a common area in which to interact. World-systems analysis emphasizes the fact that throughout human history, most of our societies have not existed in isolation; groups of humans across the planet have come in contact with other groups, and their interactions play significant parts in the different ways these communities have developed and continue to develop. The unit of analysis placed under scrutiny is not the individual, the household, social classes, or the nation-state, but rather, the systems in which these actors participate.

In anthropology, world-systems theory –whether it is the perspective articulated by Immanuel Wallerstein or by other writers- can be seen expressed in the ways anthropological works acknowledge the external connections their objects of study have with other groups, cultures, or institutions. This is so, even if a world-systems perspective is not explicitly mentioned. Indeed, the important thing to be noted in an anthropological work that has world-systems characteristics is that the group under observation does not exist in a social vacuum. Whether a study involves the archaeological analysis of potsherd fragments from South Asian city-states, or the ethnographic observation of a fishing community in Northern Europe, there is always the acknowledgement of a community’s connections with external groups (Kardulias, 1999).

For the sake of simplicity however, this economic anthropology paper shall use Immanuel Wallerstein’s World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction as our primary reference with regards to the phenomena we hope to analyze. Wallerstein’s description of world-systems and the core-periphery dynamics it articulates has been accused of, among other things, Eurocentrism, economic determinisim, and a lack of acknowledgement of the agency and influence that those in the periphery may possess in relation to their core-region counterparts (Hall, 1999). Additionally, in Wallerstein’s own text, he mentions critique from nomothetic positivists, orthodox Marxists, state autonomists, and cultural particularists, who all insist that “its basic premises have not been accepted by world-systems analysis” (Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: an Introduction, 2004, p. 19). In response, Wallerstein points out that,

What these four critiques have in common is the sense that world-systems analysis lacks a central actor in its recounting of history. For nomothetic positivism, the actor is the individual, homo rationalis. For orthodox Marxism, the actor is the industrial proletariat. For the state-autonomists, it is political man. For cultural particularists, each of us (different from all the others) is an actor engaged in autonomous discourse with everyone else. For world-systems analysis, these actors, just like the long list of structures that one can enumerate, are the products of a process. They are not primordial atomic elements, but part of a systemic mix out of which they emerged and upon which they act. They act freely, but their freedom is constrained by their biographies and the social prisons of which they are a part. […] it must be emphasized that for world-systems analysts, time and space-or rather that linked compound TimeSpace- are not unchanging external realities which are somehow just there, and within whose frames social reality exists. TimeSpaces are constantly evolving constructed realities whose construction is part and parcel of the social reality we are analyzing. The historical systems within which we live are indeed systemic, but they are historical as well. They remain the same over time yet are never the same from one minute to the next. This is a paradox, but not a contradiction. The ability to deal with this paradox, which we cannot circumvent, is the principal task of the historical social sciences.

(Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: an Introduction, 2004, pp. 21-22)

Given the sheer scale of the global land grab –encompassing multiple nation-states across both the core and the periphery- and its effects, it would appear that Wallerstein’s articulation of world-systems, for all of its warts, would be a very good lens through which to observe this phenomenon. We have already discussed the fact that the world-systems perspective analyzes historical systems and observes them over the course of the longue durée, and this paper hopes to look at how the paradox standing at the intersection of history and system manifests through the global land grab phenomenon in general, and in the Philippines’ experience in particular. To do so, it is important for us to understand the key concepts of Wallerstein’s world-systems perspective.

World-systems analysis takes into consideration three types of systems: the minisystem, the world-empire, and the world-economy. Minisystems are composed of small chiefdoms, tribes, or bands, and barring uncontacted tribes in remote areas, they are generally extinct. World-empires, on the other hand, possess a centralized hegemonic political system –even if one may encompass multiple cultures- and examples include such past complex societies as the Byzantine Empire and the Harappa Civilization of India. The present world-system is capitalism, an example of a world-economy, which is not politically unified, but rather, is composed of multiple polities existing and trading with one another. In Wallerstein’s own words,

A world-economy is constituted by a cross-cutting network of interlinked productive processes which we may call “commodity chains,” such that for any production process in the chain there are a number of “backward and forward linkages,” on which the particular process (and the persons involved in it) are dependent.

(The politics of the world-economy: The states, the movements, and the civilizations, 1984, p. 2)

In economic historian Karl Polanyi’s terms, minisystems engaged in reciprocity, world-empires engaged in redistribution, and the present world-economy engages in market exchange.

In both world-empires and world-economies, there exists an “axial division of labor,” in which certain activities and processes deemed more valuable are concentrated in geographical axes that Wallerstein refers to as the “core.” These activities vary over time, for instance, today, generating stock futures and trading in them is an example of a core-like process, one that is often concentrated in the highest corporate echelons of multinational financial institutions.

Because there is a division of labor, exchange occurs between territories, and this exchange tends to be unequal, as areas engaged in processes considered valuable benefit far more than others. In world-empires, the core is also where the seat of political power lies. In the case of world-economies the core may be composed of core-states, situated in many different polities, and possessing many different cultures.

In both world-systems however, the core is where wealth and power are concentrated. In contrast, the entities and polities of what Wallerstein calls the “periphery” often engage in labor and other processes deemed less valuable, produce more raw materials for core consumption and processing, and are economically, and ultimately politically, beholden to those of the core. One historical example that continues to ring true today is the Philippines’ relationship with Japan. The Philippines is home to several manufacturing facilities owned and operated by Japanese companies. Tamiya toy cars, for instance, are almost exclusively manufactured in the province of Cebu, by Tamiya Inc., a Japanese-owned and operated company. The Philippines also enjoys a good amount of financial aid and developmental support from the Japanese government, in the form of infrastructure loans and technical support.

The present world-economy is a capitalist one, and it encompasses all the nation-states on the planet. As a capitalist world-economy, its ultimate end is the accumulation of capital. In a competitive economic environment, those who act without the accumulation of capital as their ultimate goal will often find themselves out-competed or otherwise “penalized,” as those with the “correct” motivations overtake them and are rewarded.

This emphasis on endless accumulation of capital makes it possible for a world-system without a common culture or a unifying political structure. Instead, the shared goal of capital accumulation leads to an ever-growing expansion of wealth, which makes for a highly efficacious division of labor, one in which core and periphery are locked in dynamic tension. The periphery endeavors to attain core status, and the core works to secure its place as the core.

What Wallerstein refers to as “core-like processes” are those that have a high degree of monopolization, ensuring that a maximum profit accrues to those who engage in them, in contrast to those processes that are “truly competitive,” and accrue far less. In this sense therefore, entities engaged in monopolies or quasi-monopolies are in a far stronger position than competitive ones, and surplus value constantly flows from the periphery to the core in an unequal exchange.

This unequal or asymmetric exchange is a defining characteristic of Wallerstein’s core-periphery dynamics. The flow of surplus value from periphery to the core is a direct result of the axial division of labor earlier discussed in this paper, and the core’s dominance is an important feature of all world-systems.

Before we move forward, it must be mentioned that Wallerstein emphasizes that the terms “core” and “periphery” are not absolute, but rather, relational. They are contingent on two different sorts of processes (core-like and quasi-monopolized, and peripheral and competitive processes), rather than geographical areas, nation-states, firms, or classes. There cannot be one without the other, and in a capitalist world-economy, where a multiplicity of polities exist within a single economic system, certain production processes’ profitability in relation to other processes determines whether a state is a core state or a peripheral one. Additionally, Wallerstein points out that:

Capitalists need a large market (hence minisystems are too narrow for them) but they also need a multiplicity of states, so that they can gain the advantages of working with states but also can circumvent states hostile to their interests in favor of states friendly to their interests. Only the existence of a multiplicity of states within the overall division of labor assures this possibility.

(Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: an Introduction, 2004, p. 24)

The core-like processes of quasi-monopolies are only possible due to strong state mechanisms that are favorable to those processes, and as such, the few states in our world-system that are politically strong also tend to have more such quasi-monopolies, enjoy large inflows of surplus value, and can be considered “core-states.” In contrast, politically weak areas often lack the relevant state mechanisms to support or generate quasi-monopolies. These states have “free,” competitive markets, and most of their processes tend to be peripheral, such that the firms and other entities here enjoy far lower profits than those of their core-state counterparts.

Wallerstein also mentions semiperipheral states, that is, states that possess relatively equal numbers of core-like and peripheral processes. In the world-economy, semiperipheral states stand between the core and periphery and endeavor to join the politically strong states at the core. Examples of core states include the United States, Germany, and Japan, with their quasi-monopolies on such industries as software, aerospace manufacturing, consumer electronics, and telecommunications. Semiperipheral states are emerging nations such as China, Brazil, and South Korea that have a mix of quasi-monopolies and competitive industries. Peripheral states include developing countries such as Peru, Cambodia, and the Philippines, that focus primarily on highly competitive processes such as manufacturing services and the export of raw materials.

The semiperipheral states which have a relatively even mix of production processes find themselves in the most difficult situation. Under pressure from core states and putting pressure on peripheral states, their major concern is to keep themselves from slipping into the periphery and to do what they can to advance themselves toward the core. … These semiperipheral states are the ones that put forward most aggressively and most publicly so-called protectionist policies. They hope thereby to “protect” their production processes from the competition of stronger firms outside, while trying to improve the efficiency of the firms inside so as to compete better in the world market.

(Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: an Introduction, 2004, p. 29)

It is no large surprise therefore that many of the firms perpetrating the global land grab come from semiperipheral states. Supported by state food security policies aimed at protecting national food supplies, domestic food production is “outsourced” to fertile but cash-poor nations. In Asia, Chinese, Indian, Malaysian, Japanese, and South Korean firms are gaining control of vast swathes of agricultural land in peripheral states with weak regulatory mechanisms and a hunger for foreign investment cash, such as Pakistan, Cambodia, the Philippines, and, in China’s case, several countries in Africa (GRAIN, 2008).

As earlier mentioned in this paper, this massive uptick in land and agricultural investment came as a response to the food and financial crises of 2007 to 2008, which leads us to a discussion of the economic “cycles” that Wallerstein mentions in his text. Kondratieff cycles (also known as Kondratiev waves) are economic cycles in capitalistic economies characterized by expansion (A-phase) and stagnation (B-phase). Wallerstien employs the concept in discussing the ways that cores and peripheries may expand, contract, and shift over time. He describes it in the following way:

A major leading industry will be a major stimulus to the expansion of the world-economy and will result in considerable accumulation of capital. But it also normally leads to more extensive employment in the world-economy, higher wage-levels, and a general sense of relative prosperity. As more and more firms enter the market of the erstwhile quasi-monopoly, there will be “overproduction” (that is, too much production for the real effective demand at a given time) and consequently increased price competition (because of the demand squeeze), thus lowering the rates of profit. At some point, a buildup of unsold products results, and consequently a slowdown in further production. … Rates of unemployment rise worldwide. Producers seek to reduce costs in order to maintain their share of the world market. One of the mechanisms is relocation of the production processes to zones that have historically lower wages, that is, to semiperipheral countries. This shift puts pressure on the wage levels in the processes still remaining in core zones, and wages there tend to become lower as well. Effective demand which was at first lacking because of overproduction now becomes lacking because of a reduction in earnings of the consumers.

(Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: an Introduction, 2004, p. 30)

Although Wallerstein makes little mention of it in his text, it is important to note that financial speculation has become a considerable part of our world-economy. Arguably, while speculation certainly occurs in any country that possesses a working stock market, this process is most concentrated in core states, where the capital behind such activities is traded most intensely among individuals and entities, and those engaged in it gain and lose in staggering monetary amounts.

The food and financial crises of 2007 and 2008 are direct results of the abuse of this financial process. Deregulation of the financial system in countries such as the United States and Iceland made this abuse possible. Paradoxically, the success of financial markets in core countries was due to the prosperity generated by the quasi-monopolies supported by state regulatory mechanisms. But the fatal flaw of today’s world-system lies in its very premise: endless capital accumulation.

The discourse surrounding the expansion of a capitalist world-system and its accompanying political and technological features has often been considered synonymous with the concept of “progress,” entrenched as it is in enlightenment-era evolutionism and concepts of modernization. That being said, the changes facilitated by progress, which is to say by the expansion and deepening of the present world-economy, has also led to massive negative consequences.

Not least of those consequences is ecocide, the destruction of entire ecosystems and the dramatic deterioration of the natural environments of particular areas. New technologies, increased consumption, population expansion, and a market-oriented shift in individuals’ relationships to both their environments and their communities all work together to create a domino effect with far-reaching environmental consequences (Bodley, 2015).

Indeed, despite the expansion and movement of processes and markets, the global population has begun to reach its limits; there are few new markets in which to expand, and various production processes are depleting natural resources at a rate that our planet cannot replenish. As wages and demand stagnate in the face of rising income inequality, it has become increasingly clear that we are presently in the midst of the B-phase in the Kondratieff cycle.

Financial deregulation had been a response to this, and it has led to the “overproduction” of stocks, futures, derivatives, and other financial products. This overproduction in turn led to increased competition, but in order to maintain (or even grow) profit margins, trading entities generated even more financial products, primarily in the form of credit, which –when sold- became profit (Damon, 2010) (Bale, 2015). A side-effect of all this speculation –in the food and housing markets- was the vast inflation of prices of basic necessities, followed by their industries’ dramatic contraction and a worldwide economic recession.

As previously stated, the global land grab had been the response of many firms and governments in core-states scrabbling to secure domestic food security and find new investment opportunities to replace the lacunae left behind by the 2008 Financial Crisis.

As the B-phase of the present Kondratieff cycle deepens, more and more entities –and the states that protect their processes- rush to secure their positions within the core, and this land grab is one of the many ways that firms and governments do so.

Every instance of large-scale land acquisition in this context has been unique, contingent on the needs and intentions of those working in the local governments where the land is located, and the capacities, demands, and industries of the firms seizing control of the land. However, across national and regional borders, there are similarities among the experiences of the nations of the periphery where land had been acquired and commercialized on a massive scale.

For instance, since entities from foreign countries are gaining control over land in particular, it is possible to see the global land grab as neo-colonial in nature. Indeed, when the governments of the periphery cede such control over land to foreign entities, it can be said that the global land grab has the character of the appropriations and expansions of the world-empires of the past. Rather than expanding the power of a political entity however, the global land grab primarily and explicitly works to ensure that value flows into the corporate entities engaged in core-like processes that are perpetuating it. Any gain in political power, perhaps facilitated by already lax government regulation and oversight in nations of the periphery, is incidental to the economic gain permitted by control over the land and resources in these places.

In gaining control over this land, the general experience is that less powerful individuals and groups are deprived of control over their own livelihoods and physical environments, become less self-sufficient, and very frequently as a result of this, become beholden to the requirements of the market economy on which they had previously been less dependent. In some cases, they are even completely disenfranchised and forced to engage in criminal activities or retreat farther into more and more marginal territories, if such spaces are still present and accessible.

In the cases where the area in question is under significant political or armed conflict, large-scale land investments made by foreigners willing to deal with warlords and similar such figures may exacerbate tensions even further and lead already existing conflict situations to escalate (International Land Coalition, 2011). In many other places, the establishment of processing infrastructures and the generation of employment, coupled with business tax contributions to local government units, create a local economy almost entirely dependent on the corporation’s presence alone.

These situations are not necessarily to the benefit of the core entities making such large-scale land acquisitions, but it generally has the effect of weakening of political machineries in already-peripheral states. This further facilitates unregulated, “competitive” trade, making it more likely for peripheral states to remain peripheral, and for surplus value to continue flowing towards the relatively politically stable core.

Aside from that, the global land grab is a manifestation of the way the many political and corporate entities of the core maintain their status within the world-economy. The core, that is to say transnational corporations and core governments that are (in this case) concerned about their food security, harnesses peripheral state governments’ internal needs and agendas in order to gain control over land, whether through purchase or leasehold contracts.

This control allows entities of the core to further gain from the resources of the periphery, expanding both financial and political capital through the exercise of their control over the physical spaces in the periphery that have become designated as “theirs.” In essence, the land appropriated by the land grab becomes that of the core, and thus the resources drawn from it no longer benefit the peoples and entities of the periphery, where the land is situated. Virtually all the value extracted from it flows into the core.

In the case of DOLE and Ye Ana’s ancestral land, any value her land produces now redounds, not to Ye Ana and her community (and ultimately to the Philippines), but to the corporation that now effectively controls that land. The intention in doing this is generally not to perpetuate the state of underdevelopment in the Philippines –even if it ultimately contributes thereto- but simply to take advantage of the existing institutions and circumstances that make it possible to extract as much surplus value from the land in question as possible.

It is relevant to note here that Dole Philippines has had operations in the Philippines long before the food and financial crises of 2007 and 2008. Its cannery has stood in Polomolok, South Cotabato since the 1960s (Stanfilco, 2013), and is more a product of the Philippines’ colonial experience under the United States –something that merits the writing of another paper altogether. However, I have elected to use Dole Philippines and Ye Ana’s experience as an example of the global land grab currently taking place because Dole’s presence in Polomolok shows the long-term effects of the large-scale land commercialization of the global land grab can have on communities and polities in the periphery.

To look at how Dole’s acquisition of Ye Ana’s family’s land changed her community’s economy, we must look at how the land in question has been perceived, and how it has changed. Ye Ana’s family’s land is part of her tribe’s Ancestral Domain, which is to say that it had been part of her tribe’s patrimony “since time immemorial” (Republic of the Philippines, 1997). Land tenure among the T’boli is generally determined by ancestral rights passed down from father to firstborn son. It involves the right to hunt and grow rice in particular areas. Their concept of land use is not so much one of ownership, as it is one of stewardship; families have the right to cultivate and enjoy the fruits of a plot of land under a particular datu, but the land itself is not within the human sphere of commerce. All that may be exchanged, passed on, or enjoyed, is the use of that land (Duhaylungsod, Hyndman, & Thomas, 1994).

The T’boli have generally been kaingin farmers, cultivating land in shifting cycles and not settling in one location to farm intensively. In line with this form of subsistence agriculture, the T’boli developed the concept of s’basa, or sharing. This cultural logic sits at the center of their kinship mode of production. It is a form of social reciprocity –an understanding that exchanges are not strictly direct, nor are the values of exchanged goods systematically calculated. The logic of s’basa likewise applies to the community’s relationship to land in the sense that it informs their cycles of production and consumption. Rice is an extremely important crop for the T’boli; its cooperative cultivation is central to their subsistence agricultural activities, and it sits at the center of many of their social relations. S’basa sharing is most present in the ways that T’boli communities engage in rice cultivation; it is engaged when the community comes together to clear a family’s plot of land for rice planting. While the household provides betel nut and food to those who engage in the labor, the logic behind participating in the activity is not directly tied to that acquisition. And while it is understood that reciprocity is in effect, there is a denial that the “balance” for one’s labor in another family’s land may be paid through the cooperative labor in one’s own land (Duhaylungsod, Hyndman, & Thomas, 1994). While many T’boli have now eschewed shifting cultivation for more intensive, sedentary farming methods, their perception of land is still clearly not divorced from their social relations. In contrast, in the eyes of the government, prior to their obtaining a Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title (also known as CADT), the state likely classified the land claimed by Ye Ana’s community as patrimonial property, that is, land that belongs to the state under the Regalian Doctrine (, the T’boli developed the concept of s’basa, or sharing. This cultural logic sits at the center of their kinship mode of production. It is a form of social reciprocity –an understanding that exchanges are not strictly direct, nor are the values of exchanged goods systematically calculated. The logic of s’basa likewise applies to the community’s relationship to land in the sense that it informs their cycles of production and consumption. Rice is an extremely important crop for the T’boli; its cooperative cultivation is central to their subsistence agricultural activities, and it sits at the center of many of their social relations. S’basa sharing is most present in the ways that T’boli communities engage in rice cultivation; it is engaged when the community comes together to clear a family’s plot of land for rice planting. While the household provides betel nut and food to those who engage in the labor, the logic behind participating in the activity is not directly tied to that acquisition. And while it is understood that reciprocity is in effect, there is a denial that the “balance” for one’s labor in another family’s land may be paid through the cooperative labor in one’s own land (Duhaylungsod, Hyndman, & Thomas, 1994).

While many T’boli have now eschewed shifting cultivation for more intensive, sedentary farming methods, their perception of land is still clearly not divorced from their social relations. In contrast, in the eyes of the government, prior to their obtaining a Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title (also known as CADT), the state likely classified the land claimed by Ye Ana’s community as patrimonial property, that is, land that belongs to the state under the Regalian Doctrine (a European-origin legal fiction that assumes that all land within a particular territory is owned by the King, and post-colonially, the state) (Bocobo, 1936). The CADT represents the Philippine government’s understanding that a particular group has held claim to the land in question since before the Spanish arrived on Philippine shores. It grants them ownership of that land as “private but community property which belongs to all generations and therefore cannot be sold, disposed or destroyed” (Republic of the Philippines, 1997) (Agabin, 2011).

In securing their land tenure rights through the acquisition of a CADT, we can already see the experience of alienation. Ye Ana’s people once occupied territory that had encompassed all of South Cotabato, down to what is now General Santos City. However, due to the encroachment of settlers from Luzon and Visayas who engaged in more conventional means of land-grabbing (i.e., usurpation, acquisition of claims or titles through a stronger understanding of state bureaucracy, etc.) , the boundaries of that territory, as defined by their CADT is now constrained to the mountain hinterlands of South Cotabato. Obtaining a CADT may have protected the community from conventional, smaller-scale forms of land-grabbing from lowland settlers and smaller local businesses, but defining the territory and placing it within the sphere of the Philippine state and its structures also opened them up to the dangers of predatory bureaucracy.

The DOLE growership contract is one example of such predatory bureaucracy. Ostensibly, the land Ye Ana’s family has right to is still protected by the communal ownership of the CADT. However, since T’boli understanding of land tenure is one of usufruct, and the growership contract essentially constrains the family’s use of the land to the growing of pineapples, their links to that land has effectively been severed in many ways. For instance, through the contract, their participation in the cultural logic of s’basa was reduced; the terms of the contract stipulate that they could no longer engage in communal agricultural activities such as rice-growing, only pineapple-planting. In effect, a very important link to their tribe and to the subsistence lifestyle to which their ancestors had adhered was substantially weakened –perhaps even severed. Instead, a new link was forged; one directly between Ye Ana’s family and the faceless entity known as Dole Philippines.

Ye Ana mentions that others in her community have availed of growership contracts as well, such that enormous swathes of their tribe’s Ancestral Domain have now been converted from integrated farmland and hunting grounds, into monoculture plots. This massive environmental conversion significantly lowers the area’s biodiversity, severely restricting the entire community’s ability to engage in hunting and gathering activities. Once again, this changes the ways that this community interacts not only with their land, but with each other. Fewer subsistence activities can take place, and as such, less communal reciprocity is performed.

Instead, in order to sustain themselves, Ye Ana and others in her community must make use of the money for which they had traded their land rights to purchase food and other necessities. Unfortunately, at PhP6,000 per hectare per year, the rental income Ye Ana and others like her get from Dole Philippines is woefully inadequate to meet one family’s material needs for one year. Additionally, instead of primarily engaging with one another and with other T’boli and Bla-an communities in the area, the weakening of their subsistence economy requires that they shift their focus outward, to the shops and banks of the lowlands, and fulfill the social and cultural requirements such engagements demand.

This dynamic is reflected in Montefrio’s paper on the Pala’wan, and my own research with the Ata and the Bukidnon of Negros. In all three cases, pressures from the core –whether the local cores of urban centers such as Puerto Princesa or Bacolod City, or the global cores of multinational corporations such as Montefrio’s unnamed oil palm company and the Dole corporation- initiate changes in the relationships peripheral groups such as indigenous peoples have with their environments and with each other.

While a host of other historical ills have long hounded Lumad peoples such as the T’boli –from ethnic discrimination, the denial of their sovereignty as indigenous people, to outright genocide- the alienation from their environment facilitated by Dole’s large-scale corporate land acquisition strikes a significant blow to their cultural identity. It is an identity tied to the seasons and an economy that is composed of cycles of sharing and reciprocity, one made possible by their relationship with the land. With that relationship compromised by the reduction of their land rights to a financial instrument to be traded and bought, many of the embodied concepts and values integral to their culture lose their physical integrity, their sense of social solidity. Instead, the T’boli must negotiate new ways of being in a rapidly shrinking world.

As the B-phase in the Kondratieff cycle of core-periphery dynamics deepens and the infrastructures and protections sustaining the core begin to evolve or break down, the entities engaged in core-like processes will fight all that much harder to maintain the status quo. In Wallerstein’s own words,

…just because a system is in crisis does not mean that it does not continue to try to function in its accustomed ways. It does. Insofar as the accustomed ways have resulted in secular trends that are approaching asymptotes, continuing in customary ways simply aggravates the crisis. Yet continuing to act in customary ways will probably be the mode of behavior of most people. It makes sense in the very short run. (Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: an Introduction, 2004, p. 87)

In an earlier time, perhaps it would have been possible for the world-economy to simply acquire more natural resources and expand and subsume new polities to support the capitalist premise of endless accumulation of wealth. But there are no new continents left on this planet, and there are no new groups or polities for the world-system to absorb. There is only the deeper integration of marginal communities –communities in the periphery that are not as deeply embedded in the capitalist market economy- and the dwindling largesse of a finite Earth.

We do not yet know what new form the world-system will take after this; there is certainly no returning to the A-phase of Kondratieff cycles past at this point. But as the world-system fluctuates ever more wildly, and violent responses to the injustices these fluctuations create become more pronounced, eventually, much like Ye Ana and her tribe, we must all learn how to develop a new relationship with our environments and with each other; we must negotiate new ways to be.

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[1] “Ye” means “mother”

[2] Not her real name

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