Debt as Infrastructure: Contract Farming, Labour, and Oil Palm in Montes de María

This thesis interrogates the operation of credit for contracted palm oil production and its impacts on the lives of peasant communities in the Colombian Caribbean. My work presents a detailed account of how credit shapes the operation of contract farming schemes as well as the labouring experiences of peasant palm fruit producers. In this account, I approach debt as an infrastructure of agrarian capitalism that underpins and transforms agrarian lives. In the contract farming scheme I study, the devices through which debt becomes an infrastructure are materialised in the institutional arrangements of contract farming which were created to comply with credit access conditions. This institutional architecture encompasses the peasant palm cooperatives, the price-setting procedures, the exclusivity agreement that tied fruit output to the local palm mill, and the technical package that made peasants dependent on external inputs and expert knowledge provided by the local palm plantation. These contract farming conditions are infrastructures of debt that enable the provision of capital for production, and the circulation and appropriation of surplus value. However, in their operation, these infrastructures facilitate the alienation of landed and landless peasant labour and exploit the unwaged reproductive labour that sustains the life of communities in the oil palm plantation. This thesis begins by placing the debt infrastructures I study in context and subsequently analyses the operation of these infrastructures from the standpoint of labour. On one hand, I analyse how debt infrastructures shape the exploitation of peasants, landed palm fruit producers and plantation workers alike. On the other hand, I show the moral and social reproductive labour required to operate such infrastructures. In my argument, I show how debt infrastructures are based on local land, labour, and capital relations and how these infrastructures transformed each to enable palm fruit production. Debt is an infrastructure that transforms the productive and reproductive labour necessary to produce palm oil.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Martinez Salinas, Joseph

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Nally, David

• plantation
• political economy
• palm oil
• ethnography
• debt
• infrastructure
• agrarian change
• Colombia

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/485787d5-0fce-48c4-b79b-9712a703c300/download
• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.99878

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/353850