Derek Hall

Land grabs, land control, and Southeast Asian crop booms

This paper argues that research into the dynamics of land control in the contemporary ‘land grab’ can benefit from engagement with the literature on booms in the production of crops like cocoa, coffee, fast-growing trees, oil palm, rubber and shrimp in Southeast Asia. This literature can help answer three key questions: who seeks to exercise control over land for the purpose of growing export-oriented crops under boom conditions; how would-be producers bring tobear regulatory power, market power, force, and legitimation to gain control over land; and how booms differentially affect areas with secure and insecure land control relations.

Certify Sustainable Aquaculture

Certifications limited contribution to sustainable aquaculture should complement public and private governance. Aquaculture, the farming of aquatic organisms, provides close to 50% of the worlds supply of seafood, with a value of U.S.

The 2008 World Development Report and the political economy of Southeast Asian agriculture

125 billion. It makes up 13% of the worlds animal-source protein (excluding eggs and dairy) and employs an estimated 24 million people (1). With capture (i.e., wild) fisheries production stagnating, aquaculture may help close the forecast global deficit in fish protein by 2020 (2). This so-called “blue revolution” requires addressing a range of environmental and social problems, including water pollution, degradation of ecosystems, and violation of labor standards.

Environmental Change, Protest, and Havens of Environmental Degradation: Evidence from Asia

This article seeks to determine what light the literature on the political economy of agriculture in Southeast Asia can shed on the analysis that underpins the World Banks 2008 World Development Report, Agriculture for Development. It argues that work on Southeast Asia highlights gaps and problems in the Banks account relating to the dynamics of boom crops, to the nature of social and political mobilisation around agriculture, and to the conceptualisation of agrarian transition.

Pollution export as state and corporate strategy: Japan in the 1970s

This paper explores the relevance for the debate on pollution havens of two cases from the international political economy of Japan-Southeast Asia relations. It begins by suggesting that the typical focus of the pollution havens literature is too narrow, and concentrates instead on the broader question of the extent to which the environmental transformations associated with particular sectors influence their international siting patterns. The first casethe changes in Japanese FDI to Asia in the 1970sdemonstrates that Japanese firms and the Japanese state consciously attempted to relocate highly-polluting industry in order to escape anti-pollution protest in Japan. The second casethe effort to create in Asia and the Pacific an export-oriented industrial tree plantation (ITP) sector supplying regional pulp and paper marketsshows, somewhat counterintuitively, that political contestation related to the environmental problems caused by ITPs has encouraged Japanese companies to concentrate their tree planting activity not in Southeast Asia but in Australia.

What happened when the land grab came to Southeast Asia

ABSTRACT Most economists examining the question of ‘pollution havens’ have concluded that the level of environmental regulation and activism in different states is not generally a significant determinant of international patterns of trade and foreign direct investment. This paper argues on the basis of extensive primary research that with respect to Japans foreign direct investment during the 1970s, at any rate, this conclusion needs to be rethought. In the early 1970s, Japanese actors were remarkably forthright in ascribing their investment decisions to a desire to move polluting industry overseas. These statements allow us to examine ‘pollution export’ as a state strategy, a project advocated by industry organizations, and a response of individual firms to high levels of protest and regulation. The paper also traces the development of the Japanese debate over pollution export through the 1970s.

Resource allocation in urban services: Spatial response to financial constraints with reference to health visiting in Kent, England

This introduction to the collection seeks to determine to what extent the specialist regional literature on agrarian and environmental transformations in Southeast Asia has responded to land grab studies, and how scholarship on Southeast Asia contributed to the broader field. We argue that at the centre of land grab studies is what Mara Goldman calls a ‘standardized package’ that we use to explore the ways that the field of land grab studies has been taken up in the Southeast Asian literature; the places and topics that receive the most attention and those that tend to be deemphasised and underrepresented; and efforts to critique and ‘decentre’ the global land grab and processes of land grabbing in the existing literature and in the contributions to this collection. We suggest that Southeast Asian scholars contributed to the dynamism of the field by pushing for greater nuance, context and historical specificity, and integration of longstanding academic theories and concerns. These efforts are part of the productive tension between opening up the range of topics and processes under study on the one hand, and maintaining unity and centring of the field on the other, that has been fundamental to land grab studies.

Applied social area analysis: Defining and evaluating areas for urban neighbourhood councils

Abstract Part of urbanised South East England is used to discuss some of the spatial allocation problems of a reorganised health service region under conditions of financial constraint. In particular, the role and response of health visiting services are scrutinised so as to examine the relationship between stringent financial control, changing spatial organisation patterns and actual primary health-care requirements.

Food with a visible face: Traceability and the public promotion of private governance in the Japanese food system

Abstract Urban neighbourhood councils, neither statutorily established nor widely initiated in England, are seen to possess a number of advantages over existing forms of representative participation in relation to the equitable distribution of resources. In Portsmouth a community area perception survey and principal components analysis of census data were undertaken to produce synthesised ‘best fit’ social sub-areas upon which to base neighbourhood councils. These areas were then analysed in terms of their relevance and appropriateness, terms specifically defined, along four scale dimensions. An original contention that for maximum effectiveness neighbourhood councils should be established to cover all urban residential areas was confounded by the manifest irrelevance of the neighbourhood council concept in certain socio-spatial contexts.