In the rural Indonesian village of Hongoi, indigenous Dayak Modang women like Lina* have had to come up with creative ways to continue their long-held tradition of weaving. Some Dayak women use their skills to sell or exchange their crafts as a source of income. In the absence of the forest materials necessary for this practice, many women have replaced traditional materials like rattan vines with things like single-use plastic cups and straws.
Finding the plastic is the hardest part, Lina told Tessa Toumbourou, a researcher from the University of Melbourne, as quoted in a study published in February in Asia Pacific Viewpoint. Once I have them, weaving them together is easy, it only takes a few nights.
The study examines the relationship between palm oil development and increased gender division in Hongoi, East Kalimantan province, where the Modang community resides. The Modang are a subgroup of the Dayak Kayanic group, who have lived in the area dating back to the 16th century.
The palm oil boom that started in the 2000s brought large-scale deforestation to the region and increasingly diminished access to materials and resources that people once gathered from ancestral forest landscapes.
Researchers focused on three main factors that influenced how palm oil impacted men and women differently: social inequality, livelihood strategies, and food security. The basis of this research was formed on feminist political ecology and it emphasized the act of sustaining livelihoods, despite the pressures of palm oil development, as an act of resistance.
Lead author Toumbourou emphasizes the importance of the Modang community’s ability to maintain the productivity and cultural significance of their land.
Holding onto their land and continuing to sustain a livelihood in these times is an act of resistance, she said in an interview. Communities are under intense pressure to be assimilated into the palm oil industry In such conditions, many assume that communities would inevitably give up. By choosing to maintain their socioeconomic status on their own terms instead of being absorbed into the palm oil industry as landless laborers, they are actively resisting the allocation of resources into external markets.
Over the past decade, all neighboring villages eventually conceded land to oil palm plantations, and Hongoi became completely surrounded by oil palms. In Hongoi and elsewhere in the region, companies have taken advantage of ambiguity in the precise location of village borders to encroach on ancestral forests and farmland.
Though there are different views across the village about how and whether to negotiate with palm oil companies, no one wanted to give up their village land entirely, as this would mean the loss of their autonomy as farmers and their cultural practices and knowledge, Toumbourou said. By sustaining livelihoods, women are also helping to prevent the need for their village to release land to companies and become landless laborers.
Swidden (slash-and-burn) agriculture and cash crops like cocoa, banana and coffee have long been common sources of food and income in the Dayak community. Villagers would also gather food and materials from the forest and nearby river. However, as oil palm plantations have replaced forest landscapes, the loss of resources, as well as the loss of ecosystem services, have threatened main livelihood staples.
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