Social Sciences Brown Bag

This is a past event.

Friday, October 21, 2016, 12 pm– 1 pm

This is a past event.

 Jonathan Robins, Assistant Professor of History, will present, "Recycling policy:  the 'Nucleus Estate' model and the global palm frontier, 1900-2000"

 

Abstract:

This talk explores the long career of an old idea: the "nucleus estate." When palm oil production was first mechanized in the early twentieth century, many smallholders in Africa found it more profitable to continue manufacturing oil by hand, instead of selling fruit to mills. The "nucleus estate" was first envisioned as a backup plantation for mills, ensuring that they could operate without smallholder participation. Over the twentieth century, the idea of a core plantation in the midst of smallholders was re-imagined as an agricultural school, a resettlement project, a research laboratory, and a nursery for trees. The model jumped from Africa to Southeast Asia and was adopted by the World Bank in the 1960s, without any critical examination of the model's troubled history in the colonial era. While the model's leading advocate in the late 20th century, Malaysia, has dropped the approach, the model continues to influence discussions of economic development, land rights, and environmental sustainability on the expanding frontier of oil palm production in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

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