THIRD CONFERENCE OF EUROSEAS 2001

Environmental Change and Livelihood Politics: Linking Labour and Environmental Agendas

Panel convenors: Becky Elmhirst (School of the Environment, University of Brighton, UK) and Ratna Saptari (International Institute for Social History, Netherlands)

Abstracts

Cash crop farming, labour migration, and tree-cutting among the Ifugaos in upland northern Philippines

Edsel Sajor
Amsterdam School for Social Science Research
University of Amsterdam

Netherlands Environmental advocates often privilege the role of indigenous regimes of resource access in the uplands in sustainable forest practices, often ignoring the dynamic part played by changing labour patterns on local people's resource use. One such case are the Ifugaos in the uplands of northern Luzon, Philippines, who are known for their indigenous institution of private woodlots ('muyong/pinugo') that has undeniably played a crucial function in maintaining balance in local agroforestry. In recent decades, this institution has had contrary consequences to local environment, as local people intensify tree cutting to modernise and upgrade their housing. Consumption of higher quality housing has been supported by the rise in cash incomes due to livelihood shift from subsistence rice farming to commercial vegetable gardening and migration of labour to urban centres and overseas. This new housing consumption has been constituted as well by alterations in dominant meanings attached to housing forms, as local people participating in market-oriented farming and migration change their social referencing in a vastly expanded socio- cultural horizon. This paper argues for the importance of studying patterns of labour among indigenous peoples and the changes that these induce on local socio-symbolic domain in examining the merits of integrating indigenous resource regimes in government sustainable development programs.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Resource Conflicts and Resin Production in North Halmahera, North Maluku, Indonesia

Jennifer Leith
School of Development Studies
University of East Anglia UK

Copal is the name given to the hard resins which originate from the dipterocarp Agathis species of South East Asia, used commercially in varnish and paint manufacture. Indonesia today is the biggest supplier and exporter of copal on the world market, along with a similar resin, damar, collected in Indonesia from the Shorea sp, Anisoptera sp, Hopea sp and Vatica dipterocarps.

Copal and damar are also traditional forest products gathered by men in the upland areas in Halmahera, North Maluku. Tapping the trees at least 25 years old by v shaped cuts in the bark, they would return weeks or months later to collect the hard blocks of resin slumped on the ground. The resins were used locally for torches and lamp oil, for caulking boats and as a source of incense and medicines. First traded from Indonesia to Europe in the 1820s, international trade in resins has been recorded in official statistics in North Maluku since the 1880s. Agathis also produces a high class valuable timber, and Agathis today are plantation sources for timber in Central Maluku.

Copal and to a lesser extent damar collection in North Maluku was part of a local livelihood strategy for migrant labourers who travelled to the rich sources of the resins at Kao, to the island of Morotai in Kao Bay, and to Bacan and Obi, islands off the west coast of Halmahera. From careful records made by missionaries and Dutch officials in the early part of the century, trips would occur after rice harvests, part of the regular seasonal livelihood strategies of the Galela of north Halmahera. Trips increased in frequency with periods of drought and the disease of the cacao trees, which they depended on for cash crops. Resin producing trees were held individually and by communities, and were not possessions of the Sultan of Ternate. Given their productivity of more than 30 years, they were passed on though inheritance.

Between the years 1980-85, Maluku provincial statistics show a sharp decline of more than 60% in the output of copal resin This period also coincides with the with expansion of the provincial forest territory classified by the Department of Forestry (the result of the 1982 Forest Use Agreements (TGHK) and the new licensing of forest concessions in Halmahera and elsewhere in Indonesia. PT .Pan Tunggal, part of the larger Barito Pacific conglomerate of tycoon Bob Hasan began logging the valuable Agathis sp the source of Kao copal, west of the Kao River, North Maluku.

Using a political ecology framework, and oral histories collected in 1995-96, this paper presents a case study of a coastal village of Galela migrants in Kao North Halmahera, who settled in the early years of the 20th century to collect resins. Now without rights to the trees under forest concessions, this paper documents some of the conflicts, issues and outcomes in resource based livelihoods faced by the people of Tabobo, Kecamatan Kao, North Halmahera.

Gatekeepers of resources: environmental governance, work identities and gender divisions of labour.

Bernadette P. Resurrección
School of Environment, Resources and Development
Asian Institute of Technology Thailand

Natural resource use and management are not altogether free from norms and values people attach to female and male labour. As a case in point, among the Kalanguya of the northern Philippines, gender norms and values are constituted in the bundle of rights and obligations within the marriage contract and religion that deploy women and men to shoulder different resource use and management tasks. Moreover, the Kalanguya norm of the industrious woman has been reconstituted historically: as validating women's esteemed place in the community as livestock raisers and farmers in the past, yet today the norm is employed as a means to control women's labour in agriculture. Current upland development schemes in the Philippines have designed programmes that will harness male elders' groups as community-based resource managers, overlooking the fact that women have been traditional resource managers and may have specific interests in resource use and management.

Among the paddy rice farmers of Chiang Dao district in northern Thailand, water for irrigation is an important resource. Traditionally, irrigation committees had been formed to manage the irrigation system together with its infrastructure and maintenance requirements. These committees have been largely male-dominated, premised on the belief that physical strength is needed to maintain the irrigation system. Physical strength is believed to be a male attribute whereas female labour is considered weak, thus deployed for domestic tasks. However, the gender division in irrigation use and management does not totally reflect these notions attached to male and female labour since women participate in irrigation activities both in the past and in the present. Recently, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has provided a loan package for water management in agriculture to the Thai government. In this package, sub-district river basin committees are being formed to manage irrigation systems. So far, those recruited as members have been male leaders of traditional village-based irrigation committees and local male bureaucrats. This reinforces the gender inequalities within water management and does not conform to the rhetoric of participatory development the ADB purposively adheres to.

This comparative study thus suggests that the interventions of Philippine upland development and the ADB water management loan project - as environmental governance programmes - have mainly privileged men as wielders of power over resources due to hierarchical values attached to male and female labour. These values moreover differ in diverse contexts such as in the localities under study: whereas among the Kalanguya, women are esteemed for their strength and sense of industry, in the Thai case, women are considered men's dependents in irrigation maintenance.

Values and gendered notions of labour relate to work and gender identity. They shape the work opportunities and choices of women and men in resource use and management, the way different types of work, transactions and placements in environmental governance are perceived, and the way gendered work identities are constructed and reinforced. It is also suggested that changes and continuity within the gender divisions of labour have fed into and themselves have been constructed, maintained and validated through other aspects of gender relations such as in local resource intervention initiatives in the form of environmental governance programmes, wider economic re-structuring, intra-household, ethnic and patronage relations.

This comparative case study therefore addresses the values and subjectivities within which the gender divisions of labour acquire their meanings. As a related objective, this study also calls attention to the ambiguous nature of gender relations, where women may not always resist the domineering ways of men in the context of resource management and environmental governance.

Linking labour and environmental organisations during the East Asian crisis. A comparative study of Malaysia and South Korea.

Peter Wad
Department of Intercultural Communication and Management (DICM),
Copenhagen Business School Denmark

Both Malaysia and South Korea were badly hit by the currency and financial crisis in 1997. Both countries went into negative growth rates during 1998, bottomed out in 1999 and achieved renewed growth in 2000. However, many of the roots of the crisis are still not addressed or resolved, among other things corporate debt, the lack of transparency in huge and well connected business conglomerates, the use of environmentally damaging and outdated technologies in manufacturing industries, and unemployment or low paid, low skilled and low safe jobs. Yet the relations between civil society, business and the state are quite different in the two countries during the crisis, South Korea having a more open, democratic society with a 'dissident' government, an active civic movements and militant trade unions, while the environmental movement and trade unions face an increasingly authoritarian regime in Malaysia.

Based on recent field study the paper explores and discuss the relationships between trade unions and environmental groups during and after the East Asian Crisis in Malaysia and South Korea. The question is whether the crisis made trade unions downgrade internal health and safety issues and external environmental issues in order to preserve employment and wages, and thereby offended environmental values and norms and co-operative frameworks with environmental groups? In broader terms, did the crisis create a cleavage within civil society, which facilitated environmental damaging responses to the crisis?

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