Oil Palm versus Rubber: GIS Empirical Check for Land Grabbing in West Kalimantan

Land grabbing or “the large-scale acquisition of land or land-related rights and resources by
corporate entities” (White, et.al., 2012: 619) has become one of the important issues in agrarian
studies. Without neglecting the gravity of land grabbing as “a regressive land reform where
governments take land from the poor and give (or sell or lease) it to the rich” and its consequences to
small farmers’ life, it must be put into consideration that every attempt to take away lands always meets
resistance from farmers. This paper is to examine how farmers calculation of cost and benefit of two
market crops, namely palm oil and rubber related to their effort to deal with plantation companies’
moves to land grab and convert a vast area into palm oil fields. Ethnographic data is collected through a
series of fieldwork in Meliau sub-district, West Kalimantan, 2010, 2011, 2013. Satellite image of the
area is obtained from Google Earth.