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"The Plantation Outside: Externalities in the Unmaking of Asia’s Banana Republic "
Plantation capitalism confronts a serious challenge in the 21st century. For every commodity that travels long-distance chains, there are multiple externalities that are hidden and unaccounted for—not by accident, but by design. Externalities are the unpaid costs of production that are considered external to formal systems of accountability. Commodity traders depend not only on the externalities themselves, but also on the idea—indeed, the conceit—that externalities remain external, that they can permanently be pushed onto others “downstream” without those elements circling back to haunt them. “The Plantation Outside” is about how, when, and why the doubling back of externalities happens in the context of a powerful, but also desperate plantation industry operating within the increasingly constrained ecological conditions of the 21st century. It is based on ethnographic research between the Philippines, a global exporter, and Japan, a major importer of the fruit. In the plantation zones of the Southern Philippine region of Mindanao, externalities like rogue pesticide drift, food waste, water effluent, and fungal pathogens are matters for which the plantocratic elite systematically shirks responsibility. In their pursuit of justice against these unfair externalizations, banana growers, environmental activists, Indigenous peoples, watershed guardians, rank-and-file laborers, and everyday residents on the plantation’s peripheries navigate several arenas of contention in pursuit of new forms of accountability. These include chemical regulatory paradigms, food cosmetic standards, water management systems, and the conventions of science. All these arenas serve as sites where community actors working in conjunction with dynamic, more-than-human ecologies articulate creative and radical counter-plantation politics. Their efforts, this research project contends, reveal that the doubling back of externalities is not an accident nor an inevitability, but rather an achievement of tactical maneuvering. Where scholarship in the environmental humanities and allied fields has largely come to think of the plantation as a landscape and a logic of political impossibility, inexorably tied to slavery, racial capitalism, and monocultures of the mind, this work aims to resuscitate tactics from the Global South towards sometimes modest, sometimes momentous ecological change.
Alyssa Pardes is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology.
