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Jeff Neilson, "Fortress Farming: Agrarian Transitions, Livelihoods, and Coffee Value Chains in Indonesia" (Cornell UP, 2025)
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New Books in Southeast Asian Studies is.
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Sponsored by the ANU Southeast Asia Institute, the Griffith Asia Institute, the New York Southeast Asia Network, the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre. Hi, and welcome to the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies series. My name is Colm Graham and I'm a postdoctoral fellow at the National University of Singapore's Asia Research Institute. Coffee. You may have already had coffee. Be having a cup right now or wishing to have one soon. There's also a possibility you may dislike it. After all, tea is the world's second most popular drink of choice after water. A little over a decade ago, the magazine the Economist showed the popularity of coffee and tea is divided geographically, with coffee consumption more prevalent in the global north and tea in the global South. Yet most coffee production occurs in nations of the global South. Indonesia is one such country. The export of coffee from Indonesia has colonial roots. By the early 18th century, the Dutch East India Company dominated the nascent world. Coffee trade, and production on Java's coffee estates contributed to that significantly. Gradually, though, production on Sumatra and Sulawesi by small scale farmers came to overtake them. By 2020, small scale farmers were responsible for 99% of Indonesia's coffee cultivation. Yet coffee, much like other agricultural crops, does not contribute as much wealth in many producing households. As it once did, sources of income derived away from the farm have come to play a much bigger role in Indonesia's rural economy. So why do people continue to produce coffee and other crops when more money can be derived from sources beyond the farm? What role do broader structural factors such as deindustrialization, land laws, corporations, and the government play? Jeffrey Nielsen, who is Associate professor of Economic geography in the University of Sydney's School of Geosciences, has a new book, Fortress Agrarian Transitions, Livelihoods, and Coffee Value Chains, out through Cornell University Press that offers compelling explanations with ethnographic and survey data, and informed by 25 years of experience of research in rural Indonesia. This book analyses Indonesian coffee cultivation in the context of changes to the broader agricultural sector to explain fortress farming, or a defensive mode of production, as a means for rural people to maintain their livelihoods amidst the uncertainties of late capitalism. It causes us to focus on the transforming role of farming in people's lives while keeping the goal of enabling human flourishing in sight. Geoff, thanks very much for agreeing to be on the podcast to talk about fortress farming. We're lucky to have you.
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B
Thanks, Cole. Thanks a lot for having me, and I'm very much looking forward to the conversation.
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C
Great. Well, to begin with, what led you to visit a village in South Sulawesi where coffee was being grown in 1998, a tumultuous year of Suharto's downfall and the 1997. 1998 financial crisis?
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B
Since around 1994, I've been living in and on and off in Jakarta as an exchange student first, and then working for an environmental consulting firm. And one of my student friends, actually, who was ethnic Turajan living and brought up in Jakarta, but he encouraged me when I was thinking about doing an honors level research project, he said, well, I've got family up in Toraja. My sister's helped organize a cultural festival there. We can sort of introduce you to some of the communities there. So that's when I went up there in 1998, which, as you say, was a tumultuous period for sure. I mean, the economic crisis had just hit Indonesia when I started that bout of research. And I know a lot of my student friends who were involved in the protest movement were very active, and I was to join them in some of the protests at the time. Um, but going over to Toraja, interestingly enough, tumultuous, yes, but the, the way that reformat was manifesting in Toraja, it was different, I guess, the rest of Indonesia. There, there, there, there was a, A, a bugis Pupati region in place at the time, who took a very strong line against cockfighting and gambling. And so ref manifested itself in Tirja in this sort of the opening up of cockfighting dens across bamboo groves. Across, across. But anyway, I started doing some research and I was looking at the relationships between Torajan cultural systems and the natural world. And so that sort of involved doing some work at the forest village interface and so doing research in these villages. These are also places where coffee was being grown. And that wasn't my focus at the time, but it triggered an interest that then a few years later when I came to do a. When I came to a PhD or think about doing a PhD, I ended up looking into, yeah, the coffee regions there. I wanted, I wanted to go back and do more work in Toraja, interested in the process of rural development there. I had been talking to someone who became my supervisor, Bill Pritchard at the University of Sydney, and he had a project looking at commodity chains across the Asia Pacific. And coffee was one of those, one of those commodities. And so there was some sort of fortuitous, I guess dovetailing there of his interest in mine. And that's when I started doing research on coffee in Sulawesi.
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C
As you went on with your research over the following couple of decades, you amassed an enormous amount of survey and ethnographic data. Can you talk a little bit about discerning what was most useful from that data field book?
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Since then I've maintained an ongoing relationship, personal and professional with Toraja. And so I've sort of gone back there annually and revisited a lot of the same coffee growing villages that I went to actually in 1998 and 1999. So that sort of has been the focus of the, I guess the ethnographic data that I've collected over time and that's involved a lot of sort of casual engagement with ceremonies, with livelihoods, with the diaspora. And then I've been lucky enough over the years to have a number of projects funded by acr, which is the Australian center for International Agricultural Research. And they have taken a strong interest in supporting coffee related research in Indonesia in quite an applied way. So that sort of has meant that I've been able to work together with Indonesian Coffee and Cocoa Research Institute, which who are based in East Java and through them certainly collect a number of household level surveys. That which then I guess combined together with what I consider the ethnographic approach as well as actual, what we call action research. So a lot of the. My involvement is also an ACR has been very much has pushed me in this direction, I would say. So action research in the sense of working together with roasters, with traders who are developing relationships with farmers and to try to support those relationships and then monitor and conduct research on what those relationships mean, the livelihoods of farmers. So it's also involved me getting very much working quite close with some of these smaller and larger roasting firms. And it's also dragging into the world of consulting for international development agencies and providing advice to icri, the research institute in Java, who also took a very applied approach to their, to their research.
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C
You have this concept, institutional environment that encompasses different structural factors that shape people's livelihoods. What do you mean by institutional environment?
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Yeah, so I mean, I guess that's a term that comes out of two fields of literature, I suppose. One is within the global value chain world itself. So there was initially a reference to institutional frameworks around the chain, which is like the rules and regulations that might dictate actions of value chain actors. And that is something that Bill Pritchard and I developed in a previous book, Value Chain Struggles, where we looked at this as institutional environments encompassing both actors external to the chain, states, governments, NGOs, as well as those within the chain. So it came out of that, that field combined, I guess, with my reading of Douglas north and his work on institutions and economic history. So I think of it sort of as the, you know, the tangled web of incentive structures that shape and affect human behavior. As a geographer, I'm also very much interested in the multiscaler nature of these phenomena. So thinking about the way that the incentive structures for a farmer in southern Sumatra is going to be shaped by institutions, so rules and norms that are both local within the community as well as national and perhaps global. So that's sort of, that's where this idea of institutional environment comes from. It's trying to capture the multiscaler nature of social norms and rules that affect human behavior. And in my case, that's referring to the livelihood strategies of smallholder producers.
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Your book also makes a contribution to debates about livelihoods. Can you speak more about why you use the livelihoods approach?
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Yeah, so I guess I've always been attracted to the work of Robert Chambers and putting the last first and sort of the idea of trying to understand household level strategies from the bottom up. And for me, the livelihoods approach, livelihoods perspective, perhaps even the sustainable livelihoods framework, it still provides the most effective way of capturing that bottom up perspective of households. And I guess I'm very much interested in not only the economic factors that shape behavior, but also non economic factors. So in particular, sort of the cultural resources that might also be shaping behavior. And it seems to me that the livelihoods approach still is the best way of sort of reflecting the lived realities of rural communities. And I guess in particular the way that households put together a diverse portfolio of activities, both farm based or farm based, looking into various sorts of transfers and how they draw upon a range of resources, both financial resources, natural resources and social networks to come up with those strategies.
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C
In addition to institutional environments and livelihoods, your book concerns Indonesia's capitalist agrarian transition on the country's so called outer islands. How do institutional environments and sustainable livelihoods intersect with Indonesia's agrarian transition there?
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B
I mean, I start the book with the assertion that, you know, the onset of the industrial revolution in 1800 or so, that three quarters of the world's population are engaged in farming, and now that's been reduced to about one quarter of the world's population. So there has been a very generalized historical process of economic and social transformation where societies shift from being predominantly agricultural rural to becoming industrialized and urban. So this is sort of a generalized phenomena that I refer to as agrarian transition associated with modernization, urbanization and capitalist transformation, which you, I think, highlighted there in your question. Now, none of these processes are inevitable, of course, and the concept has been rightly critiqued for its theological assumptions about processes of development. But it's also quite clear that empirically this transformation at the side of level has occurred in many contexts, not everywhere. Now, you referenced their capitalist agrarian transition, and that sort of ties in very much I associate with the work of Terrence Byers, who sort of looked at the agrarian transition much more specifically as the capitalist transformation of agriculture. And that is often part of the story. But I don't think it's necessarily a distinguishing feature. So for me, the term is much more societal level change away from a predominance of agriculture towards more urbanized industrialized forms, and as a capitalist transformation of agriculture can be part of it. But one of the things I do highlight in fortress farming, of course, is that that's also not inevitable. And there is a much broader range of approaches that households take towards farming and towards land, rather than necessarily capitalist approach to farming. So when I think of the agrarian transition, I think the question of scale is really important. So as I sort of alluded to a moment ago, at the global scale, I think we could say there has been an agrarian transition that's gone on. We can also think of it at the national level, looking at sort of national level data sets or indeed sub nationally in the different regions of Indonesia, including the Outer Islands, also maybe experiencing their own agrarian transition, which is why sometimes the term, as I'm sure you're aware, is used in the plural agrarian transitions to sort of, to highlight that, that, that, that range. So how would I think about it? What's going on in terms of the outer islands of Indonesia? Well, again, we're talking a very diverse set of factors at play there as well. And you know, Clifford Gates, of course, controversially, perhaps you know, looked at the Outer Islands as being places where there's a lot of smallholder commercial dynamism when it comes to agricultural activities. And contrasting that of course, with what he called agricultural involution in Java today, I guess you'd have to say the dominant process of play in places like Sumatra and on Kalimantan is the growth of palm oil plantations, which are often large scale, commercial, corporate, even investments. But I don't know, there are probably many more households in the Outer Islands are actually involved in smallholder production. You know, they're part of value chains. Yeah, sure, for oil palm and for rubber, but also coffee, cocoa, coconut and other crops. So I guess, yeah. And my research of course looks at a subset of those commodity producing households, the 2 million or so households that are thought to grow coffee as some part of their livelihood. So how do I see all that fitting together? Well, again, it's trying to understand the household level livelihood strategies and how they're shaped by broader structures, institutions and processes. And I guess to give one perhaps really obvious example, it seems that many later industrializing countries, which is what I would call Indonesia, are experiencing so called premature de industrialization. So it seems that sort of that unlike say South Korea, Taiwan and some other countries, it seems that sort of that Indonesia is unlikely to reach the same. That manufacturing in Indonesia is unlikely to reach the same level of importance for the economy and for employment that it has in those northeastern countries. And so many researchers, such as, I guess Danny Roderick is the standout in this regard, has said the no later industrializing countries. De industrialized meaning deindustrializing in the sense that the service sector is becoming more important to the overall economy and to employment at an early stage of the process, of the development process. And I guess so if we're right, that seems to be what's going on in many land industrializing countries. There are of course implications for opportunities for rural households and individuals within those households to get jobs off the farm and so therefore there is what seems to be a so called stalled agrarian transition where households are often partly engaged in non farm activities, but also retaining access to their farmland.
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And so since many farmers have a greater variety of income sources, I wonder what kind of control they can exert within value chains in relation to corporate power.
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Yeah, well, I guess the answer to that is relatively little, except that they retain the autonomy to shift to another value chain. And there is a lot of such shifting that goes on. So perhaps it's worthwhile unpacking a little bit sort of the ideas about corporate power within global value chains and the value chain for coffee in particular. I mean, as I'm sure many of us will be aware, the coffee sector, take that as an example, is now dominated effectively by two large companies, JD Jacobs, Dow Edwards and Nestle, due to a bunch of mergers and takeovers over the last decade. And these roasters, along with Lavazza and Starbucks and Chibo and others, are generally referred to as lead firms within the value chain in the sense that they have a lot of control over the actions and activities of actors elsewhere in the chain, including of course, smallholder farmers who I'm interested in. And these large firms often exercise that power through their own suppliers, their strategic suppliers with global trading firms, firms such as E. Com Olam, Louis Dreyfus, Neumann Group, who are very dominant. And these trading firms are then generally those who are responsible for sourcing coffee from farmers, or perhaps from collectors and traders who source from farmers, of course. And so the ability of these large leaf firms to capture value within the chain has been pretty well documented. And certainly researchers such as Stefano Ponti and Benoit Davyron, who talked about the idea of a coffee paradox being the idea that especially coffee's booming consumers are paying more for coffee, and yet at the farm level the price is pretty much the same as it's always been. And that they link that essentially to the ability of lead firms to both create, but more importantly capture value through symbolic branding exercises. And sometimes that can then translate into benefits for farmers, but not necessarily. And that's kind of been the object of a lot of research in this area. And I guess linked to that corporate power is also the interest that these lead firms have in delivering sustainability programs. The mechanism in the coffee sector anyway, and in some other commodities, the mechanism of exerting power, funnily enough, is often through certification schemes, sustainability programs. So from when I started looking at coffee 20 odd years ago until now, one of the big changes that is really evident is that the actions of these lead Firms and international traders are a lot more pervasive in the growing regions themselves through various training programs and approaches to sustainable farm practices. And that then is then leading to new opportunities for some actors within the producing regions and also the transfer of different sources of resources to farmers as a result of these programs being introduced. So there is some in many other sectors there might be what we refer to as land grabbing going on. In the coffee sector, there's actually very little large scale corporate investment in production. For the most part, lead firms are more than happy to allow production of the farm level to be outsourced to smallholders. Hence the 99% of Indonesian coffee that you cited earlier, which is now grown by by smallholders, which wasn't the case in the colonial era when the role of large commercial plantations was far more important. But the trend has certainly been towards the growth of the smallholder sector.
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Does the nature of such large international corporations dominance help explain Indonesia's relatively low coffee yields?
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Yeah, not necessarily. I mean, so what? Indonesia has had a history of large government extension programs that have been rolled out in coffee. For the most part they have actually been fairly ineffective in increasing yields and productivity. And certainly over the last 10 years or so it's been the actions of these international roasting firms who introduced new farm level technology, or have attempted to introduce new farm level technologies to increase yields. So they often they either companies like Nestle for example, has been very active in Lumpur in trying to introduce high yielding practices. Other companies have been more active through broader industry platforms as a sustainable coffee platform for Indonesia. And so I would actually say that the companies themselves would love to have Indonesian farmers generating higher yields and producing more coffee. At the end of the day, they're interested in shoring up long term supply. So in some ways I would say Indonesia's low yields are, despite active involvement of both the government, more and more importantly these global companies in trying to encourage them to actually increase their yields.
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C
Just to illustrate a bit more the earlier claim about low yields, you have this great table on page 14 that shows coffee yields in major producing countries. It shows Vietnam on top with just over two and a half tons per hectare, and Indonesia at the bottom of this list of seven with just over half a tonne per hectare, if not the broader structure of coffee value chains. What best explains Indonesia's low coffee yields?
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Well, for me, the fortress farming explains it. So in this sense that sort of, that many of those 2 million odd households that are growing coffee are growing it somewhat defensively, they're not growing in A way to maximize. They're growing it in such a way that at the household level it's not necessarily their most important income source. And so therefore they're not willing to allocate resources in terms of both their own or household labor or paid labor and financial capital into increasing those yields.
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C
Where did you get the term fortress farming from?
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B
It came from a farmer in the Cairo highlands of North Sumatra. And I remember visiting his farm and he was incredibly switched on, articulative, a man who clearly had a very good understanding of agronomy and knew everything that needed to be done to increase his yields, you know, perhaps to the end well above the low rates that you cited earlier. And yet, and yet he wasn't doing that. And so I sort of asked him, well, why don't you, why, why don't you then just, you know, you obviously know how to increase the yields, but you're not, why, why don't you increase them? And he responded and said something along the lines of coffee. So he said to me, no coffee, that's just a livelihood fortress. I just depend on that when times are tough. But there's no way I can actually really get ahead through coffee. And that was the origin of this idea which does very much focus on what's sometimes called the social safety net role of farming.
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C
What kind of household economic changes have gone on in the book's case study areas to Raja and Semende that mean farming coffee is undertaken in a defensive mode or as a social safety net.
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B
The two case studies are in some ways quite different. I mean they're different in terms of scale, first of all. So Toraja encompasses two districts, Kabalpatten, and you're looking at maybe 500 to 600,000 people living in those districts. Semenda is three sub districts. So you look at maybe 30,000, 40,000 people. So they're a different scale. And so therefore Tirudja are also encompasses fairly large to two large towns which cemented doesn't have. So that sort of also affects the nature of farm employment. Looking at the scale analysis, so the changing role of farming within diversified rural economies, of course well documented across Southeast Asia. So I don't think what I'm presenting in these two case studies is that much of a, an anomaly as such. I think it's part of much, much broader trend. And so to take to take the example of Toraja, first of all, you're saying this is a place which has been a region that's been engaged with the global coffee industry for at least 150 years. So it goes back to the mid 19th century and prior to colonial interventions in these highlands. And I guess part of my analysis is that even despite that long history, that has not necessarily meant a capitalist or productivist approach to coffee farming itself. Now there are a range of non farm rural income generating activities as there are in any landscape. And normally it starts off with collectors, with small scale traders, with warungs, with stalls, and then service providers, maybe hairdressers, restaurants, grocery stores, et cetera. So that usual sort of development of non farm services, sometimes providing services to farmers. But in the case of Toraja, you're also looking at quite an active phenomena of migration and remittances. So from at least the late 1960s there's been a fairly strong out migration, and again, not necessarily unique to Raja. And then it's the remittances are often sent back to those households which is seen as a greater, of greater importance to their overall household livelihoods than the coffee farm in itself is. Even though the local generation of cash may actually be more important from coffee, but at the household levels, often remittances that drive that. And again in the case of Traja, it's remittances that are fueled through participation in various forms of ceremonial activity. And that then is generating a whole range of secondary non farm rural income activities in the sense of musicians, people making palm wine for the ceremonies, people, decorators, et cetera. So there's a whole series of jobs related to providing services to activities that are fueled by reminiscences.
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C
So in some sense then you could say that the off farm economy is funding the preservation of a farming cultural identity.
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B
Yeah, with the. Yes, I would say that, but with the caveat that it's not preserving in a sense of preserving something that's unchanging. The idea of the cultural identity within these rural regions is also evolving and changing constantly. I would say that it's definitely proactively generating a cultural identity. And in some sense there is continuity with the past in that cultural identity.
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Related to continuity with the past, a central component of fortress farming appears to me to be risk aversion. And risk aversion is a key aspect of the kinds of dynamics that James Scott was describing in the book Moral Economy of the Peasant. In that book it was risk aversion against subsistence failure. I wonder to what extent fortress farming is a transposed dynamic of moral economy where people are no longer risk averse against subsistence failure, given the household economic changes we've been talking about. But instead are Risk averse about something.
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B
Else as opposed perhaps to when James Scott's moral economy was being written or devised. There are far greater networks going on now beyond the village environment. And so it seems to me that investment in agriculture and farming can be considered the dependent variable that depends on the success or not of off farm endeavors. So many households it seems me, are network into either locally based non agricultural activities or perhaps more likely are commuting or migrating to urban areas. And then some of whom are successful, some of whom aren't for whatever reason they might be at a personal level or it might be a systemic level whereby the Asian financial crisis Covid has triggered a reversal of rural urban migration where people have gone back to the farm where and I should a small footnote, I should say where they have continued access to that farmland. And of course in those instances where individuals have been forced off their land or have their land appropriated by large scale infrastructure or mining or plantation programs, of course they may have lost that access to land. But in those instances where they have had access they can use it as something of a, of a buffer for their livelihoods. So yes, fortress farming, a key aspect of it is this social section it role but it's also related to the transfer of resource which is the other key aspect of the concept as I see it. So I highlighted before remittances sometimes sent back via ceremonial networks. But there are of course a whole range of different resource transfers that go on including government social protection payments, payments for ecosystem services in some cases and even sometimes transfers along the value chain where buyers companies are implementing value chain programs which is resulting in training. It's resulting in new jobs being created locally and payments for the landscape service of continuing to grow coffee. So yeah, there are resonance with James Scott's concept of a moral economy and the so called safety first principle. But the key difference of course is that the rural or peasant communities today are far more in mesh in these broader networks which allows, which allows them access to a much greater range of resource flows.
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C
What do you see as some of the implications of fortress farming?
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B
Well, I guess firstly I think it means that there may well be a stalled agrarian transition going on in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia. Which means that many households in late industrializing countries will continue to have a partial dependence on farming going ahead. I think that might be a like a somewhat like it's very fraught of course to make predictions. I think that may well be an outcome for Indonesia. And then secondly I guess the farming systems and this comes back to Your question earlier about the productivity levels in Indonesian coffee, but. So farming systems may not necessarily be oriented towards a productivist approach. And if that's the case, then we may need a different attitude towards agricultural research and extension and development. So conventionally, these research and extension has been focused on maximizing yields, but it may actually be more beneficial to focus on minimizing labor and perhaps creating systems that are likely to attract different resource transfers, such as payments for ecosystem services. So may require quite a different understanding of research and extension. And then the implications I think it has for resource Kenya, ensuring that households maintain access to land, perhaps to fishing grounds and perhaps forests, appears to me to take on a whole new level of importance. And so whereas if you were to look at a Indonesian coffee farm producing only 500kg per hectare, and you say, okay, that's really low productivity, surely a corporate plantation can take that over and increase yields and that would be better for everyone. That is a justification. It's not that unrealistic. We certainly hear it in relation to swidden farming in the Outer Islands. But I think then thinking about new systems of resource access for communities and how they. The justification for their for preserving such access should not rely on enhancing productivity and gdp, but it can be based more on a livelihood resilience argumentation. For example, in Indonesia recently there's been a fairly strong movement towards legal recognition of customary tenure across the country that may be an avenue or a mechanism through which sort of access to resources for livelihood resilience could actually be strongly supported.
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C
I wonder what your hopes are for the future direction of research about agrarian Indonesia.
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B
Well, I guess answering that question, I can't help but be flavored by what I've found in Fortress Farm and what I see to be sort of the. If I'm right, that this is a relatively widespread phenomena, and I should say, of course, that the experiences of rural Indonesia, let alone rural Southeast Asia, are incredibly diverse. And there are certainly instances of, as I alluded to earlier, the growth of oil palm plantations, for example, is a key factor shaping agrarian change. But I do think that what I've observed through Fortress farming is relatively widespread and I think it will have resonances across not only Indonesia, but hopefully the broader region. And so I guess if I'm right, I'd like to think there'd be future research trying to understand those evolving cultural attitudes towards farming and then attitudes towards rural homelands. And I'm thinking here, particularly the sorts of work that Ben White has done in understanding the role of youth in farming and the Intergenerational attitude. So, you know, often. Or the work of Jonathan Rigg in Thailand where he sort of said, okay, well the older generation is still maintaining the farm because they've always been farmers and that's just what they do. But the kids are not so sure and the grandkids don't even know where the fields are. And so there is this big question as well. Is that attitude to retaining relationships with rural areas and to the farm going to die out in the next generation or. And this is where sort of the direction of cultural change, of course, is so unpredictable. And you never know whether it's likely to be a resurgence in sort of a back to the farm movement, for example. And there is some evidence of that occurring, I guess the work of Jean Van der Plug in Europe and the New Peasantries and I'm reading similar things in China as well. So I guess that whole area sort of think about the cultural attitudes, particularly amongst the younger generation now and how that's going to evolve towards farms. I think that's a really exciting area of research. Also following on from my thoughts on resource transfers. Sorry, I'm using that term to specifically refer to the way that rural households depend on a range of transfers, often from urban areas into the rural communities and how they are. They do appear to be important factors that are supporting livelihoods. So trying to understand the full range of those resources. And that I think will include payments for ecosystem services and various landscape services, either through formal programs, but also as I document in fortress farming through informal networks and the preservation of cultural attitudes.
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C
Fascinating. Well, to wind up our discussion, can you tell listeners about your current endeavours?
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B
Yeah, well, probably too much and probably spreading myself too thin. But one area is the work on customary tenure. So I'm doing some work now that's trying to understand these new systems of resource rights based on adult recognition. So that is one area of research I'm working on right now. I've also been working for the last three or four years in, in Vietnam and the central highlands of Vietnam, which is one of the world's centers of coffee production. It's undergoing a very different agrarian transition to Indonesia. And I'm trying to piece. Piece that together. It's sort of. Obviously the. The socialist history of Vietnam has led to very different relationships with land over time. And the central highlands in particular have led to a lot of dispossession of sort of customary relationship with land. So there's that. That research activity I'm also trying to piece together and I'll just start a new project in Timor Leste as well, where the production systems are probably a bit more aligned with what I describe in fortress farming.
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C
And I wonder finally, if you have any books you're currently reading to recommend.
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B
I've just finished reading Gerald Hickey's trilogy of books on the Vietnam Central Highlands. He did a lot of research, essentially 1950s through to the early 1970s books such as Sons of the Mountain, Free in the Forest, and Shattered World. So that's what I've just finished reading, obviously related to my research there. I'm currently reading a book, Turning Land into Capital, which is by Phil Hirsch and Natalia Scudder and a few other colleagues. Again looking at land issues in the Mekong. On my to Read list. I'm allowed to include that.
- [41:10]
C
Absolutely.
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B
I really want to read Sango Mahanty's work on market formation in the Cambodia Vietnam borderlands, and also Miles Kenny Lazar's work Socializing Land Again in Laos. So for the moment, my reading focuses, I'm just realizing as I'm verbalizing it, there is quite focused on mainland Southeast Asia.
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C
Well, thanks again for being on to discuss Fortress Farming, Agrarian Transitions, Livelihoods, and Coffee Value Chains, published by Cornell University Press in 2025.
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B
Well, thank you, Colin. Thanks for showing an interest in fortress farming and for the conversation we had today, and I'm looking forward to hearing whether you see any resonances in your own work in Java going ahead.
- [41:58]
C
Sure. I look forward to talking more about it off the podcast. You have been listening to new books in Southeast Asian Studies. You can download many more interviews about books focused on Southeast Asia or on other themes you may be interested in via the New Books Network website or wherever you download your podcasts. Thanks for listening.
- [42:19]
B
Sam.