Multifrictional Crops: The Social Lives of Cacao and Oil Palm in Times of Extinction and Hope.

From wild trees to world crop commodities, from forest destroyers to forest saviors: cacao and oil palm have a special place in histories of global socio-environmental connections. Responding to threats posed by the expansion of commodity agriculture to climate and biodiversity, policy-makers now seek solutions in these tree-crops themselves. They are deemed to be able to integrate multiple ecosystem services with commodity production to improve communities' livelihoods. This project engages with the analytical challenge of an improved understanding of the complex relationships between the material specificities of cacao and oil palm, and the human meanings and values that make them drivers of both extinction and hope. Through the innovative conceptual approach of multifrictional crops, this research follows cacao and oil palm from Congolese forests to Dutch and Belgian cities and ports. It looks at how various forms of environmental governance and knowledge, everyday practices, and multispecies relations come in tension to shape the social-ecological lives of these crops, and those of the people and landscapes who grow them. Comparing a nonnative to a native crop in the Congo Basin allows to explore the importance of cultural-environmental histories and of place-based knowledge to (agro)biodiversity. As such, it will critically broaden conceptions of sustainability and justice to ask how ethical human-nonhuman encounters can be built so as to produce just outcomes.

Keywords:SUSTAINABILITY

Disciplines:Conservation and biodiversity, Sustainable agriculture, Cultural economics, economic sociology, economic anthropology, Ecological anthropology, Other social and economic geography not elsewhere classified

Project type:Collaboration project