Agricultural Development, the State, and Smallholders: Oil Palm in Malaysia and Nigeria

• In Event: 485 - Section on Sociology of Development Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 05. States, Bureaucracy, and Civil Society

Abstract

This paper examines whether states play a crucial role in facilitating economic development and why state intervention promotes development in some countries more than others. It applies these questions to agriculture by focusing on the cases of smallholder production of oil palm in Malaysia and Nigeria. In the former, the state, through the Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA), was effective at expanding the nascent oil palm subsector by using efficient, capital-intensive production and processing, and incorporating poor peasants for the first time into the production system. In Nigeria, in contrast, the state was unable to significantly increase output or alter the production methods of oil palm peasants.

While the Malaysian state had a relatively rational and skilled bureaucracy, giving it high intrinsic capacity, the divergence in the effectiveness of oil palm promotional policies was also the result of the states operating in vastly different contexts. This paper argues that the different class structures and extent of capitalism created different contexts that mediated the state’s development of extrinsic capacity—its capacity to implement policies by securing the cooperation of outside social groups. The greater development of capitalism in Malaysia resulted in differentiation of the peasantry, creating new classes of peasants willing to participate in the state’s development programs and helping the state build its extrinsic capacity. In Nigeria, capitalism remained underdeveloped and the peasantry relatively undifferentiated, which largely deterred peasants from cooperating with the government’s efforts to promote new production systems and technology to improve productivity.

Author

• Sheffield Emi Lesure, NYU