Independent small-scale producers have played central roles in organizing and industrializing capitalist production of high-value seafoods in Asingi and the Hope Islands, two coastal villages in Sulawesi, Indonesia. The accomplishments of these ethnically Bugis entrepreneurs break with a history of state and corporate-led capitalist seafood production in other parts of Indonesia. This dissertation answers four questions about the political economic, social, and ecological transformations in these two cases. First, how have small-scale producers gained and maintained control of production in these places? Second, how has their industrialization of production allowed them to consolidate this control? Third, how have their practices perpetuated a historical pattern of opportunistic, environmentally-destructive resource exploitation in the Indonesian archipelago? Finally, how has the continued control of foreign capitalists over processing and exporting limited the ability of these small-scale producers to move into higher-value stages of production and marketing, and to contribute to the industrialization of the Indonesian economy? In answering these questions I focus particularly on the how the nature of coastal territories and marine commodities has affected processes of primitive accumulation, commoditization, and nature's subsumption under capital. I demonstrate that the dynamics of enclosure, credit-based contracting, uncertainty and risk, and state intervention in the production of "live reef food fish" (large coral reef fish sold alive in restaurants) for export to Hong Kong, have differed significantly from those in the production of aquacultured black tiger shrimp for export to Japan. I argue that these distinctive dynamics of production in fisheries and aquaculture warrant the theoretical recognition of specifically aquarian – not agrarian – capitalism and transition in Indonesia. This line of inquiry into the nexus of capitalism, nature, and tropical marine commodities at the turn of the millennium contributes to scholarly debates in political ecology, agrarian studies, and economic geography, while also contributing to studies of the Indonesian economy and regional agro-food restructuring in East and Southeast Asia.
email: fougeres@gmail.com