Fortress Farming: Agrarian Transitions, Livelihoods, and Coffee Value Chains in Indonesia (Cornell Series on Land: New Perspectives on Territory, Development, and Environment) - Softcover

Neilson, Jeff

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501780921 ISBN 13: 9781501780929

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2025

Synopsis

Fortress Farming identifies in Indonesia's rural coffee-growing regions an alternative livelihood strategy that is reshaping relationships with land and informing Indonesia's agrarian transition. Jeff Neilson presents "fortress farming" households as ones that are reluctant to embrace productivity-maximizing agriculture, even as they interact with commodity markets and powerful downstream companies. Rather, these households tenaciously maintain access to land as a last defense against insecurity in a precarious global economy, all the while actively tapping into off-farm income sources. Fortress farming confounds assumptions that the development process entails an inevitable transition away from the land and into city-based manufacturing.

Shifting away from production to take a fuller view of rural Indonesian coffee-growing communities, Fortress Farming explores how and why defensive farming strategies have emerged, and what these tendencies mean for our understanding of agrarian transition in late-industrializing countries in the early twenty-first century. Neilson posits that late-industrializing countries may never undergo a full agrarian transition: In the alternative livelihood practice of fortress farming, we see a way that local social institutions can resist, or at least modify, the productive forces of capitalist agriculture.

About this title

About the Author

Jeff Neilson is Associate Professor of Economic Geography at the University of Sydney. He is the coauthor of Value Chain Struggles and the coeditor of Global Value Chains and Global Production Networks.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1501780921
• ISBN 13: 9781501780929
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 306