Paul K. Gellert - "Ecologically Unequal Exchange from Indonesia and New Zealand: Examining China’s Benefits from the Intertwined Palm Oil and Dairy Sectors"

Dubious societal benefits and tremendous environmental harms are emanating from the production of palm oil and dairy products in the Asia Pacific. Palm kernel expeller (PKE) – a ‘flex’ commodity that is a ‘waste’ by-product from palm oil processing in Indonesia – has grown into a billion-dollar export to supplement dairy cow feed and thereby address the ecological limits of intensifying grassfed dairy operations in New Zealand. Although neoliberal trade liberalization has led to significant revenue from palm oil and dairy for both exporting countries, the trade illustrates newly emerging structural relationships between China and the Asia Pacific region and represent ecologically unequal exchange (EUE). EUE offers an integrated framework to address how the structure of global production and trade simultaneously produces capital accumulation and wealth and environmental degradation and socioeconomic losses. In effect, PKE bolsters the already huge impact of oil palm plantation expansion across the archipelago and also the corporate profits from the expansion. While EUE is most frequently applied to environmental injustice between global North and South or core and periphery, this paper examines the complexities of the middle or semiperipheral position of Indonesia and New Zealand while providing a window into questions about China’s increasingly dominant role in the global dairy industry, in the region, and in the world.

Paul K. Gellert is Visiting Research Scholar, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, CUNY Graduate Center and Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Tennessee. He has conducted research in Indonesia since the mid-1990s, focusing on the environmental political economy of commodity extraction, agro-extractivism and developmentalism, from logging and plywood to coal and palm oil. He is currently investigating climate obstruction in the Global South with support from the Climate Social Science Network (CSSN). He co-edited Ecologically Unequal Exchange: Environmental Injustice in Comparative and Historical Perspective (Palgrave, 2019) and a special issue of The Journal of World-Systems Research on Ecologically Unequal Exchange in Comparative Perspective. His work has been published in Journal of Contemporary Asia, Journal of Asian Studies, Political Geography, PLOS Climate, and Globalizations.