In Southeast Asia, a plantation boom over recent decades has transformed landscapes and life-making on an immense scale, with some 16 million hectares of land under oil palm cultivation in Indonesia. In Sumatra, the historical origin of Indonesia's oil palm complex and where the societal transformations associated with oil palm have worked out over several generations, nutritional insecurity persists despite a long oil palm boom. This paper sets out to understand this conundrum. We use social reproduction and food system concepts to discuss the predominant circuits of labour, migration and food provisioning practices that lead to these outcomes in two oil palm landscapes: an enclave dominated by agribusiness and smallholder contract farming and an independent smallholder context where villages retain control over land. We explain the food and nutritional outcomes associated with oil palm landscapes by exploring the processes that squeeze the landscapes of social reproduction of labourers and marginal producers.[i] We also consider the forms of autonomy and agency that enable people with low incomes to coax an existence in the crevices of the plantation system. Here, we need to understand care work and poor nutrition (stunting) within more expansive and interconnected circuits of labour, family, education, migration and food system change. This provides a basis for rethinking the plantation sector and food system transitions and considering the processes required to give marginal people greater control over the means necessary for a good life.

Professor John McCarthy is a Lecturer and Researcher at the ANU Crawford School of Public Policy. He is also on the board of the ANU Indonesia Institute and a member of the ANU Institute for Climate Energy and Disaster Solutions. John is an expert on rural development and resource policy in Southeast Asia. He works on problems of environmental governance, rural development, and food security in the global south.