Unearthing Production
A roundtable discussion with Chris Abdul Hakim Martinez, Perdana “Pepe” Roswaldy, and Peter Vale
Broken oil palm tree in Riau, Indonesia. Photograph by Pepe Roswaldy, January 31, 2023.
Pandemics, wars, and political shocks throw the prices of everyday consumer goods into disarray for people around the world. But what about the slow-burning production of the copper electrifying our cities, the aluminum in our appliances and packaging, and the palm oil in our processed foods and shampoos? Submerged commodities with obscure origins knit the world market together. We asked three HPE Project grantees – Chris Abdul Hakim Martinez (‘23), Perdana “Pepe” Roswaldy (‘23), and Peter Vale (‘24) – to discuss their historical research with an eye toward contemporary issues facing Global South governments and green transition economies.
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Each of you studies the production and extraction of a resource from a particular spot on the earth, though within shifting political and social contexts. Tell us about the landscapes, labor processes, and global consumption patterns that you examine.
Pepe Roswaldy (PR): I study Indonesia’s persistent expansion of oil palm plantations. Indonesia is the world’s largest producer of palm oil, arguably one of the most contentious cash crops, and I examine the state’s reasoning for promoting its palm oil economy amidst the crop’s contribution to deforestation, biodiversity collapse, rural poverty, and socio-political unrest. In addition to my commodity focus, my analytical device is plantations – a political-economic institution and a socio-spatial gridlock of exploitative labor rearrangement and violent ecological (re)construction. We can find palm oil everywhere, from cars and shampoos to vegan-friendly substitutes. This ubiquity hides those workers who break their bones carrying 150-pound fresh fruit bunches every day, women workers who suffocate from spraying glyphosate for ten hours, child labor, and farmers who are $15 million in debt. The whole production is severely atomized, making palm oil’s supply chain hard to trace.
Chris Abdul Hakim Martinez (CM): I focus on a mineral ore called bauxite – the ore that is used to source nearly all of the world’s aluminum. As opposed to the images that often come to mind when talking about mining in Africa (the deep underground gold mines in South Africa or the unregulated, so-called “artisanal” mining of coltan in Congo), bauxite mining in Guinea has historically been capital-, rather than labor-, intensive. Because bauxite is mined according to economies of scale, the labor process largely depends on the use of heavy machinery to move tens of thousands of tons of bauxite-rich earth daily from the mining sites to bauxite trains or trucks and eventually to be exported from Guinea’s large industrial ports. While until the mid-20th century, most of the world’s aluminum was produced from Caribbean bauxite sources (especially from Jamaica, Suriname, and Guyana), Guinea’s extensive and high-grade bauxite reserves came to be perhaps the most important in the world by the mid-1970s.
Peter Vale (PV): My research focuses on copper mining and production in the southern Democratic Republic of Congo, a region known as Katanga. While there is much to say about mining industries in Congo today, the copper industry is, similar to Chris’s case of bauxite in Guinea, unique in the Central African context because it is highly formalized and based, almost exclusively, around corporations. This is in contrast to the more hybrid, artisanal-industrial Congolese mining systems in cobalt, gold, and coltan, which Chris also mentioned.
In large part, copper’s geological availability conditioned the development of particular approaches to mining and refining it. In the early 20th century, copper ore may have achieved a concentration as high as 10% or 15%, but today, miners are often working with less than 1-2% copper – a reality that makes it essential to smelt and refine the metal relatively close to the extraction site. Of course, those with the capital to erect large refining and processing plants have historically been large corporations – specifically, the colonial Union Minière and its postcolonial nationalized incarnation of Gécamines. Through large-scale corporate investment in mining towns, a class of mining laborers emerged around the three primary regions of extraction (Lubumbashi, Likasi, and Kolwezi). So while there have been intermittent moments of labor organizing in the copper mining sector, much of the 20th century is a story of a mining class that slowly differentiated itself from the rest of the population until the civil conflicts and economic ruptures in Congolese society during the 1990s and 2000s.
Each of you emphasizes the large-scale production and ubiquitous consumption of these resources. How did we get here? How should we understand shifts between the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial cultivations of palm oil, bauxite, and copper? Are there clean breaks between the strategies deployed by political regimes during these phases? Which for you are the most salient debates among different factions of producers, and how would you characterize their competing visions?
PR: Palm oil in Indonesia has a colonial origin; Dutch botanists brought Elaeis guineensis to Indonesia in 1848. The colonial persistence of monoculture systems and the spatial gridlock of plantations remain. Despite this, the funding and labor rearrangement in the plantations have changed. Contemporary debates in palm oil plantations mostly center on the consequences of palm oil. Important as these conversations are, they tend to get stuck on how to improve production and support ethical consumption, obscuring the very labor that feeds the world and the question of why plantations exist in the first place. Centering such labor in palm oil plantations could not be more pertinent.
Plenty of research has shown skepticism toward, if it has not outright rejected, the notion that expanding production benefits those whom plantation companies claim to help, let alone the idea that plantations can be truly sustainable. Current scholarship has also examined how plantations actually operate on the ground, and how they connect to the global pattern of cash crop production. I would also highlight that the role of the state changes – I would suggest it has become worse than just an accomplice to private capital. The government of Indonesia has its own interests and historically adapted these interests to the global dynamics of cash crop production and now to the rise of green funds and markets such as carbon trading in the palm oil economy.
CM: While the mining of bauxite in Guinea began on a small scale while it was still a colony of France, Guinean bauxite did not become globally consequential until after independence in 1958. The most ambitious bauxite mining projects were carried out during Guinea’s First Republic under the party-state of the Parti Démocratique de Guinée and its leader Ahmed Sékou Touré. Rather than being enclaves of only foreign mining firms, by the 1970s most of Guinea’s rapidly expanding mining sector was led by mixed state-private enterprises. Critically, however, the long-term objective of Touré and the PDG was the local processing of bauxite into higher-value exports, with the eventual dream of smelting aluminum on Guinean soil – somewhat similar to the situation Peter described in Congo. This objective, however, presaged a larger set of debates around commodity-led development, and if it would actually be possible for primary commodity exporting countries (such as Guinea or Jamaica) to change their more dependent position in the aluminum commodity chain vis-à-vis that of the world’s key producers and consumers of aluminum (such as the United States and Japan). For example, Guinean leaders tried a variety of strategies, including direct nationalization, state-private partnerships, and producer-led levies to challenge these forms of unequal integration.
PV: While there is certainly an overarching story of continuity in terms of cultural symbols and environmental motifs associated with Congolese copper, the copper industry itself has been defined by rupture and dis-organization since at least the 19th century. Despite my previous insistence on the non-artisanal nature of Congolese copper production, the precolonial era was defined by a group of proto-industrial/artisanal smelters known as the “copper eaters” or mangeurs de cuivre. What has fascinated me about these precolonial copper eaters was the way that they treated copper production like any other agricultural harvest season.
Now, in the colonial era, these copper eaters kept their distance from the Belgian Union Minière – a clear point of disjuncture that meant most colonial mining laborers were recruited as migrant laborers from distant regions of Congo and neighboring countries. At the same time, the symbols of the Basanga copper eaters – copper crosses known as croisettes – persisted through the colonial and into the postcolonial era, with three croisettes featured prominently on the flag for the secessionist State of Katanga (July 11, 1960 – January 21, 1963). And for postcolonial Zaire (Congo after 1971), the copper eaters became cultural symbols for Congo’s long-standing industrial greatness in copper production. However, it would be negligent of me not to mention that the celebration of these cultural symbols in the 1960s and ‘70s came at a time of fleeting economic success in the global copper market, while many Congolese people began to feel the overwhelming weight of unemployment in an industry increasingly reliant on technology.
Given such shifts over time, where do matters stand today? Which global or local actors are calling the shots? What are their critics saying? Are there prospects for sustainably managing these resources, or for workers’ controlling the conditions of their production? Are there significant forces committed to paths other than the ruthless production of these commodities
PV: Following the political turmoil and devastating conflicts of the 1990s in Congo, the state mining company of Gécamines was forced to layoff many of its employees in the early 2000s while selling off its majority ownership of mining concessions to foreign companies due to accumulating national debts. The result is a state mining company that still exists as a partner with many different foreign mining companies, but that primarily acts as a collector of fees rather than a full-on mining company. At the same time, due to the selling off of these mining assets, the landscape for copper, zinc, and cobalt mining in Katanga is extremely fragmented, with mines owned by Chinese, Canadian, Swiss, and South African companies, among others.
Mining engineers and workers have mentioned to me how this landscape is far more difficult to navigate as they may work under Chinese management one month, Canadian the next, and South African the following. Additionally, a key social consequence is that without a centralized corporation running the show, the kinds of tight-knit mining town communities that existed around specific mining or refining sites no longer exist with many (contract) laborers traveling by company buses to their mining sites. There are certainly protests and strikes against this situation, but I have seen little political movement towards reforming the industry aside from high-level gestures and rhetoric towards a more Congolese-centric, “responsible” (ESG-lite) form of mining.
PR: Conditions in palm oil plantations have only worsened for workers and smallholders. Solutions offered still revolve around technological fixes and financialization or financial instruments such as sustainability certifications, supply chain traceability, and carbon offset. These techno-financial solutions serve as a new mode of exploitation and extraction. There will be no sustainable or ecologically sound solution for palm oil production as long as we maintain the supremacy of plantations. Monoculture cannot feed the growing population of our planet – it’s unsustainable for both the ecosystem and human beings.
The 2010 People's Agreement of Cochabamba is still my model for envisioning reparation. It made me rethink this concept of “shared” responsibility that has been unevenly distributed. Carbon emission and extraction (dependence on natural resources exploitation) in Indonesia, and possibly other postcolonial countries alike, are historically conditioned. Of course, this is not a pretext for the horrible decisions and policies that the government of Indonesia has taken to protect its palm oil industry. But imposing draconian sustainability standards just to create tradeable green metrics, instead of genuine repair for our relationship with natural resources, will only reflect the imperialist persistence in the global capitalist division of labor for cheap goods, a situation that domestic elites will definitely exploit for their gain.
Indonesia’s palm oil industry has been talking about transition for a while now through the agenda for downstreaming such as diversifying products to biofuel. Under this framework, labor issues are surely not being discussed, or at least outside of already-existing human rights frameworks. But I think the real question, in my case, has always been less about palm oil and more about how long we want to continue this monoculture. How can you transition out of plantations if the very existence of cash crops in the Global South is sustained by the endurance of plantations?
CM: When Guinea’s first major bauxite agreements were signed in the 1960s, they talked in terms of exporting up to 5 million tons of bauxite annually. In 2024 alone it was estimated that Guinea produced over 130 million metric tons of bauxite – making the country the world’s largest producer. While during the Touré years most bauxite was being exported to be processed in North America, Western Europe, and Japan, since the early 2010s China has been both the world’s most important bauxite importer, as well as the world’s largest producer and consumer of aluminum.
In Guinea itself, the 2021 coup d’état against President Alpha Conde which ushered in the military government headed by Général Mamady Doumbouya and the Comité National du Rassemblement et du Développement (CNRD) has seen renewed calls for local processing of bauxite into alumina (the intermediate product between bauxite and aluminum) and aluminum. In late December 2024, the CNRD signed the first of such agreements with the Chinese state-owned enterprise State Power Investment Corporation, which agreed to build Guinea’s second alumina refinery – the first of such refineries to be in the country since 1960. The work on the refinery has just commenced, with the opening ceremonies taking place on March 26, 2025. However, while exports of bauxite (and to a lesser extent, alumina) have dramatically increased over the past half century (in no small part because of ongoing transitions toward “green” technology, especially in transportation), Guinea has consistently ranked among the world’s poorest countries by nearly all standardized development indicators, raising serious concerns about what is possible in an economy led by the export of raw industrial minerals.
PV: I will close by noting that each of these resources, which are so embedded in our global economy, have found some role to play in the supposedly “green” energy transition – whether it is copper in EV batteries and circuits, aluminum in wiring and electrification, or palm oil as a more “renewable” and lower carbon-producing fuel. But as “submerged” commodities, which find themselves spread in low doses throughout our economy, their landscapes of exploitation and destruction often remain obscured. As a result of these two key elements – their “green-ness" and their ubiquity – these commodities seem to have a relatively clear future in our global economy. And while that may spell good news for investors and even certain classes of workers here and there, it is in this context that we must consider how the measures that we take to curb the worst excesses of capital accumulation (e.g., transitioning from oil and coal extraction) continue to buy into the dominant ideas and frameworks built around extractivism.
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Chris Abdul Hakim Martinez is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research is located at the intersection of social history, economic history, and political economy of 20th-century West Africa. His dissertation project examines the interlinked struggles for decolonization, development,and economic sovereignty through an examination of the rise of the bauxite mining industry in the Republic of Guinea (1900-1984).
Perdana “Pepe” Roswaldy is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Northwestern University and an Arryman Scholar in the Equality Development and Globalization Studies at the Buffett Institute. Their research focuses on Indonesia’s history of palm oil expansion and plantation economy. They also write extensively on gender justice and land conflict.
Peter Vale is a cultural historian of capitalism and the environment in Africa. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. His current research project, The Copper Eaters: Inventing Capitalism in Central Africa, asks: why, despite persistent economic decline and devastating ecological consequences, have Congolese (DRC) workers, residents, and officials maintained such a deep attachment to a copper mining industry dominated by foreign capital and corporate enterprise?