Roads, marketplaces and plantations

Food and infrastructure are entangled in multiple ways on an oil palm plantation in Wide Bay, Papua New Guinea. The plantation was established as part of plan to bring income, employment and road infrastructure to remote and rural area. The plantation company builds and maintains roads in the region, which until 2015 was not connected by road to urban centers. The plantation is also dependent on roads, which grid the oil palm fields and connect the main estate to extension plantings further away, because oil palm fruit needs to be transported quickly after harvest to the mill, where it is pressed into palm oil. Palm oil, in turn, is used as a cheap raw material in many industries, including food industry. At the same time, food for the workers is a central question on the plantation. Many workers grow their own food to save on meager wages. Women from neighboring peasant communities sell part of the food they cultivate on the plantation for workers. Theytransport the food to the plantation by hitching rides on company trucks driving through their villages or hiring one of the few local cars. The plantation company in turn sells food on wage credit to workers while seeking to control market sales by local women onplantation premises. By focusing on the inter-relation between food grown and marketed on the plantation and the road infrastructure, I examine the unequal relations between agricultural capital, wage labor and the surrounding peasant sector. These unequal relations, and struggles over them, are materialized in and enacted through food and roads. The infrastructure space of the plantation provides affordances to resistance, for example when peasants block roads to protest restrictions to sell food on the plantation.