Browsing by Subject "Plantations"

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    Accessing the viability of HTR - Indonesia's community-based forest plantation program
    (2009-04-24T18:19:10Z) Schneck, Joshua
    In Indonesia, development of sustainable supplies of timber has failed to keep pace with industrial demand. After decades of overharvesting and clearing to bridge supply gaps, Indonesia’s forests and forest industries are in a crisis, with declining stocks of timber to support forest-dependent livelihoods and biodiversity, and large recurring emissions of atmospheric CO2 linked to deforestation. The Indonesian Government’s strategy of providing incentives to developers of large-scale industrial timber plantations has been of limited success, with only 30% of state targets reached after nearly twenty years of work. Difficulties can be traced to conflicts over land rights at the community level, and the limited financial viability of plantation investments in markets distorted by illegal and cheaply-priced wood supplies. In an effort to address these obstacles, the Indonesian Government introduced a new community-based plantation program in 2007, Hutan Tanaman Rakyat (HTR), which affords local communities rights and incentives for developing timber plantations on community lands. Country-wide targets for HTR are substantial, with 5.4 million hectares of plantations planned, however substantial challenges lie ahead in identifying suitable areas of land, creating effective institutional arrangements, and ensuring economic viability. Here, we examine the financial viability of developing pulpwood plantations under HTR at 22 proposed sites in West Kalimantan, and consider challenges to implementing HTR on the ground by surveying a local plantation company operating under a partnership model similar to the kind proposed for HTR. Investments in all 22 sites yield negative net present values, indicating HTR is not profitable under current market conditions. Results suggest HTR may be best facilitated by accompanying macroeconomic and forest-sector policies which reduce market distortions, improve market transparency and liquidity, and raise domestic log prices.
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    Robinson Crusoe as Promotion Literature: the Reality of English Settlement in the Chesapeake, 1624-1680
    (2019-06-06) Dowdy, Beverly
    In the seventeenth century a minimum of one hundred thousand English indentured servants emigrated to the Chesapeake Bay of North America. Virginia and Maryland plantations used indentured servitude in the production of one important colonial crop: tobacco. Compared to their countrymen and women at home, the English suffered extremely high mortality rates. To understand possible causes and material conditions, my method involved reviewing both historical literature and material evidence. I interviewed the Director of Education of the Godiah Spray tobacco plantation at the historic colonial capital of St. Mary’s City, Maryland. The Godiah Spray is a working seventeenth century plantation that replicates the work and management of tobacco. I also drew information from archaeological studies of skeletal remains in Chesapeake colonial graves examined by forensic anthropologists of the Smithsonian. This study examines three promotional emigration tracts written by Englishmen in that century. I also examine other monuments of literary promotion that came to embody the myth that anyone could succeed in the New World: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders. Why was there such a large disconnect between the high mortality rates in the Chesapeake and the supreme confidence of immigrant success authored by Defoe? I will argue that in his novels Defoe was handing his audience a script which demonstrated how to work and become rich in the New World. Robinson Crusoe, along with many other of Defoe’s works, functioned as propaganda to counter the dismal reputation of the colonies and to convince the English to emigrate.