Bengt Karlsson
Ordinary Place
The Plantation is all about monoculture. It is about the cultivation of single agriculture crops on large tracts of lands that first been cleared of previous vegetation as well as of the people that lived on the land earlier. The conversion of forests and smallholder farm lands into plantations continues to be one of the main drivers of biodiversity loss in the world today. This is especially critical in the Global South where there has been an exceptional increase in plantations and monocultural agriculture of, for example, oil palm, soy beans and sugar cane during last decades. For many, the plantation signifies a great number of the ills of the modern capitalist system with its ruthless exploitation of people and the environment. Noting this, Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing suggest the term Plantationocene as an alternative to Anthropocene as a name for our present era. But even if plantations are monocultural spaces, this does not mean they are devoid of biodiversity. A multitude of living beings have made the plantation their home. Most of these are uninvited denizens, commonly cast as weeds and “pests”. For example, more than 1000 different species of arthropods have been found in tea plantations. To keep such unwanted intruders in check and create a conducive environment for the tea plant to thrive requires constant labor, care and input of large quantities of fertilizers and pesticides. This is an ongoing work and one that becomes even more difficult in times of escalating climate change with warmer temperatures and erratic weather events.
Mobile Species and History
In this project I am concerned with tea plantations and the different implications of the travel of the Assam tea plant (Camellia sinensis var. assamica), taken from its original habitat in Northeast India -and surrounding parts of upland Southeast Asia - to East Africa and other parts of the British Empire. This movement begun in the latter part of the 19th century and is still unfolding, mainly through exchanges between tea producing countries in the Global South. Tea seeds and seedlings were initially brought across the Indian Ocean by planters, botanists and scientists. Such circulation of plantation crops across the world has played a key role in Western imperial dominance over other people and places, sugar and cotton being prominent historical examples. Social scientists and historians that focus on colonial plantation histories have rightly focused on the sufferings and exploitation of the laborers, commonly held as indentured laborers or slaves. In my study, I will instead stay closer to the plant. I focus on the relations forged between people and plants, and the subsequent biodiversity dilemmas caused by large-scale cultivation of tea in formerly forested lands. My key questions are, what happens when species are made to travel? How should we think about such movement or mobility of cultivars? Can we think about agricultural crops as “invasive species” that suppress and displace “native” flora and fauna? Even if it is human actors that have enabled the mobility of tea, that is, carrying seeds along and establishing plantations in various parts of colonized territories, the tea plant has also begun to move out of the plantation on its own accord. In some places, tea is again growing wild in abandoned tea plantations and experimental plots. As a feral plant, in the wild, tea can grow into a flowering tree that reaches 20 meters or more.
Biodiversity Dilemmas
In the lexicon of the BIOrdinary project, the plantation can be described as an ordinary place, where few would come to look for thriving biodiversity. Most tea plantations today are vast, disciplined landscapes dominated by a single species, that is, tea. Furthermore, the modern tea plantation has rather limited genetical diversity, as the tea industry mainly use vegetatively propagated, high-yielding, clones. An entire field can be planted with genetically identical tea bushes. While this has boosted production, tea scientists and planters have come to realize that it also makes the tea industry highly vulnerable. Increasing temperatures, lack of rain or too much rain, as well as the proliferation of new pests and diseases can come to wipe out entire plantations. This has also happened with other plantation crops, for example, the collapse of the coffee industry in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in the late 19th century due to a leaf fungus, or the more recent case of the so-called Panama disease that wiped out all plantations with the popular Gros Michel banana variety. The banana industry turned instead to the Cavendish banana, considered to be resistant to the disease, but a new strain of virus has recently been detected that also infects the Cavendish banana. The key lesson is the danger with large-scale cultivation of single, genetically identical crops.
As in the case of the banana, the tea industry has come to realize the importance of bringing more diversity into the plantation. In Kenya, the tea industry pins a lot of hope on the new variety of purple tea, that was launched in 2011. This variety is supposedly more climate resilient, as well as more attractive to consumers due to its health properties as it contains high levels of anthocyanin, which like with blueberries is supposed to lower blood pressure and reduce risks of heart disease. The tea scientists also look at the possibility to return to the older practice of planting tea from seeds instead of from cuttings as a means to increasing genetic diversity. A seed-planted tea bush also grows deeper roots and therefore becomes more-sturdy and climate resilient. Moreover, tea growers experiment with cultivating various other crops alongside tea, and maintaining patches of forest as ecological buffers to prevent the spread of pests and diseases, as well as to mitigate extreme weather events and storms. Tea scientists now speak about the tea plantation in terms of an “ecosystem” where tea bushes require companion species to thrive, both above and below the ground. This is especially pronounced in organic tea cultivation, where chemical pesticides and fertilizers are not used. This makes the plantation a less toxic place, which is beneficial for the laborers as well as other living beings. Instead of chemical weed control, cows are let in to graze between the lines of bushes. But many in the industry remain skeptical to organic tea, asking whether consumer will be ready to pay the higher price that come in the long-run with increased production costs. The overall dilemma that I address in the project concerns the future of tea in conditions of the Anthropocene. The plantation form itself is in crises, and perhaps tea should instead be cultivated as a forest crop—something that indigenous peoples did prior to the colonial appropriation of the plant.
Actors & Players
The main actors in this study are the tea plant and the people involved in its cultivation, that is, laborers, smallholder farmers, corporate professionals and agriculture scientists and other experts. Besides the human actors, the study engages with the interspecies assemblage of animals, insects, fungi, and plants that thrive in and around tea plantations. Some of these species have travelled along with tea plants across the Indian ocean. Climate change, caused by human activities, also figures as an actor, challenging the very possibility of tea cultivation in certain places within the coming decades.