Factory fortunes? Agrarian change, gendered livelihoods and the feminisation of labour in the edible birds’ nest trade in rural Indonesia

Abstract

While the production and exchange of high-value non-timber forest products (NTFPs) can benefit the rural poor, their sustained intensification can often reinforce uneven gendered outcomes. This paper examines how the expanding edible birds’ nest (EBN) trade in Indonesia, has unevenly incorporated a growing number of young rural women in precarious off-farm work in EBN ‘cleaning’ factories. We examine the gendered divisions of labour that emerge as more women enter assembly-line nest cleaning in converted homes situated along the supply chain. Based on extensive fieldwork in Kapuas Hulu, West Kalimantan, we reveal how the tedious, routine, and low-paying nature of women’s factory work reproduces new forms of feminised labour and livelihood insecurity. To negotiate the less desirable aspects of factory cleaning work, women sustain connections across farms and fields in their natal villages and, in the process, challenge local trends of ‘de-agrarianisation’. In doing so, they negotiate the feminised labour conditions of intensifying NTFP commodity chains by leaning on their agricultural base to sustain family and finances amid truncated agrarian change.