ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 explores the village and household level transformations that have occurred over the last century to accommodate a new livelihood activity and value chain. It does so through a forensic examination of activity in Pitu Sunggu village in Pangkep Regency in South Sulawesi. Pitu Sunggu has a long history of production of export commodities, and produces only a small amount of food for its own consumption. The village landscape has been transformed by waves of commodity booms – from mixed cropping to field rice production in the early 20th century, from field rice to wet rice during the Green Revolution of the 1970s, from wet rice to shrimp and fish farming from the 1980s – and, most recently, from marine fishing to seaweed farming from the early 2000s. This chapter traces this agrarian history of commodity transitions and how seaweed farming was taken up in different ways by different community members.
