Palm oil plantations, for one, are increasingly struggling with the sector’s declining attractiveness, which has hardly changed since the colonial era.

Behind basic foodstuffs like palm oil, cocoa, coffee and bananas that are part of our daily diet lies a rarely asked question. Who will agree to work in the fields of the world’s large tropical plantations in years to come? Since producing countries gained independence, the sectors that deal with field crop production have relied on a model largely inherited from the colonial period when export crops were produced for global markets, and their profitability long depended on abundant, compliant, and inexpensive labour.

But this model is running out of steam. While public debate around major tropical crop production sectors has long focused on environmental issues, the central challenge today is the social attractiveness of these horticultural systems.

Sectors shaped by their colonial history

Large-scale tropical agriculture was built on territorial specialisation and dependency on export. As we showed in a previous book about how human wellbeing is dependent on nature and how ecosystems function, independence did not fundamentally transform this productive logic, despite technical and institutional adjustments.

Power dynamics, labour organisation, and the priority given to external markets remain deeply structuring forces.

Oil palm in Southeast Asia, cacao in West Africa, and bananas in Latin America follow comparable trajectories, where environmental sustainability – supported by increasingly robust certification standards – has progressed more rapidly than the social transformation of these sectors.

This gap between a productive model inherited from colonial history and the social aspirations of contemporary rural societies in the tropics largely explains the current employment crisis that is affecting plantations.

Young people are turning away from plantation work

In Indonesia and Malaysia, the world’s leading palm oil producers, plantations are now struggling to recruit locally. Research conducted by John........

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