Frontier development in the midst of ecological civilization: unravelling the production of maca in Yunnan, China

Abstract

In this paper we argue that research on development in frontier regions needs to incorporate an explicitly environmental and ecological dimension, because economic frontiers are increasingly regarded as ecological frontiers in state and public discourses alike. We elaborate this argument by examining how the state-capital coalition has intervened in the development of Yunnan, a southwestern frontier of China, and how this process has involved the construction of an ecological civilization. This paper conceptualises the campaign of ecological civilization as the performance of state power through the discourses and practices of nature, and in this process, development is a highly situated and contingent process entangled with the complex negotiations between the state's ambition of socio-political assimilation, the volatility of the market and the agency of local communities. In specific, we focus on economic and ecological practices of using land for the plantation of the commercial crop maca. In the past decade or so, maca production in Yunnan has undergone a drastic process of rapid expansion and subsequently an equally rapid decline. Local authorities colluded with large enterprises to domesticate maca and promote maca production for land-based capital accumulation and poverty alleviation. Meanwhile, local farmers underwent a transformation, albeit contested, incomplete and full of back and forth, from passive recipients of development to active agricultural entrepreneurs. This article advances debates on frontier development and the role of nature in such processes, through the specific lens of ecological civilization in contemporary China. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd