Presentation short abstract

I examine how yield-focused rice policies in Southeast Asia—rooted in productivism and epistemic violence—erase Indigenous knowledges, agroecologies, and land rights. Ethnographic work among the Pala’wan reconsiders 'yield' as nourishing spirit worlds & broader cosmologies amid dispossession.

Presentation long abstract

In Southeast Asia, cereal crop production for food security has long prioritized input-intensive farming, yield maximization, and surplus accumulation. Since the Green Revolution, however, efforts to close the so-called yield gap—the difference between actual and potential yield—have stalled, undermined by biodiversity loss, soil degradation, and climate vulnerability. Broader agrarian changes—driven by infrastructure, extractivism, and peri-urban expansion—have reinforced productivist logics and declining yields through dispossession and restricted access to land and resources. Drawing on Spivak’s notion of epistemic violence, this paper examines how the political economy of commercial rice production, shaped by racialized technological optimism, narrowly defines yield as volume and marketable output. Over time, such violence erases Indigenous smallholders' situated knowledge and agroecologically diverse practices. Examining the roles of the International Rice Research Institute and the Philippine state, I trace how decades of rice research and policy have criminalized swidden yields and marginalized the cosmologies that sustain them. Ethnographic insights from southern Palawan show how Pala’wan farmers struggle to sustain rice yields due to criminalisation, enclosures, and pressures to intensify, while, when conditions allow, strive to cultivate socio-ecologically complex yields entangled with spirit worlds. For the Pala’wan, upland rice yields involve ongoing negotiations with forest deities through which social relations, moral order, and ecological functions are maintained. The conclusion calls on public and private sector actors to move beyond narrow productivist models and recognize the enduring significance of swidden yields and cosmologies for Indigenous rights to land and livelihood.