Ownership network structure and decision-control behaviour of eight major oil palm companies in Malaysia

Southeast Asia mosaics of agriculture and tropical forest landscapes have been heavily shaped by the progression of industrial plantations, from colonial times to now. In Indonesia and in Malaysia, the history of corporations undertaking these activities is indissociably from the land cover change, when “clearing the forest and expanding the agricultural frontier” was a colonial policy. For example in most instances, forests where replaced by industrial gambier plantations, then rubber plantations, and finally oil palm plantations, but direct conversions of forests into industrial plantations continue to happen until today. Controversies about deforestation and oil palm sustainability emerged in this context. Most of the land use changes have been made by the biggest of these corporations, which became corporate giants and diversified their activities to almost all sectors of the economy, from automobile to banking and telecoms. In Indonesia like in Malaysia, most of the development of industrial palm oil plantations is under the control of a fistful of giant corporations. Most of today's proposed solutions to curb deforestation by oil palm are market tools such as palm oil trade bans or regulations and palm oil certifications, that are supposed to influence the economic decisions of private actors that are developing oil palm. However oil palm corporations are so diversified and embedded into the national economies, with many other stakes at play than deforestation, that many other factors could influence their corporate decision making, and outweigh the market tools that have been used up to day to try to influence their economic decisions. Works dating from Porter et all suggest that financial factors such as the shape of the network of ownership shares may play more on the corporate decisions than the market itself, while other works suggest that the nature of the financial ownership (government-owned versus privately-owned) is the essential driver of the corpor