Cattle, Corn, and Critters: Eating and Being Eaten in the Borderland

The borderland between Myanmar and Thailand, whilst chiefly known for its porosity and ethnic armed conflict, has become part of Southeast Asia’s wider plantation frontier (e.g. & Kenny-Lazar and Ishikawa, 2019). Corn plantations stretch along its undulating hills, as protracted conflict, cheap land, displacement, and migrant labor have created favorable conditions for agribusinesses. Rather than looking at macro-scale frontier (geo)politics, resource extraction/exploitation as often ascribed to the Plantationocene, this talk aims to shed light on how everyday life bordering practices become processes of biological negotiation. Taking a multispecies angle to how corn cultivation, cattle feed, ethnic conflict, and invasive pests such as the corn armyworm are entangled in this borderland, it invites us to look at borderlands through metabolic relations and material transformation.