But while elite skyscrapers and shopping malls are mushrooming in Jakarta as a result of this accumulation, and consumers in other parts of the world are luxuriating with the manufactured goods made affordable to them by the low cost of palm oil, Indonesian people on these plantation islands are caught in an intense struggle involving land grabs, illegal concessions, complex environmental degradation, and increasingly brutal physical violence. Frequently unable to carry on with their traditional practices of subsistence farming and often never receiving the compensation initially promised, people are scrambling to get a crumb of the cake. Many communities have organized collective actions defending their land rights; this brought about cultivation schemes such as the so-called Kebun nucleus / Kebun plasma distribution, which intends to provide local farmers with access to up to thirty percent of land that was cleared for oil palm agriculture. Usually, however, the multinational or local companies keep the fertile land to themselves, granting the small farmers access merely to second or third-grade land. In many areas in South Kalimantan, for example, the land has become so scarce that it is very difficult to open up any new plantations. Desperate for income and under terrible existential pressure from the developments in their surroundings, people have begun to turn even the rivers and the lakes into plantations. But as these sites are too wet for the palm trees to grow, they quickly die, wealth never comes, the ecosystem is ruined, and what remains are blasted landscapes.⁶