This research aims to investigate the causes of degradation and deforestation that result in natural hazard vulnerability in the hills of South Sulawesi, Indonesia. Through three months of field research in three villages, we conducted in-depth interviews with farmers and described through a political ecological perspective how political processes such as state policies and capitalistic economies cause the hill areas to should act as water catchment areas but instead threaten the surrounding downstream regions. This study reveals that the land-use change from forest areas to agricultural fields in the hills cannot be separated from the historical process of policies that have taken place from the colonial era until now. The expansion of cornfields in the hills is supported by the presence of poultry feed processing companies that force farmers to change teak forests to more profitable cornfields. Meanwhile, the state territorialization policy that gave livestock companies the right to utilize the hills in the past has led to environmental degradation. In the end, both political and economic processes create a vulnerability to natural disasters that threaten the area around the hills of South Sulawesi that is not only adequately solved by the community-based forest management scheme that Indonesia currently implements.