Peasant strategies for survival in the changing world which they faced in 19C0 naturally centred on questions of access to land and to work. Using a very crude classification, based on landownership, people in Pari could be divided into better-off families, marginal and landless peasants. Table 3.2 shows that the majority of Pari people fell into the category of marginal and landless peasants. The table also suggests that the land of Pari was concentrated in the hands of a few people. Table 3.3 shows that the numbers of people controlling the land of Pari, through operation, was also small. It was an even smaller number of these who controlled most of the agricultural employment opportunities by being able to afford to hire labour. Many of the kinds of strategies used by the villagers in Pari to make the best of their lives reflected this unequal balance of bargaining power within the h a m l e t .
It was possible to distinguish two different kinds of survival strategies being used in Pari. There were firstly the strategies
used by those who owned or controlled land and capital resources,
represented by the better-off peasant farmers and landowners.
(Note that better-off does not mean rich.)
Secondly, there were
the strategies of the poorer peasants, most of whom had only their
labour to offer, but a few of whom had tiny patches of land.
To
better understand how these two kinds of strategies worked, I will
present ethnographic data gathered during fieldwork in 1980.
We begin with the strategies of the richer villagers.
Their
strategies to deal with the changing agricultural and social
situation tended to be positive, involving active decisions and
behaviour.
This reflected their access to trie critical resources
of land and capital. One example of their adaptation to change can
be seen in their use of sharecropping.
In Pari sharecropping occurred more frequently than renting.
There were several explanations for this. One obvious one was the
existence of absentee ownership.
Land owned by absentee owners
covered an area of 9.7 hectares or about 39 per cent of all
wet-rice fields. Except for two owners who lived in Malang, these
people lived elsewhere in Banyu village or Talun sub-district, so
eight were not actually absentee owners according to the 1960
Agrarian Reform*
The two exceptions held land in Pari by
inheritance. One was a descendant of Eurasians who had owned land
in Pari and in neighbouring villages since before the War, while
the other was one of the children of the previous lurah.
All of
the land owned by absentees was worked on a share-cropping basis
by ten Pari residents.
Sharecropping also occurred because some who inherited land had taken up other occupations and did not have farming knowledge; others lived some distance from their land. In 1980 there were six people practising mertelu in Pari and in all cases the landowners were domiciled outside the hamlet. The reason outsiders tended to use the mertelu system was probably that they were not always available to supervise the work themselves. Consequently they preferred to farm their land on this sharecropping basis. Four of these six mertelu cases continued to employ sharecroppers from the same family as their deceased parents had. Under mertelu the landowner provided seed and fertilizer and the sharecropper was responsible for all other inputs. At the harvest the sharecropper had the right to one portion and the landowner to three portions. In practice it was always possible to modify the arrangement, often to the disadvantage of the sharecropper.
This was one strategy used by the more powerful to adapt to the changing economics of agriculture after the Green Revolution. There were no written agreements between sharecroppers and land- owners, and a sharecropper often had to accept a unilaterally- renewed agreement on the landowner's terms. For example, three of the ten ploughmen in Pari had previously worked under maro and
mertelu agreements with the same landowners, but within the twenty years before 1980 the landowners had renewed the agreements on a
dacinan basis. One landowner increased his division of a harvest by unilaterally classifying a male sharecropper who had previously received one-third of the crop under mertelu into a dacinan who
merely prepared rice fields up to the planting phase and was paid a fixed amount43of p a d i. In the situation of increasing yields due to the Green Revolution, the dacinan arrangement retained the benefits of the higher productivity for the landowner. Further more, dacinan on a certain area of land required less labour than the old maro and mertelu arrangements - and, of course, offered
44
lower payment. The result for the sharecroppers was less beneficial. Instead of working with one landowner, the three sharecroppers had to work for as many as three landowners each, all on a dacinan basis, in order to obtain sufficient income.
There were advantages in sharecropping for the landowner. One landowner preferred to sharecrop his land to avoid the "small but irritating problems" (rebyek) of dealing with many wage labourers. By sharecropping it, he dealt with limited numbers only. From the owner's point of view wage labour was not necessarily cheaper than sharecropping, particularly when the costs of supervision were considered'45 M o r e o v e r , he reduced his possible losses by sharing the risk of crop failure or poor harvests with a sharecropper.
Under sharecropping a landowner does not lose control over his land. In Pari convention required the sharecropper to ask his
43See pages 78 and 145 above.
S n Pari in 1980 for ten days of ploughing on one hectare of wet-rice field, a dacinan sharecropper earned 60 dacin of gabah (unhusked paddy). One dacin approximates 20 kilograms, or the contents of a kerosene tin. By contrast with maro or mertelu a dacin harvest share was fixed and did not vary with output.
Sharecroppers who received a share of the crop were more likely to work diligently than labourers who were paid a fixed rate.
landowner for advice concerning what crops should be planted, when and how the crop would be harvested and so on. The landowner could even direct the operations to be performed by, for example, insisting that his sharecropper plant tobacco. If he rented out his land, he would completely lose control over its operation. Another reason why owners were reluctant to rent out land was that tenants could plant crops that affected its future use. Sugarcane for example was not a popular crop among landowners in Pari, because they said it required different landscaping from rice and a period of fallow before the soil was suitable for reversion to other crops. Many of these problems could be minimized under sharecropping arrangements. Thus, in many ways sharecropping allowed the owner more freedom to change the arrangements for working his land in ways that increased his profits.
4 6
Another advantage of sharecropping that re-appeared during some of the changes associated with the Green Revolution was that it secured labour to work the land when a labour shortage was beginning to emerge. This can be seen as one of the motives of landowners for using kedokan tandur labour.47 The participants in
kedokan tandur were all women and, as in dacinan, were not paid in cash, but had the right to a larger harvest share than ordinary harvesters. In 1980 in Pari they received one portion of rice for every seven they harvested while the farmer received six portions.
^ h i s had been an important reason for sharecropping during the early period of settlement in Java.
The ratio operating for the ordinary harvester at that time was
1:12.
Under a kedokan tandur contract, a participant harvested a
specific plot that she had previously planted or weeded. Thus she
did not have to compete with others while harvesting.
In Pari
kedokan tandur was restricted to women from Pari hamlet and there
was a tendency for kedokan tandur contracts to become permanent.
From the poorer peasants7 view, as one respondent told me, this
reduced the access of people from other hamlets to Pari harvests.
From the landowners point of view, as another respondent said, the
kedokan
tandur
system prevented participation
of
uninvited
outsiders in his harvest.
It seems that in the past, when labour was relatively
plentiful and poorer villagers were in need of work and a share of
the harvest,
kedokan tandur may have been more a poverty sharing
mechanism.
In that case landowners would want to restrict this
kind of institution so it would be logical that it would be closed
only to women from the hamlet.
The peasants also, would want to
restrict access to local women.
Most labourers under
kedokan
tandur arrangements were from poor households and most worked for
more than one landowner.
However, in 1980 I found that a few
kedokan tandur women were from richer households.
One better-off
farmer told me that he urged his wife to join kedokan tandur so
that her team would be available when he needed manpower.
This
seemed to suggest that kedokan tandur was coming to be seen as a
4 8 way of ensuring sufficient labour was available when needed and
illustrates yet another strategy employed by the richer group of p e a s a n t s .
Another important feature of kedokan tandur relates to the practice of uyang-uyangan, the 'buying and selling of rice'. This also was used by some richer people in Pari as a way of expanding their non-farm businesses. The persons engaged in uyang-uyangan were called penguyang. The penguyang bought paddy, usually from better-off farmers with a surplus of pad! who wanted to exchange this for cash. Families, like the one I lived with, would sell small quantities of paddy from time to time for their daily cash needs. Sometimes as many as five or more of these rice traders would come knocking on the door early in the morning (7 a.m.) wanting to buy paddy. They then hulled it at a slepan (rice mill) and sold it as rice to customers such as rice grocers or other people who traded in rice, including rice mill owners and intermediate traders in the subdistrict centre of Talun and in local markets. The profit of the penguyang was derived from the difference between the price they paid for the paddy and the price they received for the processed rice.
Nobody knew when or how uyang-uyangan started in Pari: as far as respondents could remember it had always been practised there. They agreed that during the Japanese Occupation the business nearly died, but flourished again after the Revolution during the early
^Lt is very important that harvest labour should be available exactly at the time the crop is ripe. Delay causes the crop to spoil.
1950s and became even more important in the early 1970s with the introduction of a mechanical rice mill. In 1973, a wife of a retired army officer installed Pari's first mechanical rice mill, which the people regarded as a monument to the death of hand-pounding. Within a short time several rice mills were installed in other hamlets and neighbouring villages. The women who lost their jobs in rice pounding were quickly absorbed by the business of uyang-uyangan, which flourished along with the
introduction of the mechanical rice mill.
Respondents said that trading in rice had increased but profits were smaller since the mechanical rice mill began operating in Pari. They also said that the number of people involved in
uyang-uyangan in 1980 was increasing.49 One reason which was frequently given for this increase was that, as more and more people were without access to cultivated land, they became
penguyang, one of the few income earning opportunities available in Pari. It is clear that the expansion of the trade in rice is also related to increasing commercialization in the villages.
As can be seen from the interview with Mbok Diwut below the scale of the uyang-uyangan business had also increased in recent years. There were no records in the village of the number of people engaged in this business but the kamitua estimated that probably one person in every four households would be engaged in
49
See James Fox, n.d.,: 6-8. 50
the uyang-uyangan business. I estimated that probably more people than that were involved, especially during the harvest season. Women who engaged in this enterprise typically borrowed the necessary capital from the landowner for whom they worked. The landowner who also ran the rice-mill in Pari, for example, provided such capital to her kedokan tandur workers on the understanding that they used her rice mill to process the rice they bought. From the kedokan tandur participant's point of view this was advantageous, since they generally lacked capital. It gave them more chance of adding to their household income in a situation where paid employment was scarce. However, from the rice-miller's point of view, since there were other mills in the district that could have been used, the arrangement enabled her to increase her business and also to profit from the husking the grain. In addition she had both the first option on the purchase of the rice and the right to keep the germ and bran for sale as pig fodder and the chaff as fuel in lime-kilns. Giving credit to the penguyang
thus offered several different ways of increasing her profits. Most penguyang in Pari lacked capital. Larger traders were able to benefit from changes in rice prices during the year. During the harvest usually the rice price was lower so wealthier traders stock-piled, buying from the penguyang whom they often financed. They sold when the price rose. Most penguyang in Pari lacked the capital to do that. They were happy if they could just manage to pay back their capital and make a small profit. In Pari paddy tended to be sold in small quantities, even by larger
51
farmers. Immediately after the harvest the larger farmers were also able to afford to hold their paddy until prices increased. However, if a small penguyang with whom they already had a kedokan tandur relationship, came asking to buy they might feel obliged to sell some.
Unlike ordinary sharecroppers who had relations with a limited number of landowners, the kedokan tandur participants often worked for several landowners so they had a number of potential suppliers on whom they could rely for their supply of paddy. The wife of the previous lurah told me that if she knew the women personally she would often sell some paddy out of pity for them, even when she did not need cash. Kedokan tandur linked the penguyang to the larger landowners in a kind of patron-client relationship. The rice trader (this was sometimes also the mill owner) profited from being able to buy rice through the penguyang when prices were low and sellers often did not really want to sell. Larger traders wanting to stockpile rice when prices were lower were often quite dependent on the penguyang for their supplies.
The relationships between the penguyang and those who supplied their capital reflected their very unequal positions. Most
penguyang operated on a small scale and were very dependent on people such as rice mill owners, rice grocers, and even some better-off penguyang who provided them with capital. Generally, each penguyang obtained her capital from more than one source. In
5Jartly because larger here is a relative term. Even the larger farmers in Pari were actually quite small.
the past this had not been the case.
The penguyang had been able
to rely on a single patron for all her needs, including support in
times of illness or other difficulties.
In 1980 this was not
possible because the patrons of 1980 were themselves clients of
bigger patrons outside the village and restricted themselves to
more strictly business relations with their
penguyang.
The
dependence of the penguyang was determined both by the proportion
of capital provided by these sources and also in her
weak
bargaining power.
The small penguyang was virtually an employee of her suppliers
of capital as wTill be illustrated below.
Part of the task of
penguyang was to mill the paddy they bought before selling it as
rice.
If they purchased wet paddy, they also had to dry it before
milling.
The rice mill owner provided the facilities, such as a
place for drying the paddy, but the penguyang had to carry out all
the work themselves.
The
penguyang
(like other villagers or,
often, their children who brought paddy to be husked) also had to
do all the loading, bagging and other general labour necessary to
mill the rice.
The only employee at the rice mill in Pari was a
man who operated the engine.
If penguyang obtained their capital from a trader they would
have to sell their paddy to him.
In Pari almost all the penguyang
obtained most of their finance from the mill owner. They fulfilled
their obligation to her by husking the paddy at her mill.
For
marketing the rice, they were free to make their own arrangements.
However, for most of my respondents the rice mill owner was likely to be the buyer. She was also a rice grocer.
So far, the discussion on strategies for survival has focused on the activities of the better-off people in the hamlet. It is clear that because of their control over the key resources of production, especially land and capital (these gave them control over work opportunities) , they were able to respond to the changing situation in a positive and generally 'modern' way to benefit their own economic interests. In the process, their actions were often at the cost of the poorer peasants. In the remainder of this section I will examine the response and strategies of the poorer villagers in coping with change. Some aspects of their response are already illustrated implicitly in the above discussion. The dacinan sharecroppers have been forced to increase the numbers of people they work for; those whose traditional sharecropping agreements have been changed by the landowners have accepted the