Peasants in the Making: Malaysia's Green Revolution 9789814345545

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PEASANTS IN' THE MAKING Malaysia's Green Revolution

The Institute of Southeast Asian Studies was established as an autonomous organization in May 1968. It is a regional research centre for scholars and other specialists concerned with modern Southeast Asia, particularly the multi-faceted problems of stability and security, economic development, and political and social change. The Institute is governed by a twenty-two-member Board of Trustees comprising nominees from the Singapore Government, the National University of Singapore, the various Chambers of Commerce, and professional and civic organizations. A tenman Executive Committee oversees day-to-day operations; it is chaired by the Director, the Institute's chief academic and administrative officer.

PEASANTS IN THE MAKING Malaysia's Green Revolution

DIANA WONG

Institute of Southeast Asian Studies

Published by Institute of Southeast Asian Studies Heng Mui Keng Terrace Pasir Panjang Singapore 0511 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior consent of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

©

1987 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies

The responsibility for facts and opinions expressed in this publication rests exclusively with the author and her interpretations do not necessarily reflect the views or the policy of the Institute or its supporters.

This study was carried out under the auspices of the Southeast Asia Programme, Sociology of Development Research Centre, University of Bielefeld with the financial assistance of the Volkswagen Foundation. Cataloguing in Publication Data

Wong, Diana Peasants in the making: Malaysia's Green Revolution. 1. Villages ~ Malaysia ~ Kedah. 2. Social structure ~ Malaysia ~ Kedah. 3. Kedah (Malaysia) ~ Rural conditions. 4. Rice~ Social aspects~ Malaysia- Kedah. 5. Muda Irrigation Scheme (Malaysia). 6. Green Revolution - Malaysia - Kedah. I. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. I!. Title. HT431 M3W871 1987 ISBN 9971-988-59-3 (hard cover) ISBN 9971-988-64-X (soft cover)

Typeset by Integrated Graphics Pte. Ltd., Singapore Printed in Singapore by Chong Moh Offset Printing Pte. Ltd.

Contents

Acknowledgements Part I

The Framing of the Study

Chapter 1

The Empirical Setting: The Green Revolution and Muda

vu

3

Chapter 2

Peasant Reproduction: A Framework of Analysis

15

Chapter 3

The Making of the Muda Region: The Social Organization of Land Colonization

29

Part II

The Anatomy of the Village

Chapter 4

The Village in Its Social Setting

45

Chapter 5

The Village Households: Indicators of Social Differentiation

52

Chapter 6

The Sample Households: Patterns of Social Differentiation

65

Part Ill

The Traniformation of the Village Economy

Chapter 7

The Production Cycle and the Division of Labour

111

Chapter 8

Landownership and Land Tenure

128

Chapter 9

Rural Indebtedness and the Marketing of Padi

145

Chapter 10 Patterns of Change in the Non-Padi Economy

160

Part IV

The Traniformation of Village Society: The Unfolding of Social Differentiation

Chapter 11 Kinship and the Family Development Cycle

171

Chapter 12 The Village as a Community

184

Chapter 13 The Pattern of Leadership: From Patron to Broker

197

Part V

Conclusion

Chapter 14 Peasants in the

Making~

Muda's Green Revolution?

209

Appendix I Research Methodology

222

Appendix 11 Questionnaire

224

Weights and Measures Bibliography

230 231

Acknowledgements The debts ofkindness incurred in any intellectual undertaking can never be fully repaid - i t is in humble recognition of this fact that I wish to record here my thanks to those without whom this book would not have been written. Thanks are due first of all to the villagers of Kampung Gelung Rambai, who received me with a courtesy and tolerance I shall never forget. Even those to whom a special debt of gratitude is owed are too numerous to be named but one in particular cannot be left unmentioned- Yusuffismail and his family, who took me in and made me feel at home. Hutang emas bolih dibayar, hutang budi dibawa mati. This same generosity was displayed by fellow-researchers in Malaysia, who shared unstintingly of their ideas and research material. Thanks are due in particular to Shadli Abdullah, who brought me to "his" village and bequeathed me the fruits ofhis earlier labour, namely, the trust, respect and affection of the villagers. To David Gibbons, Lim Teik Ghee, Khoo Khay Jin, and S. Jegatheesan, whose knowledge of the Muda peasantry was surpassed only by their willingness to share it, is owed more insight into the region than can be made apparent even by the most conscientious of footnoting. Needless to say, they are not to be held responsible for any mistakes or misinterpretations which may nonetheless have crept in. Thanks are due in the same vein to my colleagues and teachers at the Sociology of Development Research Centre in Bielefeld, in particular to my supervisor Pro( Dr Hans-Dieter Evers, whose constant encouragement and critical support proved invaluable to a struggling, inexperienced scholar. A special word of thanks goes to Christel Huelsewede, who performed that particularly German miracle of turning chaos into order in the course of typing the manuscript. Thanks are also due to the Volkswagen Foundation, which provided a grant for covering the expenses of the field-work. Finally, to my parents and my grandmother, who began it all and saw it through, my deepest gratitude. DIANA WONG

Part I The Framing of the Study

1 The Empirical Setting: The Green Revolution and Muda

INTRODUCTION In the late sixties, a massive drive to improve agricultural production with the aid of new technology, in particular new varieties of high-yielding grain, was launched in many countries of the Third World. This new phase of"agricultural modernization" and the tremendous changes it wrought in the lives of millions of farmers all over the world soon earned the epithet the "Green Revolution". By the end of the decade, the "Green Revolution" had reached Malaysian shores as well, unleashing its waves of change most extensively in the traditional rice bowl states of Kedah and Perlis. Beginning in 1970, irrigation facilities made available under the Muda Irrigation Scheme have allowed for the double-cropping there of rice, the food staple of the country. What has been the Muda experience of ten years of the "Green Revolution"? How have these changes been felt at the village level? What impact has the adoption of the new technology had on income distribution, labour relations, land tenure and other related issues? How, in short, has the process of agrarian transformation unfolded in this one particular part of the world under conditions, one could say, of peripheral capitalism? These are the questions to which this book addresses itself. Before descending into the view from the village, which shall come into sharper focus in the following chapters, a review of the literature, comparing the generalizations which have been made for the Muda region to that of other Asian countries, is in order.

4

THE FRAMING OF THE STUDY

THE GREEN REVOLUTION: THE GLOBAL RECORD It should be borne in mind that the "Green Revolution" is nothing more than a descriptive term covering a wide range of programmes which were undertaken in various countries. The actual form that these programmes took differed, of course, from country to country, but in general, the following five components were found in all such "Green Revolution" programmes: 1. A technological 'package' or recipe produced in scientific research centres and designed to fit the environmental conditions of the region in which it is to be applied; 2. Arrangements whereby knowledge of this technology could be communicated to cultivators; 3. Measures to ensure the availability of physical inputs, that is, HYV seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, machinery and fuel; 4. Measures to favour the prospect of profitable sale sufficiently attractive to compensate for the greatly increased production costs and risks involved; 5. Indispensably, some system of credit so that the payment for inputs and additional cultivation expenses could be financed, pending the receipt of income from the sales of the product after the harvest. 1

The main feature of this new technology was the indispensability of new physical inputs which had to be paid for in cash. Furthermore, in order to maximize the chances of success for this new technology, planners tended to favour the best agricultural areas in the distribution of their programmes and investment, as well as the so-called "progressive" farmer, that is, the already well-to-do farmer who was most likely to accept the new technological innovations. The consequence, according to Pearse, who headed a global United Nations study on the effects of the "Green Revolution" between the years 1970 and 1974, has been "a further bias towards polarization and uneven growth" in the affected areas. The bigger farmers benefit; the poor arc increasingly marginalized. The studies showed that cultivators who had no more land than an area capable of supporting a minimal family suffered handicaps in most cases which prevented them from benefitting from the higher production potential of the technology, in spite of the willingness of such cultivators to devote increased labour to production. 2

Furthermore,

it did not perceptibly improve levels of livelihood, nor its quality, for the poorer sections of the rural populations, which may be considered as including between one and two-thirds of the national populations in the countries studied. Moreover, it has failed to prevent a further impoverishment of a considerable proportion of the poor. 3

The experience of the Southeast Asian countries seems to support this view. In his summary of various studies done on Java, Hartmann comes to the following conclusion:

The Empirical Setting

5

These studies lead to the following conclusion about the consequences of the "Green Revolution": unequal distribution of the direct and indirect uses of the new biological and chemical technologies in rice production; new technologies with regard to land preparation, weeding, harvesting and milling of rice with lower costs for the larger landowners but which, at the same time, reduce the employment and therefore income opportunities for the gmwing numbers of small and landless peasants who are dependent on wage labour; more frequent harvest losses because of the greater sensitivity of the new varieties to drought; floods and especially pests, which threaten the income of the smaller landowner more than that of the larger landowners; lower real incomes in the agricultural sector; unequal access to agrarian and other institutional credit while private, informal credit and interest rates for small and landless peasants remain high and strengthen their dependence on moneylenders with the frequent consequence of total appropriation of their land ... increasing landlessness and accelerated rate of land purchases by wealthier farmers as well as by urban ditcs ... " 4

Reports of increasing polarization also issue from the Laguna area in the Philippines, where the "Green Revolution" in rice production was first launched and has been longest felt. In the village studied by Hayami for example: ... the large farmers have accumulated land holdings and consolidated them into larger units of operation. Similar trends are not uncommon throughout Asia, even though the process of polarization is not quite so dramatic in most cases as observed in the barrio in Laguna. 5

In Thailand, the "Green Revolution" did not even really get off the ground. In 1970/71, high-yielding varieties occupied only 2 per cent of the planted area, leading to the "inevitable conclusion ... that the increase in yields observed in Thailand since the mid-1960s is independent of the high-yielding varieties". 6 In searching for the "factors that account for the lack of success of the Green Revolution in Thailand", Yotopoulos and Adulavidhaya conclude that: One of the more serious handicaps of the Green Revolution technology may well be that it relics heavily on operating capital and especially on purchased high-energy intermediate inputs. As such it may be largely inappropriate for the economic position and the initial endowments of peasants. The peasant is the family producer who owns his small plot of land, relies exclusively on family labour, organizes the consumption needs of the family, and only secondarily produces marketable surpluses when money is required to buy the few items outside the ambit of self-sufficiency. The peasant is only marginally wired to the circuits of the market mechanism and therefore cannot use the market as a purveyor of agricultural inputs. 7

In the same vein, Pearse partly attributes the polarization and impoverishment effect, especially problematic for the small farmers, to the fact that "the small farm in pre-capitalist farming is essentially self-provisioning" and that most of them could not manage the quantitative transition from self-provisioner to petty commercial farmer. 8 Although phrased in a different, more technocratic language, one can assume that Hayami is making essentially the same point when he writes that:

6

THE FRAMING OF THE STUDY

Contrary to the popular belief that polarization has been induced by new technology, I would argue that it has resulted from insufficient progress in technology. If technological progress is not sufficiently rapid, the increase in labour demand will fail to keep up with the increase in labour supply arising from rapid population growth. As a result, the wage rate is bound to decline and the return to assets (land) to rise, and hence, the income position of labourers deteriorate relative to asset holders (landlords). 9

We turn now to a more detailed evaluation of the Malaysian experience in the course of which it shall become clear that future generalizations about the process of agricultural change in the wake of the "Green Revolution" will have to take the apparent peculiarities of the Muda record into account.

THE "GREEN REVOLUTION" IN MUDA In 1970, the inauguration of a massive irrigation project financed by a W odd Bank loan ushered in the era of the "Green Revolution" for 63,000 farm households cultivating 236,868 acres of padi land in the north-western states of Kedah and Perlis. 10 The field research which forms the basis for this present analysis was carried out in a Kedah village situated within this Muda Irrigation Scheme. The aim of the study was to understand the nature of and reasons for the kinds of changes which the "Green Revolution" has induced and it is indeed fortunate that, given the complexity of the processes involved, a number of other scholars were involved in the same enterprise. It would be no exaggeration to say that more is known about the agrarian economy of the Muda region than of almost any other Third World country and that this wealth ofknowledge has facilitated the painstaking reconstruction of what actually happened. However, given the relative paucity of in-depth studies of village communities, answers as to why the changes took the direction they did, are not readily forthcoming. In later chapters, an attempt will be made to provide some of the answers. Prior to this, however, a brief review of the literature is in order.

THE NORTHWESTERN PLAIN BEFORE THE MUDA IRRIGATION SCHEME The major studies on the area before the implementation of the Muda Irrigation Scheme all testify to the existence of considerable agrarian distress in the period in which they were carried out, namely, in the mid-fifties.1 1 Wilson's study based on a sample of padi land in two crop years, 1954/55 and 1955/56 in North Malaya (Kedah, Perlis, Province Wellesley, Kelantan and the Krian District) contained such disturbing findings that he was moved to argue strongly for a "full Land Reform programme".1 2 The rate of tenancy was found to be high (over half the padi lands were tenanted), as was insecurity of tenure (in Kelantan, 42 per

The Empirical Setting

7

cent of the tenanted padi land was found to change hands annually). Changes in the tenurial system were also exerting pressure on tenants, for example, the increasing trend towards cash rentals, as well as the practice of re-renting, and the profferment of cash deposits to the landlord in areas of land scarcity. 13 His fmdings on the pattern oflandownership were as disturbing. Ownership of padi land was widely though very unevenly distributed, and based on an extrapolation of his Krian data, Wilson came to the oft-repeated estimation that "not more than 2000 families own less than twothirds of the padi lands of North Malaya".l 4 Doubt as to the representativity of the sample basis of Wilson's fmdings, on the extent of tenancy at any rate, is eliminated by Berwick's census of padi planters in 1955, according to which pure tenant farmers formed the largest category in terms of farms (42.1 per cent of all farms) as well as area under padi (40 per cent). 15 Further evidence of the depressed conditions prevailing in the area are provided by Thomson's study of the marketing system. In a survey carried out in 1954, 400 out of the 500 farmers interviewed acknowledged having borrowed money via padi kunca 16 whereby, he estimated, they lost out on half the value of the crop. 17 Based primarily on information made available by the above studies, a Padi Cultivators Act was passed in 1967, designed to control the level of rent in padi lands and to provide security of tenure to padi cultivators. Under the Act, all tenancy agreements had to be registered for a term not less than three consecutive seasons (season including double-cropping season, in effect, three years), and a maximum rent of 140 gantang per acre for Class I land was fixed, to which a further 30 per cent rent was to be added for the second crop, in the event of double-cropping. 18 The Act can be deemed almost a total failure. Up to the end of 1972, just slightly over 2,500 tenancy agreements were registered in Pedis and Kedah. 19 Obviously, the problems which tenants were facing could not be solved by the provision of legal rights and protection.

THE MUDA IRRIGATION SCHEME AND AFTER Planning began in 1965 for the construction of a major irrigation project which would enable double-cropping in the area. Conceived as part of the First Malaysia Plan (1966-70) and designed originally to increase padi production by raising productivity, 60 per cent of the cost of construction, estimated at 228 million ringgit, was borne by a W odd Bank loan. Water was first released from the two dams, the Pedu and Muda, in 1970 and by 1975, the full feasible command area, amounting to one-third of Malaysia's padi land, was served with off-season water. Production Gains Production increases have been nothing less than spectacular. Padi production which was 268,000 tons in 1965 increased to 730,890 tons in 1974 and 774,082 tons in 1979. The bulk of the increase is to be attributed to the spread of double-cropping within

8

THE fRAMING OF THE STUDY

the same period from 8,390 acres to 219,000 acres. Thus, the production target of 653,800 tons has not only been met but also well surpassed, with a rate of increase of approximately 200 per cent. 20

Income Changes at the Farm Level Equally impressive are the increases recorded in farm incomes. Jegatheesan's study, utilizing survey data from 1966, 1967 and 1972/73, came to the conclusion that "padi farmers in Muda have, in the period of a decade, enjoyed a 3.6 fold increase in net household incomes originating almost entirely from padi production. Accounting for inflationary pressures which have been particularly significant since 1973, it was further shown that real incomes of the padi farmer in 1975 were 2.4 times those of the 1966 level". 21 Another analysis based on the same data sources revealed a fivefold increase in family net income in the post-project period. 22 Moreover, this income increase seems to have benefited small farmers even more than large ones, regardless of tenurial status. Lai, in a subsequent analysis of the same Food and Agricultural Organisation data, argues that: Although income is seen to increase with farm size, it does so at a disproportionately slower rate. The largest farm size class for instance has an average farm size of more than ten times the smallest. Yet the income gap is only five to six times (sic). For per capita NHI (Net Houshold Income), it is even smaller, at less than three and a half times. Hence, the disparity in income between farm size groups is nowhere as wide as the farm size differences would suggest. 23

His re-analysis of the FAO data did not support the original conclusion arrived at the FAO study itself, namely that "this increase in income at the farm level, however, has not been unevenly distributed across the already unequal pattern of income distribution and has, therefore, served to worsen that distribution". 24 Lai's data showed that income distribution worsened only in the first year of double-cropping, and thereafter, stabilized itself. He concludes that, "the tendency for income inequality to widen beyond the first year of double-cropping is not evident". 25 This view thus challenges those who see the Muda record as confirming the general hypothesis that income gains from the first few years of the "Green Revolution" accrue disproportionately to the larger farm operators. Based on surveys carried out in 1972 and 1975, de Koninck argues that "that the improvement of farm income is related in an increasingly exclusive manner to farm size is a fundamental characteristic of the Green Revolution in the regions studied (Muda and Aceh ~ the author)" ,2 6 That income distribution has worsened as a result of the introduction of the high-yielding varieties is also suggested by Ishak Shari and K.S. Jomo's study. Based on a review of the literature as well as their field research in two villages, they conclude that "the spatial pattern of income distribution has tended to become more skewed. The distribution of farm size and incomes within the rice-farming communities has been shown to have worsened with the introduction of the Green Revolution". 2 7

9

The Empirical Setting

Returns to Labour Another way of evaluating income gains would be to look specifically at the returns to labour, which have been postulated to be lower than the returns to land. Little is known about the extent and nature of the rural proletariat in the Muda area. The only statement we have of their size is that one-sixth (8,608) of the 54,608 farm families in 1973 did not operate any padi land but were dependent on the sale of their labour power. 28 In addition, it has been estimated that farm households which operate less than 2.13 acres were net suppliers of hired labour to other double-cropping households. 29 How have they fared under double-cropping? The initial answer is, remarkably well, as can be seen by the "dramatic increase in wages relative to other factor prices, estate wages and the consumer price index since the beginning of the Muda Project". 30 Within a four-year period, the wage rate increased by 78 per cent with wages for transplanting in particular, increasing by over 100 per cent. This was higher than the returns to land, which in fact fell by 25 per cent. During this time the Consumer Price Index increased by a mere 15 per cent (see Table A).

TABLE A Changes in Labour Use, Prices and Income 1970-73 1970

1973

Average Money Net Farm Income

100 100 100 100 100

178 192 75 123 484

Consumer Price Index (rice excluded)

100

115

Wage Rate Labour Input (Padi Crop) Land Rent Per Crop Padi Price

Source: Table A is taken from Goldman and Squire. op. cit., Table 2, p. 4.

The cause can be traced directly to double-cropping, which almost doubled (92 per cent) labour input. Family labour alone was not capable of meeting the demand so that 47 per cent of the total labour input into padi represented hired labour. 31 It would be premature however, to conclude that hired labour has benefited disproportionately from the "Green Revolution." Precisely because of the labour shortage which had led to the soaring wages for harvesting and transplanting, merchanization of the harvesting process, which was commercially introduced in 1976, had taken over 82 per cent of a farm area surveyed in 1979. 32 Furthermore, farmers have begun experimenting with broadcasting in order to save on the expense of wages for transplanting. It was estimated that by 1982, approximately 60 per cent of the padi acreage had been sown by broadcasting. 33

10

THE fRAMING OF THE STUDY

That these two more recent phenomena represent a reversal of the previous trend of high gains to labour can hardly be doubted. A more detailed discussion will be presented in Chapter 7.

Changes in the Agrarian Structure The changes in the pattern oflandownership and farm operation which have occurred in the area are particularly well documented, thanks to the excellent study by the Centre for Policy Research in Penang, based not on sample but on census data pertaining to landownership and tenure. 34 Since their reports have incorporated findings from other studies as well, this overview of patterns of land tenure will be based almost entirely on their publications.

Trends in Landownership Of particular significance is the finding that "the concentration ofland ownership in Muda has declined markedly [author's emphasis J between 1955 and 1975, although it is still considerable today". 35 As can be seen from Table B, the majority ofholdings (61.8 per cent) are below 4 re in size, but account for only 21.6 per cent of the total area, while 11.2 per cent of the holdings, which were larger than 10 re, cover 42.3 per cent of the total area. If we were to compare the distribution of landownership with that which Wilson found in 1955 however, which was that 8.8 per cent of the holdings accounted for 67 per cent of the land, it will be seen that "the top 7.6 per cent of owners in Muda own 33.9 per cent of the land, or a slightly smaller proportion of owners today own about half the amount of land owned by the top 8.8 per cent of owners twenty years ago. " 36

Trends in Farm Operation As can be seen from Table C, there has been a remarkable drop in the rate of tenancy in the area. Whereas tenant farmers comprised the main category in 1955, making

TABLE B Distribution of Padi Land Holdings, Muda Irrigation Scheme Area, 1975/76 Size of Holding

% of Holdings

% of area

4 re 4-10 10

61.8 27.1 11.2

21.6 36.1 42.3

Total

100

100

Source: Table is derived from Table l(b) in Lim, Gibbons and Kassim, op. cit., p. 268.

TABLE C Trends in Farm Tenure, Muda Irrigation Scheme Area, 1955-1975/76

Tenurial Status of Farmer

1955

1966

1972/73

%Farmer

%Area

Owner-Operator Mean Farm Size (X)

37.9 6.0

31.1

44.5 5

39.5

Tenant Mean Farm Size (X) Owner-Tenant Mean Farm Size (X)

42.0 6.7 20.2 10.3

39

41.4 5.3

38.8

29.2

14.0 8.6

21.7

100 46.748

100

Totals Total Farmers Total Area (re) X Farm Size (re)

%Farmer

100 49.772

%Area

100

1975/76

%Area

%Farmer

%Area

44.0 5.5

43.2

53.9 4.6

44.5

37.6 4.5 18.5 8 100.1 43.921

30.3

29.9 5.5 16.2 9.1 100 61.164

29.3

%Farmer

26.6 100.1

26.2 100

(340,390) 333,738

280,980

249,432

344,353

7.1

5.6

5.6

5.6

Source: Table taken from Table 6, Lim, Gibbons and Kassim, op. cit., p. 76.

12

THE FRAMING OF THE STUDY

up for 42 per cent of the farmers, their numbers were diminished to a mere 30 per cent of the farming population in 1975/76. Owner-operators on the other hand registered a major increase in numbers, accounting in 1975/76 for 53.9 per cent of farmers and 44.5 per cent of the area. The position of owner-tenants registered a slight drop, from 20.2 per cent in 1955 to 16.2 per cent in 1975/76. At the same time, the table also indicates the other major trend in the region, namely, that a clear polarization of farm size distribution has been emerging since 1972/73. "At one end is the growing number oflarge farmers cultivating an increasing proportion of the land; at the other, also a growing number of small farmers operating a decreasing proportion ofland". 37 In other words, the increasing polarization of farm size brought about by the Green Revolution in Malaysia has been at the expense of the tenant and not of the small farmer. The number of small farmers in fact has increased. The following chapters represent an attempt to explain the apparent paradoxical turn in the development of the Green Revolution in Malaysia, whereby particular attention will be paid to the historical development of the region and the social context within which padi production takes place. At this point however, a brief resume of the forthcoming argument is in order.

PLAN OF THE STUDY Chapter 2 identifies the theoretical issues which this study addresses itself to, as well as the concepts which have guided the analysis. The rejection of the concept of a specifically peasant society which is organically inter-locked with economic processes of production, consumption and distribution is grounded in Chapters 12-14, where the three structural principles of peasant social organization - kinship, territoriality and the patron-client relationship - are discussed. The rejection of the concept of a specifically peasant mode of production based on the household as a unit of production and consumption is based on a detailed analysis of the internal structure of village households provided in Chapters 5 and 6. It follows that the process of the transformation of the Muda agrarian economy - the leitmotiv of the study - far exceeds in complexity the widely-held model of a sudden breakthrough from a subsistence-oriented peasant economy to a capitalist-organized commercial agriculture via the introduction of the Green Revolution. Chapter 3 analyses the conditions under which the padi economy was established in the region and Chapters 7 to 11 follow the process of change induced by the Green Revolution. It will be argued that the seasonal nature of the padi crop before double-cropping, that is, the nature of its production cycle, made it necessary for subsistence-oriented farmers with an inadequate subsistence base to have access to consumption credit. The availability of a land frontier till the mid-fifties put a premium on labour, which was and remained a scarce factor of production until the introduction of the combine harvester in the late seventies. The closing of the land frontier in the sixties, and the implementation of double-cropping in the seventies, have wrought tremendous changes if not in the padi landscape then certainly in the padi economy and

The Empirical Setting

13

consequently, the village society. Double-cropping, with its bridging of the production-consumption gap, took the edge out of the indebtedness spiral. The tremendous leap forward in absolute production and profitability which the new technology facilitated led to an intensification of interest in padi cultivation both by owners and tenants. Whereas the previous conditions of low productivity and land availability encouraged the development of production based on tenancy, the new production constraints have been encouraging a trend towards peasant farming, that is, farming based on petty proprietorship. The rate of tenancy has fallen, partly through repossession ofland by the previous landlords. The trend towards proprietary ownership as the basis of farm operation has been accompanied by an increasing independence from hired or exchange labour from other households, particularly with the mechanization of the labour-intensive harvesting process and the increasing substitution of the labour-intensive transplanting process by broadcasting. These changes have put a premium on access to capital, or production credit, which has replaced consumption credit as a necessary feature of the production cycle. As land has become scarce and labour is in danger of becoming superfluous a new kind of farming unit is being created - the family farm as a unit of production and consumption which is, on the one hand, increasingly shorn of production ties with other village households, while on the other hand, increasingly integrated into the production cycle of production units outside the village economy. With this development, the stage will be set for further class differentiation.

NOTES

1. Taken from Andrew Pearse, "Technology and Peasant Production: Reflections on a Global Study", Development and Change 8 (1977): 130. The arguments which follow are drawn from this article but can also be found in Keith Griffin, The Political Economy of Agrarian Change: An Essay on the Green Revolution (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1974); lngrid Palmer, The New Rice in Asia: Conclusions from Four Country Studies (Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1976) among others. 2. Pearse, op. cit., p. 144. 3. Ibid. 4. Jorg Hartmann, Subsistenzproduktion und Agrarentwicklung in javaj Indonesien (Saarbrucken: Breitenbach, 1981 ), p. 34. 5. Yujiro Hayami, "Economic Consequences of New Rice Technology: A View from the Barrio" (Paper presented at the International Rice Research Conference, International Rice Research Institute, Los Banos, Philippines, 1979), p. 8. 6. Pan. A. Yotopoulos and Kamphol Adulavidhaya, "The Green Revolution in Thailand", in Readings in Asian Farm Management, ed. Tan Bock Thiam and Shao-Er Ong (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1979), p. 244. 7. Ibid., p. 256. 8. Pearse, Technology and Peasant Production, p. 144 ff. 9. Hayami, op. cit., p. 8. 10. Figures given in Zakaria lsmail, "Economic and Social Aspects of Padi Production: Some Recent Trends" (Paper presented at the seminar on "Economics, Development and the Consumer", organized by the Consumers' Association of Penang, Malaysia, 1980). For an account of Malaysia's agricultural policy, in particular the role assigned to padi production in the context of the national economy, see among others Otto Charles Doering Ill, "Malaysian Rice Policy and the Muda River Irrigation Project" (Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1973).

14

THE fRAMING OF THE STUDY

11. The studies referred to are those ofE.J.H. Berwick, Census ofPadi Planters in Kedah, 1955 (Alor Setar: Department of Agriculture, 1956); A.M. Thomson, Report to the Government of the Federation of Malaya on the Marketing of Rice (Rome: FAO, 1954); T.B. Wilson, The Economics of Padi Production in North Malaya, Part I (Kuala Lumpur: Department of Agriculture, 1958). 12. Wilson, op. cit., p. 98. 13. Ibid., p. 26 If. 14. Ibid., p. 67. 15. See Table 4 in T.G. Lim, D.S. Gibbons, Shukor Kassim, "Accumulation of Padi Land in the Muda Region: Some Findings and Thoughts on their Implications for the Peasantry and Development", in Peasantry and Modernization, ed. Hairi Abdullah and H.M. Dahlan, Special Issue of Akademika 20, 21 (January-July 1982): 291, reproduced here as Table C. 16. Thomson, Marketing of Rice, p. 26. 17. Ibid., p. 27. 18. Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, Implementation of Padi Cultivators Act 1967, (Kuala Lumpur, 1973), pp. 122 If. 19. Ibid., p. 28. 20. Figures derived from Zakaria Ismail, Padi Production: Some Recent Trends, and Ouchi et al., Farmer and Village in West Malaysia (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1977). 21. Jegatheesan, S., The Green Revolution and the Muda Irrigation Scheme, MADA Monograph no. 30 (Aior Setar: Muda Agricultural Authority, 1977), p. 58. 22. Richard H. Goldmann and Lyn Squire, "Technical Change, Labor Use and Income Distribution in the Muda Irrigation Project", Development Discussion Paper no. 35, 1978, p. 47. 23. K.Y. Lai, "Income Distribution Among Farm Households in the Muda Irrigation Scheme: A Developmental Perspective", Kajian Ekonomi Malaysia XV, no. 1 Oune 1978): 42. 24. World Bank/Food and Agriculture Organization, The Muda Study: A First Report, vol. 1 (Rome, 1975), p. 2. 25. Lai, op. cit., p. 46. 26. Rodolphe de Koninck, "The Integration of the Peasantry: Examples from Malaysia and Indonesia", Pacific Affairs 52 (1979): 281. Reference is made here to the Food and Agriculture Organization survey which was a major data source for the above studies, World Bank/FAO, op. cit., 1975. 27. Ishak Shari and Jomo Kwame Sundaram, "Malaysia's Green Revolution in Rice-Farming: Capital Accumulation and Technological Change in Peasant Society", in Abdullah and Dahlan, op. cit., p. 259. 28. Figure from Afifuddin, cited in Mohd. Ikmal Said, "Capitalist Encroachments in Padi Production in West Malaysia", in Abdullah and Dahlan, op. cit., p. 349. 29. Goldman and Squire, op. cit., p. 17. 30. Ibid., p. 21. 31. Ibid., p. 17. 32. M. Yamashita, H.S. Wong, and S. Jegatheesan, Farm Management Studies, MADA'TARC Co-operative Study, Pilot Project ACRBD 4, Muda Irrigation Scheme Qapan: Tropical Agriculture Research Centre, Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, 1981), p. 47. 33. Personal communication from Lim Teik Ghee. 34. Their findings have been presented in D.S. Gibbons, T.G. Lim, G.R. Elliston and Shukor Kassim, Land Tenure in the Muda Irrigation Area, Final Report, Part II (Penang: Centre for Policy Research, 1981) and Lim, Gibbons, and Kassim, Accumulation of Padi Land, op. cit. 35. Ibid., p. 13. 36. Ibid., p. 12. 37. Ibid., p. 290.

2 Peasant Reproduction: A Framework of Analysis

INTRODUCTION The empirical point of departure for this study is the process of change at the village level in the wake of technological and social innovations induced by the so-called "Green Revolution". Seen in broader terms, the theme is that of the transformation of agrarian structures, here as elsewhere, as a result of the penetration of capitalism into agriculture. This problematique has been a central concern in development sociology in its effort to understand the phenomenon of underdevelopment; its theoretical underpining however has been enriched by the discovery of the "peasant" by various other disciplines in the last decade - in particular anthropologists, rural sociologists and historians. 1 In this chapter, an attempt shall be made to outline the various theoretical issues involved and to make explicit the analytical concepts and theoretical framework which have guided the interpretation of the empirical material presented in the following chapters.

THE CLASSICAL BATTLE LINE: LENIN VS. CHAYANOV The terms of the debate were set by the differing analyses offered by Lenin and Chayanov of the "state of the Russian peasantry" (in response to the expanding capitalist market) at the turn of the century. In brief, Lenin's position was that the old peasantry is not only 'differentiating', it is being completely dissolved, it is ceasing to exist, it is being ousted by absolutely new types of rural inhabitants

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- types that are the basis of a society in which commodity exchange and capitalist production prevail. These types are the rural bourgeoisie (chiefly petty bourgeoisie) and the rural proletariat - a class of commodity producers and a class of agricultural wage-";orkers. 2

For Chayanov on the other hand, the peasant economy is characterized by the existence of a unit of production and consumption (the "Family Labour Farm") which has the capacity to survive, even in the face of the expansion of commodity production. 3 Changes in the size of farm units, which Lenin attributed to the process of concentration and social differentiation, were explained by Chayanov in terms of demographic differentiation. The crucial issue on which they differed was that of access to the means of production. Lenin postulated the existence of social differentiation on the basis not merely of differences in the size of landholdings but of the concentration of means of production, that is, a larger landowner would also have more of the other means of production. The mechanism, the driving force behind this process, however, is the establishment of wage labour as the basic relation of production between the poor and the well-to-do peasantry. Commercial cultivation among the well-to-do peasantry becomes capitalist farming when it is based on the hire of wage labour. And it is the poor peasantry that has to sell labour power. Capitalist class relations are the end result of this process: differential access to means of production is what allows the well-to-do peasantry to become the agrarian bourgeoisie, while insufficient access to means to production among poor peasants compels their transformation into a rural proletariat. 4

Chayanov's micro-economic theory is, on the other hand, concerned with peasant household resource allocation, and operated with the assumption of unlimited land availability, and the non-existence of wage labour as a category. According to him, the fact that in the peasant economy the unit of production was the family, which served at the same time as the unit of consumption, meant that labour allocation processes were determined not by the wage labour relation but by the consumerworker ratio (that is, more output per worker would be forthcoming should there be more mouths to feed). This in turn changes in the course of the family life cycle of the household: in its early stages, with a high consumer-worker ratio, the family farm size remains small but as the children mature and begin to contribute to the labour force of the houshold, farm size increases; in the fmal stage of the life cycle, the elderly couple returns to the cultivation of a small plot of land. For Chayanov therefore, it is family size which is the independent variable in determining the access to means of production like land and capital. In place of the class exploitation which is said to occur via wage labour, he substitutes the concept of "self-exploitation" to explain the incredibly long hours which family workers are prepared to invest should they have an unfavourable worker-consumer ratio. Peasant farm units are thus essentially subsistence oriented, homogeneous, family labour farms which are reproduced in a static fashion from generation to generation via the dynamics of the family life cycle.

Peasant Reproduction

17

THE DEBATE RENEWED: "PEASANT" VS. "SIMPLE COMMODITY PRODUCER" Buried by the collectivization of the Russian agriculture, this debate was rekindled in the sixties as new research made it increasingly clear that peasant farms had retained their hold in the agricultural sector, especially in the so-called peripheral or underdeveloped countries. More significantly, the tenacity of the peasant farm also made itself felt in West European countries where industrial production had long established itself. 5 The appearance of the first English language translation of Chayanov's theory was thus a timely event. At the same time, research into the causes of underdevelopment was refocusing attention away from the assumed static traditionalism of the peasant sector to the structures of international capitalism and imperialism which "create" underdevclopment. 6 The subjection of the entire world to the "capitalist world-economy" 7 would imply however, that the capitalist law of value would be operative everywhere, in which case the processes of exploitation, concentration and differentiation described by Lenin would inevitably take effect. Without reviewing the voluminous literature which has since arisen in the course of the revival of this debate, and at the risk of reducing the broad spectrum of positions which have been taken on this issue, just two opposing positions, 8 judged as exemplary, will be considered here. Drawing upon the work of Chayanov, Shanin proposed the existence of a specifically peasant economy, characterized by its independent nature and governed by its own logic. 9 The peasantry, "the oldest and most universal mode of production known in history", is delimited as a social entity with four essential and inter-linked facets; the family farm as the basic multi-functional unit of social organisation, land husbandry and usually animal rearing as the main means of livelihood, a specific traditional culture closely linked with the way of life of small rural communities and multi-directional subjection to powerful outsiders. 10

With this typology, Shanin hoped to defme the peasantry as ... a process, a historical entity within the broader framework of society yet with a structure, consistency and momentum of its own: emerging, representing at some stage the prevailing mode of social organisation, disintegrating, re-emerging at times. 11

Taking as his point of departure the "broader framework of society", defined as the capitalist mode of production, Bernstein argues that in the process of its global development, pre-capitalist modes of production are destroyed, including the "natural economy" in which peasant, use-value production was embedded. 12 Following an initial phase of coercion to establish the conditions of peasant commodity production, the reproduction of these conditions becomes internalised in the simple reproduction cycle to the extent that it cannot take place outside commodity relations. 13

As a consequence of this process, the conditions for simple commodity production

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are created, "the 'logic' of which is subsistence in the broad sense of the simple reproduction of the producers and the unit of production (descriptively the household)" . 14 For this form of production, Bernstein would therefore substitute the analytical category of "simple commodity producer" for the descriptive category of "peasant". Further, due to the "simple reproduction squeeze" 15 and the intensification of the process of commodification, differentiation occurs, for which he offers the following typology: (i) 'poor' peasants unable to reproduce themselves through household production (because they lack sufficient land or other means of production, or lack sufficient family labour) have to exchange their labour-power on a regular basis and come to form a category reproduced through the sale of labour-power ... The access to a small plot does not make them, by definition, 'peasants' but in so far as it contributes to their subsistence, reduces the wages paid by those who employ them. In other words, they come to constitute a rural proletariat. (ii) 'middle' peasants are able to reproduce themselves mainly through family labour and land but in specific relations with other forms of production. (iii) 'rich' peasants or kulaks accumulate sufficiently to invest in production through the purchase of superior means of production and/or labour-power; in short, in so far as they initiate and maintain a cycle of extended reproduction based on accumulation they come to form a category of capitalist farmers. 16

Reduced to its core, the dispute is a conceptual one: should the key concepts employed be descriptive or analytical, and if analytical, in respect to which conceptual grid? In more concrete terms, should an empirical delimitation of the contours of peasant production (a la Shanin) be made the point of departure for theory construction or an analytically-defined concept of a form of production which will allow the identification of the specific, historically-evolved peasant forms of production, and the analysis of the process of transformation they are being subject to, in the context of the more general conditions of production they are embedded m. It seems that the second approach would prove to be a more fruitful one. As Bernstein has convincingly argued, the destruction of the closed reproduction cycle of family enterprises in the process of capitalist expansion has led to a different process of social reproduction in which the reproduction of households takes place increasingly on an individual basis through the relations of commodity production and exchange 1 7 [author's emphasis].

Thus, even where the family farm has been retained, its conditions of existence are now determined by commodity production, in other words, by the market. At this point, it may be worth bearing in mind the conceptual clarifications which Kautsky and Lenin had already introduced into this discussion. For Lenin, as Ennew et al. notes, the market is a category of commodity economy, and commodity economy is not capitalist economy. It is only under the conditions of the latter that the market gains complete sway, which implies that it is only the conditions of capitalist production that forms of commodity production can be fully realised. 1s

Peasant Reproduction

19

Nonetheless however, The vital point is that small commodity producers are articulated into capitalist forms of commodity circulation without themselves necessarily being capitalist enterprises (not employing wage labour). The advance of capitalist production therefore is not to be judged by a simple addition of capitalist-organised enterprises, rather it is the conditions of existence of all [authors' emphasis] the enterprises, in the economy which must be examined.l 9 In accordance with this, Bernstein has proposed the replacement of the term "peasant" with that of"simple commodity producer", whose subsistence-oriented reproduction is being increasingly dominated by the process of commodification. Friedmann's criticism of this simple act of substitution is, however, well taken. 20 In its place, she proposes an analytical definition of simple commodity production. As a logical category, simple commodity production implies minimally that all external relations of the enterprise are commodity relations, that is, the enterprise sells all it produces, saving nothing for direct consumption, and buys all it consumes, both for the means of production and for sustaining the life of the labourers. 21 Simple commodity production is thus a form of production within capitalism dominated by family labour and found primarily in the agricultural sector of advanced capitalist countries: . . . the majority of farms in advanced capitalist countries are not themselves capitalist in their internal relations. Most agricultural labour is performed by farmers and their families. Wage labour is quantitatively and qualitatively subordinate to full-time family labour, both for wages earned by farmers off the farm, and for wages paid to outsiders to supplement family labour on the farm. 22 This form of production is thus subject to a double specification, the unit of production, and the social formation in which it is embedded. 23 The capitalist mode of production, which provides the conditions of existence of simple commodity production, is characterized by generalized circulation of commodities, that is, by the existence of a market in products, labour power, land, credit and so forth. Peasant production on the one hand, is defined by the fact that the social formation is not fully capitalist. Peasant production, in consequence, derives its specific character from its lack of integration into national factor markets. Personal ties, rather than market relations, are crucial for the mobilization ofland, labour, means of production and credit. "Since none of these relations, when they exist, are governed by institutionalized markets, they do not obey general laws but take historically specific forms". 24 Friedmann's own area of concern is the simple commodity producer of the advanced capitalist countries. For a further specification of the conditions of reproduction of peasant enterprises, we turn now to the work of sociologists at the University of Bielefeld, associated with the concept of subsistence production.

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THE BIELEFELD CONCEPT OF SUBSISTENCE PRODUCTION In a review article of the Bielefeld position, Schiel and Stauth make the following summary of its main focus: The debate that was initiated by Frank on capitalism and underdevelopment introduced a controversy over the interpretation of the various basic patterns which issue from the confrontation between the capitalist and pre-capitalist mode of production, over the question of the generality or specificity of the main lines of capitalist development and transformation, and over the basic relationship between capitalism and underdevelopment ... In contrast, the Bielefeld studies concentrated on the generative and regenerative reproduction and use of labour-power [author's emphasis]. The point of departure was provided by comparative, interregional studies on the forms of reproduction of petty peasant producers, whereby the main concern was their specific conditions of reproduction in concrete societies, in particular in the context of the development of the capitalist worldeconomy [author's translation ]. 25

For their analysis of the reproduction of labour power, the concept of subsistence production occupies a central position. The concept of subsistence production as used in these studies is not to be confused with "self-subsistence" or a "subsistence economy". As employed here, it is merely an analytical category that refers to usevalue-oriented production; in this sense, it is the theoretical complement of commodity production. 26 In concrete terms, it designates the various kinds of productive activities engaged within the household which are not mediated by the market: Important is, however, that a large part of this reproduction takes place as directly connected production and consumption outside [author's emphasis] the market economy ... Short for 'subsistence production for the reproduction of households or families' we use the term 'household subsistence reproduction' to describe this process. 27

The main thrust of the argument is that subsistence production, defined in the above analytical sense, is to be found in all modes of production and is in fact a necessary precondition for the production of surplus value, both in the metropole and the periphery. 28 The theoretical consequence drawn from this was that analysis be directed to the dynamics of the articulation between subsistence production and commodity production in concrete, historically-formed societies: Therefore, we wish to avoid too broad concepts such as 'subsistence economy', 'peasant economy', or 'economy of the marginal masses' and prefer to analyze the articulation or interrelation of subsistence production(s) and commodity production(s) within [emphasis in the original] a given economic structure. 29

This basic theorem, that the reproduction of labour power (generative and regenerative) requires both subsistence and commodity production, simple though it sounds, marks a not insignificant contribution to the issues discussed so far. Stripped

Peasant Reproduction

21

of its association with self-sufficiency (in respect of the unit of production) or subsistence economy (as a closed sector within the national economy), the concept of subsistence production focuses attention on the structure of the non-capitalist relations indispensable to the reproduction of the labour power, which in turn has become indispensable to capital. Work produced within the houshold re-emerges into focus, as well as the fundamental process of reproduction of human labour. The logic of production in a capitalist world economy has dominated the discussion to date; the Bielefeld approach has tended to take the logic of reproduction more seriously. 30

REPRODUCTION AND THE HOUSEHOLD It is now possible to return to Chayanov whose micro-theory also focused on the reproduction oflabour, secured through the productive activity of the household. The household constitutes both a unit of production as well as a unit of consumption, in the form of the family labour farm. Its size and productive output varies according to the changing reproductive needs of the family, as expressed in the family life cycle. While differing in details, this conceptualization of the household as a corporate, kinbased group which functions as a unit of production and consumption is also shared by some Bielefield studies. 31 The point that is missed by Chayanov, and remains insufficiently thematized by the others, is that all labour, including family labour, is not merely a value which is "naturally" at the disposal of a household, which is "naturally" formed in the course of an individual's family life cycle, but that it is a social product the formation and control of which has also to be analysed. As noted by Ennew et al., Clearly, the family-labour farm [FLF] is not an ever-always given entity. It supposes anterior to it (as the conditions of its reproduction) other social relations. The existence of FLF supposes relations of formation of family units, relations which distribute women to men to form peasant households and which therefore constitute a vital link in the division oflabour (patriarchal forms are presupposed in this analysis). To object that these arc 'kinship' relations and therefore not specifically economic ones is to beg the question of the nature of the 'economy' in this case. Marriage here makes possible the formation and reformation of the units of production. The distribution of the land to family units supposes a communal regulation of rights of tenure and inheritance ... Thus the notion of the 'family-labour farm' as the basic enterprise of a mode of production raises as problems the form of the 'family' and the nature of the communal relations which sustain the operations of 'familial' production. The 'family' is not a natural institution and has no essential form. Similarly, the commune has no simple existence in general but only as part of more definite social relations. 3 2

In fact, there have been attempts to conceptualize the pre-industrial German peasant economy as an autonomous system of resource-exchanges within and between households in the village community. 33 For the Southeast Asian peasantry as well, a model of their 'moral economy' has been constructed based on the assumptions of

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the household as a unit of production and consumption in the Chayanovian sense, and the village community as a quasi-corporative unit. 34 Evidence is accumulating however, that this household as a unit of production and reproduction is not necessarily a 'natural' feature of the peasant economy. 35 Bedmer's study of two peasant communities in north-western Germany in the seventeenth century showed that only when the household was made the major tax and income unit for the feudal lord was he interested in maintaining the viability of the household as a unit of production and reproduction. 36 Social institutions like impartible inheritance and monogamy then followed. Deere, in a study of the contemporary Peruvian peasantry, came to the conclusion that the instability of the household as a unit of production and reproduction is evident in considering the number of abandoned or separated female heads of households residing in the countryside ... 37

PEASANT REPRODUCTION: A FRAMEWORK OF ANALYSIS In a certain sense, the term peasant as used here is a residual category, delineated with reference to the analytical category of the simple commodity producer. Peasant production is a form of production 38 based on the combination of subsistence and commodity production; from this it follows that the long-term maintenance of this form of production is dictated not merely by the conditions of production at large (the market economy), but also by the logic of reproduction of the means of subsistence available to the unit of production, namely, land and above all, labour. The maintenance or reproduction of a form of production requires "the renewal from one round of production to another of the social and technical elements of production and of the relations among them", 39 and shall be termed here secondary reproduction. Primary reproduction refers to the logic of reproduction, that is, to the biological and social reproduction of human life. The reproduction of human life and the reproduction of society are thus closely inter-related. For analytical purposes we should, however, distinguish between a primary reproduction, ie., the reproduction of labour power and human life in general, and secondary reproduction, ie. the reproduction of the social and economic order in such a way as to ensure its continued existence as a definite social formation or its transformation. 40

With respect to primary reproduction, however, two further distinctions shall be introduced, that between current and extended reproduction, and that between simple and expanded reproduction. For the analysis of these processes, the major concept offered here is the family development cycle. Current reproduction designates the satisfaction of immediate subsistence requirements; Chayanov's model of the family labour farm governed by the consumer-worker ratio could be seen as an analysis of current reproduction. Extended

Peasant Reproduction

23

reproduction on the other hand, expresses the diachronic dimension of the reproduction of human life that is statically assumed in the worker-consumer ratio, namely, that production has also to sustain the period of"unproductivity" before and after the worker phase. While this is a societal problem in all social formations, for subsistence production which per definition involves the direct employment of labour, extended reproduction poses itself as a problem to the immediate producer and unit of production. The logic of peasant reproduction is thus dictated not merely by the requirements of current reproduction but of extended reproduction as well. In concrete terms, this requires the ability of the household to engage not only in simple but also in expanded reproduction. Simple reproduction is production which would cover the current reproduction needs of the household. Expanded reproduction would involve the production of a surplus above and beyond the subsistence needs of the household. Expanded reproduction is indispensable for the extended reproduction of the household. It is only with this surplus that new households (and therefore productive units) can be approvisioned with means of subsistence and therefore formed in the first place. In turn, these new productive units can then take care of the old when they turn "unproductive". The analysis of the household economy has therefore to take into account, as White notes, two aspects of the material exchanges between the generations: 1) property transfers from parents to children through inheritance, and 2) resource flows from children to parents through children's labour and old-age support. 41

This pattern of inter-generational transfers can be analysed with the concept of the family development cycle, which is derived from the family life cycle as employed by Chayanov and the domestic development cycle as employed by anthropologists for the study of family structures. 42 The development cycle of the anthropologists conveys the notion of inter-related households bound together by the processes of fusion and fission which in turn are regulated primarily by marriage and kinship structures. On the other hand, property and labour allocation processes, as thematized by Chayanov in his concept of the family life cycle, are largely ignored. The concept of the family development cycle is designed to incorporate the two aspects. This approach allows a new perspective on the issue of differentiation as posed by the Lenin-Chayanov debate. The point is that the completion of the development cycle requires expanded reproduction as defmed above, which not all households manage to engage in. The same point is made by Deere in her study of the Peruvian peasantry: It is proposed that the peasantry cannot be treated as a homogeneous class; while defining characteristics of the peasantry may be its cultural congruency or its access to land, access to the means of subsistence is in no way equal. 43

The means of subsistence are land and labour. Contrary to the misplaced notion that "subsistence production" is for free, control of and unequal access to land and above all, labour, is not a "natural" process but one subject to social competition and

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THE FRAMING Of THE STUDY

institutions. The larger the component of subsistence production, the more important the factor of and control over labour. Meillassoux' exemplary analysis of the West Atrican Gourou demonstrates the importance of the ability of the lineage elders to control the labour of their productive youths via their control over women. 44 Engaged as they are in commodity production as well, most present-day peasant households also operate under conditions ofland scarcity. Land then becomes a means of control over the labour of the succeeding generation (and not merely the means whereby surplus product is extracted from wage labour). This control is mediated by family structure and marriage patterns as expressed in the course of the family development cycle. As is shown in Chapter 5, well-to-do households are thus likely to have an extended structure, while poor households tend to be denuded. In the Peruvian case, Only by holding onto the labour of sons and daughters could he farm more land as well as take care of a large herd of sheep. The ability of the household to engage in expanded reproduction- to produce a surplus above and beyond the family' subsistence requirements and the payment of rent- was thus dependent on the amount of land in usufruct and the composition of the household group. 45

Demographic differentiation is thus not merely, as understood by Chayanov, a question of family size, but also of family structure, whereby these differences in family structure can be expressive not merely of the laws of organic development of the family life cycle, but of social processes of differentiation impinging on it. To quote Deere again, The differentiation of the peasantry on the hacienda was thus expressed in terms of the possibility for accumulation on the one hand, and by the attendant household structure on the other. As the peasants recount it, poor peasants were the nuclear households that only had access to sufficient land to reproduce their own labour power and the means of production and to pay whatever additional rent constituted the surplus. Rich peasants were those patriarchs that, surrounded by their married sons, had abundant amounts of land to farm and upon which to graze sizeable herds. 46

As has already been suggested above, such processes cannot be seen in isolation; in fact, they arc indicative of the extent to which commodity production is an integral feature even of subsistence-oriented production units. Thus, no attempt is being made here to offer a framework of analysis for the "peasant economy" or "peasant production". The point made by Perlin can just as well serve as the methodological intention here: Its purpose lies in shifting the balance of attention from an almost exclusive empirical focus on particular production groups, be these families, villages or regions, to one that takes in their specific contextualization as a fundamental aspect of their nature, thus the commercial structures of production so important for their origins and fate. 47

The "contextualization" will be examined in respect to the structure and changes in the following factor markets: land labour, product, input and purchased consumer

Peasant Reproduction

25

credit. 48

goods The concept of the "market" and its "penetration" has been decomposed into the above five categories in order to facilitate a more differentiated analysis of the "origins and fate" of those non-capitalistically organized units of production which are being incorporated into the capitalist world-economy. For the further analysis of this process of incorporation, I would like to introduce the term "peasantization" borrowed from Takahashi's analysis of the Philippine peasantry. The word peasantization is often used to refer to the process by which a tribal society evolves to a more open, hctcrogcnized and monetarized society through acculturation. I shall now use the term to mean the whole process by which the kasama, who used to have the characteristics of a rural proletarian, takes on the features of the peasantry, or petty producer. The kasama is becoming a small producer for his own consumption on his family farm, where production is undertaken by the labour of the members of the family household as a unit of operation ... 49

With the aid of these concepts, a third possible trajectory of agrarian transformation, apart from the classical English road to agrarian capitalism analysed by Marx, and the so-called "Junker" path (state-encouraged transformation of feudal estates into capitalistically-run production units based on servile labour) noted by Lenin, will be delineated. 50 Evidence is beginning to accumulate that in many parts of Southeast Asia, the incongruence between household reproduction and the farm as a unit of production is so great that to speak of a "family farm" would be meaningless. Takahasi reports for example that: I seldom saw the family members of the kasama working on their farms, except when they were hired as transplanters or reapers. The housewives were especially scarce, spending most of their time on sidelines like hat-weaving, never helping their husbands in the field. Only a few of them earned wages as hired labourers during the transplanting and harvesting season. All cultivators were essentially dependent on hired labour for such essential processes of farming as pulling and bundling of seedlings, transplanting, reaping, hauling bundles of palay, and threshing. 51

Evidence is also accumulating that "viable family farms" are being created. Based on data from Negri Sembilan and Sumatra, Kahn argues for example that "what we are witnessing is the preservation or even re-creation of a class of peasants, based on the maintenance of viable peasant enterprises ... " 52 The Muda material presented here speaks not for a preservation or re-creation but for a new creation, for the emergence of a peasantry based on the family farm as a petty producer. The concept of"peasantization" as employed here is designed in part as a polemical corrective to those who see peasants as being necessarily transformed into proletarians as a consequence of their incorporation into the capitalist world-economy. 53 The preceding discussion will have made clear that by "peasantization" is not meant a return to a closed peasant economy; on the contrary, it is conceived here as the development of a form of production which arises in the course of its increasing incorporation into the factor markets of the national and international economy.

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Seen in these terms, it is the necessary precondition for the development of simple commodity production in Friedmann's sense. It is suggested that only when peasant reproduction has been fully reconstituted as peasant production in this sense can capitalist class differentiation unleash its full force. Whether the resultant proletarianization occurs in the countryside or in the cities depends on the specific constellation of factors which cannot be derived from a study of the forces of change in the agricultural sector alone.

NOTES

1. For anthropology, see Silvia Silverman, "The Peasant Concept in Anthropology", journal of Peasant Studies 7, no. 1 (1979): 49--69; for rural sociology, see Howard Newby, "The Rural Sociology of Advanced Capitalist Societies", in International Perspectives in Rural Sociology, ed. Howard Newby (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1978); and for the renewed interest in the European peasantry of the past, see the collection of articles edited by]. Goody et al., in Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe 1200-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 2. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, quoted in Carmen Diana Deere and Alain de Janvry, "Demographic and Social Differentiation Among Northern Peruvian Peasants", Journal of Peasant Studies 8, no. 3 (1981): 336. 3. See A.V. Chayanov, On The Theory of Peasant Economy, American Economic Association Translation Series (Homewood, Ill., 1966). 4. Deere and Janvry, op. cit., p. 337. 5. Compare Kostas V ergopoulos, "Capitalism and Peasant Productivity", journal of Peasant Studies 5, no. 4 (1978): 446--65. 6. See the paper by A.G. Frank, "Sociology of Development and Underdevelopment of Sociology", in Dependence and Underdevelopment: Latin America's Political Economy, ed. J. Cock croft et al. (N.J.: Doubleday Anchor, 1972). 7. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). 8. See among others, Daniel Thorner's introduction in Chayanov, op. cit., and Basil Kerblay, "Chayanov and the Theory of Peasantry as a Specific Type of Economy", in Peasants and Peasant Societies, ed. Teoder Shanin (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971). For critical reviews, see Mark Harrison, "The Peasant Mode of Production in the Work of A.V. Chayanov",Journal of Peasant Studies 4, no. 4 (1977): 323-36; G. Littlejohn, "Peasant Economy and Society", in Sociological Theories of the Economy, ed. Barry Hirdess (London: Macmillan, 1977) and Utna Patnaik, "Neo-Populism and Marxism: The Chayanovian View of the Agrarian Question and its Fundamental Fallacy",Journal of Peasant Studies 6, no. 4 (1979): 373-420. 9. Teoder Shanin, "The Nature and Logic of the Peasant Economy", Journal of Peasant Studies 1, no. 1 (1973): 63-80. 10. Ibid., p. 63. 11. Ibid., p. 64. 12. Henry Bernstein, "African Peasantries: A Theoretical Framework",Journal of Peasant Studies 6, no. 4 (1979): 421-43. 13. Ibid., p. 425. 14. Ibid. 15. Defined as "those effects of commodity relations on the economy of peasant households that can be summarised in terms of increasing costs of production/decreasing returns to labour". Ibid., p. 427. 16. Ibid., p. 431. 17. Ibid., p. 424. 18. Judith Ennew, Paul Hirst and Keith Tribe, '"Peasantry' as an Economic Category",Journal of Peasant Studies 4, no. 4 (1977). 19. Ibid., p. 304. 20. See Harriet Friedmann, "The Family Farm in Advanced Capitalism: Outline of a Theory of Simple Commodity Production in Agriculture" (Paper prepared for the Thematic Panel, Rethinking

Peasant Reproduction

27

Domestic Agriculture, American Sociological Association, Toronto, 1981), p. 4: "The term 'simple commodity production' ... has often been used to mean family labour units, characterized by patriarchal relations, possession of the means of production, production for use, and the sale of surplus products. In this it corresponds to the loose historical description of a wide range of subsistence producers who also engage in barter or sale, more often called 'peasants'. The term 'peasant' is not a concept and the list of attributes to which it refers are not lent conceptual unity by substituting a term which ought rightly to be developed within political economy. The inclusion of self-subsistence in the definition of simple commodity production is a terminological contradiction." 21. Ibid., p. 5. 22. Ibid., p. 2. 23. Sec Harriet Friedmann, "Household Production and the National Economy: Concepts for the Analysis of Agrarian Formations", Journal of Peasant Studies 7, no. 2 (1980): 158 ·84. 24. Ibid., p. 171. 25. Tilman Schiel and Georg Stauth, "Untercntwicklung und Subsistcnzproduktion", Peripherie 5/6 (1981): 122. "Die von Frank initiierte Debatte uber 'Kapitalismus und Untercntwicklung' leitcte einc uber lange Jahre hin fruchtbarc -- inzwischen aber sich erschi:ipfende- Kontroverse uber die Interpretation dcr verschiedenen Grundmuster des Zusammentrcffens zwischen der kapitalistischen Produktionsweise und vorkapitalistischen Produktionsweisen, uber die Frage der Generalitat oder Spezifitat der Grundlinien kapitalistischer Entwicklung und Transformation, und cben ubcr die grundlegende Vermittlung von Kapitalismus und 'Unterentwicklung' ein. Dagegcn setzcn die Biclefelder Arbeitcn an Fragen der generativen und regenerativen Rcproduktion und der Verwertung von Arbcitskraft an. Ausgangspunkt waren hier interrcgional vergleichend angelegte Untersuchungen uber Formen der Reproduktion kleinbauerlicher Agrarproduzenten. Dabei ging es urn die spezifischen Bedingungen derselben in konkreten Gesellschaften, insbesondere auch im Rahmen der Entstehung des kapitalistischen Weltsystems." 26. See Georg Elwert and Diana Wong, "Subsistence Production and Commodity Production in the Third World", Review 3, no. 3 (1980): 503. 27. Hans-Dietcr Evers, "Urban and Rural Subsistence Reproduction- a Theoretical Outline". Working Paper no. 2 (Bielefeld: Sociology of Development Research Centre, Universitat Bielefeld, 1981), p. 3. 28. Compare Schiel and Stauth, op. cit., p. 123: "Die Wiedcrbemuhung der 'Subsistenzproduktion' als analytische Kategorie- und in gcwisser Weise dam it auch ihre Neudefinition- bcruht nun einfach auf der schlichten Erkenntnis, daB darin eine Gemeinsamkeit zwischen de m unmittelbaren Produzenten in Peripherie und Zentrum besteht, daB sie ungeachtet aller Unterschiede dieselbe grundsatzliche Reproduktionsbasis haben: grundsatzlich- d.h. ohne Gewichtung der einzelncn Einkommensquellen ftir die Reproduktion der Arbeiter- sind hier wie dort nicht verwertete und nicht verwertbarc Inputs notwendige Voraussetzung daftir, daB Mehrarbeit und eben deren Vcrwertung mi:iglich wird. Es ist gerade das lnsistieren auf dieser Erkenntnis der Durchgangigkeit der Bedeutung der Subsistenzproduktion ftir alle Formen der Surplus-Produktion, die die Untersuchungen kennzeichnet. 29. Elwert and Wong, op. cit., p. 503. For examples of empirically-based studies with this approach, see Georg Elwcrt, "Die Verflechtung sozioi:ikonomischer Sektoren: Studie einer bauerlichen Gesellschaft in Westafrika" (Unpublished post-doctoral manuscript, Bielefeld, 1980); Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, "Bauer!iches Bewul3tsein und gesellschaftliche Reproduktion in Mexiko". (Unpublished post-doctoral manuscript, Bielefeld, 1981); Georg Stauth, Die Fellachen im Nildelta: Zur Struktur des Konjlikts zwischen Subsistenz- und Warenproduktion im ldndlichen Agypten, (Wiesbaden: Steiner Verlag, 1983); Claudia v. Werlhof and Hans-Peter Neuhoff, "The Combination of Different Production Relations on the Basis of Non-proletarianization: Agrarian Production in Yaracuy, Venezuela", Latin American Perspectives 9, no. 3 (1982): 34; Michael Vesper, "Die Homelands in Namibia~- zur Funktion von Dberlebensproduktion" (Ph.D. dissertation, Bielefeld, 1982); HamDieter Evers, "The Contribution of Urban Subsistence Production to Incomes in Jakarta", Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 7, no. 2 (1981): 89-96; Wolfgang Clauss, Economic and Social Change Among the Simalungun Batak of North Sumatra (SaarbruckenjFort Lauderdale: Breitenbach, 1982). 30. Compare Hans-Dieter Evers, Wolfgang Clauss, and Diana Wong, "Theoretical Notes on Subsistence Production", in Households and the World Economy, ed. Joan Smith, lmmanuel Wallestein and Hans-Dieter Evers (Beverly Hills, Cal.: Sage Publications, 1984): "The stress on production and progress has diverted attention from reproduction and procreation; the fascination with money and markets has repressed first-hand experience of non-market exchange and work without pay."

28

THE FRAMING OF THE STUDY

31. Compare Schiel and Stauth, op. cit., p. 123: "Eine korporative Verwandtschaftsgruppe bildete als okonomische Einheit den 'Haushalt', der mit gemeinsamen, gemeinschaftlich organisierten und genutzten Ressourcen das 'Haushaltseinkommen' erzeugte!; and also Stauth, op. cit., p. 9: "Kleinbauerliche Produktion zielt auf Existenzsicherung in der Reproduktionsstruktur der familiaren Produktionseinheit, die gcpdigt ist durch ein ausgeglichenes V erhaltnis zwischen (i) Feldarbeit, (ii) hausliche Produktion und (iii) Absatzfahigkeit der Dberschiisse."- It should be noted that much attention has also been paid to the analysis of domestic production, that is, housework that also occurs within the household defined in the above manner. See Claudia v. Werlhof, "Women's Work: the Blind Spot in the Critique of Political Economy" Jornadas d'Estudi Shore el Patrarcat, Barcelona, 1980, and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, "Subsistence Production and Extended Reproduction. A Contribution to the Discussion about Modes of Production", Journal of Peasant Studies 9, no. 4 (1982). 32. Ennew et al., op. cit., p. 308. 33. Compare Hans Medick, "Die proto-industrielle Familienwirtschaft" in Industrialisiertmg vor der Jndustrialisierung, P. Kriedte, H. Medick,]. Schlumbohm, (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1977): 92: "Der bauerliche Haushalt produziertc, konsumierte und reproduzierte sich im Kontext der herrschaftlich bestimmten Produktionsverhaltnisse nicht als soziales Isolat. Die enge Verkniipfung von Ha us und Flur im Familieneigentum des Bauern und ihre V erankerung in der dorflichen Komrnunitat der bauerlichen Besitzer konstituierte vielrnehr ein eigenstandiges und in seinen besonderen lokalen und regionalen Auspragungen durchaus "eigenmachtiges" Regelsystem. Es steuerte den sozialen Prozefl bauerlicher "Teilgesellschaften" in der Weise, dafl die Verteilung und Umverteilung der Ressourcen auch an denjenigen Zusammenhang gebunden wurde, der durch Familienzyklus und Verwandtschaftsbeziehung, durch Heirats- und Vererbungsstrategien gegeben war." 34. See James Scott, The A1oral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Suutheast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). 35. See Diana Wong, "The Limitations of the Household as a Unit of Analysis", in Jon Smith, Wallerstein, and Evers, op. cit. 36. Lutz K. Berkner, "Inheritance, Land Tenure and Peasant Family Structure: a German Regional Comparison", in Jack Goody et al., op. cit., p. 71-95. 37. Carmen D. Deerc, "The Differentiation of the Peasantry and Family Structure: A Peruvian Case Study" (Paper presented to the IDS Conference on Continuing Subordination of Women and the Development Process, Brighton, 1978), p. 26. 38. The concept "form of production" as used by Friedmann, "Household Production and the National Economy: Concepts for the Analysis of Agrarian Formations",Journal of Peasant Studies 7, no. 2 (1980). 39. Ibid., p. 162. 40. Hans-Dieter Evers, Wolfgang Clauss, and Diana Wong, op. cit., p. 2. 41. Benjamin White, "Rural Household Studies in Anthropological Perspective", in Rural Household Studies in Asia, ed. by Hans P. Binswanger et al. (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1980). 42. See Jack Goody, ed., The Development Cycle in Domestic Groups (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958). 43. Deere, op. cit., p. 3. 44. Claude Meillassoux, Anthropologie economique des Gouro de Cote d' Ivoire (Paris: Mouton, 1979). 45. Deere, op. cit., p. 8. 46. !bid., p. 15. 47. Frank Perlin,"Proto-industrialization and Pre-colonial South Asia", Past and Present 87 (Feb. 1983): 40. 48. These five sets of market relationships are borrowed from Vernon W. Ruttan, "Agricultural Policy in an Affluent Society", Journal of Farm Economics 48, no. 6 (1966): 1100~20. 49. Takahashi, "The Peasantization of Kasama Tenants", Philippine Sociological Review 20, nos. 1 & 2 (1972): 132; Kasama refers to share tenants. 50. See Althar Hussain and Keith Tribe, Marxism and the Agrarian Question (London: Macmillan, 1981). 51. Takahashi, op. cit., p. 131. 52. Joel Kahn "Commoditization, Peasant Transformation and the Colonial State" (Paper presented at the colloquium on Trade and State in Southeast Asia, Bielefeld, 1984). 53. See for example W. Roseberry, "Peasants as Proletarians", Critique of Anthropology 2 (1978): 3-18.

3 The Making of the Muda Region: The Social Organization of Land Colonization

INTRODUCTION Most studies of the Green Revolution conceive of it as the vehicle with which a precapitalist peasantry is brought into the fold of a market economy. The following comment is typical: This integration of the peasantry into the market economy is not achieved without strain. It inevitably involves the disintegration of the traditional society and the submission to external interests of those patterns that are preserved. 1

The nature of this traditional peasantry as evocated in statements like "padi planting is therefore never a business proposition. It is a way of life'? is widespread as conventional wisdom not merely in political discourse but also in the academic literature. A geographer's description of the North Kedah Plain in 1951 made repeated reference to the "self-contained subsistence farmers who plant a few coconuts around their huts to supplement their rice and set traps in the glam swamp for edible fish." 3 Further in the text, he adds: "Throughout this period (between 1911-47) a close approximation to self-contained subsistence farming based on padi has been the mode of life on the Plain ... " 4 Furthermore, rents and even wages for harvest labourers are still often in kind, in padi rather than in cash; much of the padi which comes off the farm to enter trade is derived from these peasant payments in kind. 5

The system is thus seen to comprise a large mass of small producers with an intact subsistence cycle, surplus for trade being extracted via rents in kind. Alternatively, the

30

THE FRAMING OF THE STUDY

marketed surplus is seen to issue from larger farms which produce sufficient quantities to engage in "commercial production". Thus, in the calculations of the CPR study: Looking at the 1955 census figures again and using 10 relong as a cut-off point after which the greater proportion oflabour for the farm is assumed to come from hired labour making it a commercial one, we note already the presence of as many as 8,000 farmers who were engaged in market-oriented production of padi. Even if we use the higher figure of 15 relong as a cut-off, we would still have a total of 2,400 farmers, a substantial number indicating the considerable extent of commercialized agriculture practices in the Muda area before two decades. 6

This evaluation (of extensive commercialization) contradicts that of Dobby, but the common assumption of participation in the market economy only for those with surplus to spare - be they large farmers or landlords living on rent - and lack of market participation for the rest, involving the vast majority, as characteristic of the Kedah padi economy till the early fifties, is shared by both. The following account of the development of the Muda peasantry until the fifties, that is, to the point in time when Wilson's study was done, is an attempt to reconstruct the nature of"traditional society" or "local economy" and the nature of its integration or lack of it into the national and international markets of their day. 7 The argument made here is as follows: "Traditional society" was not composed of long established sedentary, peasant communities. As Dobby makes quite clear, the North Kedah Plains were not fully colonized until the mid-fifties, especially the stretch of glam swamps in Kubang Pasu, where the study village is located. 8 As will be shown however, he was wrong in asserting that "the expansion of Kedah padilands has special interest because it was independent of the external inducements which led to the expansion of rubber plantations and very much within the traditionally self-contained farming system indigenous to Malaya as well as to other parts of Southeast Asia." 9 This remarkable feat of land colonization has tended to be overlooked in the literature and in the official accounts of the economic development of the country, perhaps precisely because it was 'just' native enterprise that was involved. It is highly unlikely though, that this native enterprise unfolded within the bounds of a "traditionally self-contained farming system". Land pioneering is a highly precarious venture which constantly threatens the closed circle of the self-contained subsistence farmer. Usually, it took about three years before the pioneering peasants could start planting and during these years, the peasant either had to already have other subsistence plots, or relatives upon whom he could depend, that is, a unit of reproduction larger than that of the family. 10 Furthermore, the physical conditions of pioneering in swampy conditions must have led frequently to illness (malaria, accidents and so forth) which in the context of a narrow subsistence base meant the inability to produce and thus the unavailability of consumption. This led to the early dependence on the market by the poorest farmers, what I have termed elsewhere as the "subsistence paradox", 11 as soon as cash is introduced into the economy. (Compare Chapter 12 where this is discussed in further detail.)

The Making of the Muda Region

31

In tracing the development of land colonization in the North Kedah Plain from the late 18th century onwards, it will become quite clear that this land colonization did not take place in a subsistence vaccum but that its speed as well as the institutional forms it took were closely related to the inter-play of forces between the state, merchant capital emanating from the British colony ofPenang, and industrial capital establishing itself elsewhere in the Peninsula. The "traditional society" that eventually developed out of the dynamics of the confrontation between peasant labour and surplus extraction mediated through the commercialization of the subsistence crop was thus already characterized by individual household integration into the market economy, with its attendant processes of internal differentiation within the peasantry. On the other hand, as Dobby quite rightly points out, peasant proprietorship had not established itself. 12 This had to wait until subsistence was really secured, that is, until the Green Revolution.

THE MAKING OF THE MUDA REGION Afifuddin's excellent account of the "political economy of development in the Muda region" stresses the decisive switch of the state capital from the Merbok and Muda estuaries inland to Alor Star, on the North Kedah Plain, marking the transformation of a "commercial-mercantile feudal state" to a "peasant-based feudal state" . 13 This shift was forced upon the state by the loss of its earlier economic base, namely, monopoly over trade, particularly with the development of Penang, and the establishment there of British trade monopolies. These two developments caused a reduction of annual revenue by 80,000 Straits Dollars in the years after 1786, which was more than half of her earlier annual revenue. 14 Rice took over as a major export earner and profited in particular from the increasing demand for rice especially in the wake of the tin and rubber boom in the Federated Malay States in the nineteenth century. As Afifuddin says, the geographical shift of the state's power centre from an area controlling an international trade route to an agricultural one mainly supporting rice monoculture (a shift of 35 miles as the crow flies), heralded a new relationship between the rice peasantry and the ruling class. 15

To a greater extent now dependent on revenues derived from the rice trade, the "ruling class responded by directing their full attention to the control of land colonization" 16 . "The expansion of riceland frontiers, and the full utilization of the krah system were the only two factors operating in response to the increasing demand for rice." 17 The impulse for colonization in other words, came from the very beginning from commercial interests and was intimately interwoven with the possibility of surplus extraction. Members of the ruling class had already participated actively in the construction of canals to facilitate the draining and reclamation of padi land, and by 1816, three canals had been built. Manpower for the construction of the canals came from the

32

THE FRAMING OF THE STUDY

employment of Chinese coolie labour as well as from krah, or corvee labour, which the peasant owed to the ruler in return for rights of land cultivation, since all land was regarded as the property of the Sultan. The cost to the peasant could be very high since he not only had to make himself available for construction duties but also had to supply agricultural labour to the owner of his land, usually on a bagi dua (sharecropping) basis. For instance, if the piece of land a peasant is working on, produced 500 gantang, he had to provide equivalent labour hours to produce 250 gantang under the shareholding arrangement or he had to be in the service of the ruler or members of the ruling class for a period previously agreed under the leasehold. 18 The demands made on his labour were so high that very often, the "fields on which peasants depended for their livelihoods were tended by their wives and children". 19 This form of feudal exploitation, resulting in a two-tiered social order~ the nobles who owned the land and the rakyat (commoners), from whom so much was extracted that the internal structure of their own subsistence production was affected ~ gave way to a number of important changes in the course of the nineteenth century. Brutal exploitation of the above form proved to be economically self-defeating. As Sharom Ahmat notes: This absence of an incentive to produce a surplus can be explained by several factors ... A much greater deterrent was the operation of the system of Hasil Kerah (compulsory labour) which entitled a chief to call upon the peasant to work for him at any time. The consequent uncertainty as to the amount of time he might have available for his own fields had the effect of discouraging a peasant from being ambitious, for if he planted too much, he might not be able to cope with the work at all. Finally, there was always the fear that a large harvest might merely mean that the successful cultivator had to part wth the excess on the demand of some chief, petty or otherwise. 20 The establishment of a British colony in Penang and Province Wellesley also meant that peasants had a place to flee to, as is evidenced in the following comment: But krah, useful as it was, was not popular and its imposition to build part of a trans-Peninsular road in 1864 once more resulted in the flight back to the Province of many of those who were formerly living in the Province but who had been induced to return to Kedah. 21 This possibility of flight with the feet set one of the major limits to the viability of that particular form of feudal exploitation. It is in this context that the introduction of private property by the State has also to be seen. Land was offered in order to hold the peasant down, so to speak, where his person could not be apropriated. The first system ofland alienation which did not confine landownership to members of the ruling class was decreed by the same sultan, Sultan MuhammadJiwa Zainal Azlim Maazam Shah, who made the decision to carve out for his state an agrarian base by shifting his capital to Alor Star at the end of the eighteenth century.

The Making of the Muda Region

33

The full effects of this major structural change were realized, however, only in the second half of the nineteenth century, due to the setbacks imposed by the catastrophic Siamese invasion in 1821. In 1850 there were only 25,000 acres under cultivation; by 1950 another 185,000 acres had been brought under cultivation. 22 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a new pattern ofland colonization emerged which was to lay the basis of social differentiation among the peasantry for the following decades until the 1950s. The major elements in this pattern were: 1. Individual agrarian entrepreneurship involving capital investment by members

of the feudal elite, for example, the construction of the Wan Samat Canal. 2. Recruitment of settlers and colonizers via key individuals who could collect people around them, primarily religious teachers and penghulus. 3. Development of a grass-root administration in the persons of the penghulu and the ketua kampung, as well as a district level bureaucracy, in order to handle the administrative ti.mctions associated with a system ofland revenue based on rents of private property. 4. Rights to revenue collection leased to Chinese merchants. \Vhat followed was a form and rate of surplus extraction which systematically undermined the- subsistence cycle of peasant production, resulting in widespread expropriation from the peasants of the land which they had colonized with, as Dobby emphasizes, virtually their bare hands. 23

THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF LAND COLONIZATION The first major step toward the colonization of the swampy jungle which made up a large part of the Plains. was taken with the construction of drainage canals by members of the aristocratic elite. The most famous canal built in its day was the Wan Mat Saman Canal, named after its builder, the Chief Minister, and it will serve here as an illustration of the way settlement proceeded. This canal laid the foundations for the development of an estimated 100 square miles of swampy jungle lying south the Kedah River at an estimated cost of $250,000 straits Dollar. 24 Upon its successful completion however, Wan Mat made a fortune through the sale of the land conceded to him by the sultan -amounting to 20 re long along both lengths of the canal. Each relong's frontage with a full 20 re depth was sold for $120. As Hill notes, twenty Kedah relongs is equivalent to about 14 acres, an area considerably in access of the acre or two required for the support of a single nuclear family and more than such a family could work. The fact that lands were sold off in blocks of this size, must have led to the emergence of a 'wealthy peasant' class of which the member, whilst themselves cultivators, rented out land on a share-crop basis. 25

As land colonization by individual pioneers proceeded beyond the areas served by the major drainage canals, the complexity of the administrative requirements concerning land registration, as well as the unabated propensity of the sultans to make large land

34

THE FRAMING OF THE STUDY

grants to those in royal favour, continued to assure the emergence and maintenance of a highly skewed pattern of land distribution. Wilson's study of land tenure in the padi plains of the north-west in 1954 found that it could to a large extent be traced back to the original pattern ofland colonization. Fixed rents in cash or padi predominate in the West Coast states although originally much of this land was initially cultivated dengan perchuma (free) by farmers as a temporary measure, with one or two years annual rent payment commuted for the tenaga (labour) involved in clearing the land, constructing internal batas (bunds) and drains or external bunds against river or sea flooding. Considerable areas of Malaysia's padi lands were developed in this manner with the issue of State land under grants giving the proprietary rights covering 50 to 500 and even 1000 acres ofland to individuals with influence or money, who in turn gave it temporarily free as jungle land and then under gradually increasing rents as developed land to the tenants who had developed it. 26

Many peasants in fact cleared tracts of what they had thought was unclaimed, virgin jungle only to discover upon their attempt to register the land that it had already been granted to somebody else, often a member of the royal family. This happened for example, to the father of one of the landless family-heads in the village under study. In fact, there seems to have been considerable abuse of the powers entrusted to he penghulu (headman) and the petty bureaucrats at the district level with the expansion of the administrative requirements in connection with land colonization and land revenue implementation. The work of the penghulu was mainly in the initial registration of all sales and transfers of land and livestock, which formed the basis of district administration. The penghulu was also to estimate the amount of harvest in his mukim a few weeks before harvest. This would enable the district chief to predict the volume of trade he and the other members of the ruling class would undertake, and the amount of krah labour to be extracted from the peasantry in the next season. 27

In return, the penghulu was exempted from krah obligations but more than that, he was frequently rewarded with land grants which he then developed with the aid of krah labour extracted from the peasant under his charge. It was in this way for example, that a former penghulu in the village under study was supposed to have acquired 60 re long ofland, the largest plot in the village. Others charge however that he as penghulu had land registered in his name which had been developed by other villagers. The registration procedure for newly-colonized land in fact did not occur as smoothly as prescribed. Although peasants who requested land titles had to officially pay the survey fees in the form of specified man-days of corvee labour, they also had to compete for favour from survey personnel in order to get their lands surveyed properly or earlier than others, or even to get them surveyed at all. Bribes had to be given to survey personnel, mostly in the form of rice or other agricultural produce such as livestock, coconuts etc. Such a practice contributed to the acquisition of wealth by survey personnel, many of whom converted it to land. 28

The Making of the Muda Region

35

These low-level bure:mcrats were recruited from the ranks of the peasantry itself and were therefore prone to reinvest earnings gained through corruption in the purchase of land. As land further inland and to the north was developed, another popular mode of land colonization employed was the collective pondok system, usually practised by those peasants coming from Kelantan and Pattani. Afifuddin describes it in the following manner: A migrating group would gather around one among them who happened to be well-versed in Islamic knowledge or who had already established himself as a religious teacher. The group with this leader would migrate to the Muda region and stake a claim in a particular area where they would build their pondok or huts around a madrasah, religious centre for worship as well as teaching. Sometimes an already established group would invite a religious teacher from somewhere to set up a madrasah among them. During the day the peasants would go out to open up lands around the cluster of their pondok, leaving their children to the teacher for religious education. Some of the wives who did not follow them to the fields also obtained religious education in this manner. In exchange for his service, the peasants would collectively clear a piece of land and cultivate it for the teacher ... As lands become more productive and the production level of each peasant family exceeded the nisbah of 480 gantang, they had to pay zakat, a tithe compulsory for every earning Muslim. The rate to be paid is 10% of the gross yield for padi. In those early days, all the zakat from a particular group in the pondok system would go to the teacher. A group of 50 zakat paying peasants would contribute a minimum of2400 gantang to the teacher annually. Through the years a substantial amount of wealth could accumulate. 29

Contrary, therefore, to the view that "monoculture here is closely associated with the self-contained subsistence farming system ... " 30 , we see that the very conditions of land development established a social structure with surplus accumulation even at the village level. In the context of peasant pioneering ofland for the purpose primarily of subsistence consumption, we already find four modes of surplus extraction within the peasant community itself: rent, zakat, krah labour and corruption. A fifth form, also derived from the feudal state's need to raise revenue from its peasant base, 31 developed with the introduction of Chinese capital. Afifuddin suggests that the onslaught of Chinese capital occurred after the British indirect rule in 1909" 32 , but I tend here to the account given by Sharom Ahmat. Sharom attributes the increase of peasant production beyond the absolute minimum to the inflow of Chinese capital into the reproduction cycle of the peasant household. This situation was changed, but not to the beneftt of the rakyat, when the Sultan decided to farm out to various Chinese, the sole right of collecting the export duty on padi and rice for the whole state. As for the Chinese revenue farmers, they obviously wanted to encourage production. Having agreed to a fixed annual rent on the farm, the more rice that was produced, the greater their profits would be. One way in which the Chinese revenue farmers ensured that a large and regular supply of padi was available for the export market, was to get the Malay peasants

36

THE FRAMING OF THE STUDY

into debt ... What normally happened of course, was that the rakyat was unable to honour the loan on time, and this meant that he had either to hand over a more than proportionate share of the havest or lose the land. 33

Indebtedness was not unknown in the peasant economy. In fact, precisely because of the precariousness of peasant existence under pioneering conditions, which does not correspond to the prevailing image, indebtedness was already an inherent clement in the "peasant-gentry relationship of production". 34 As has already been mentioned, illness could precipitate a situation of dire need. The peasant also needed cash in order to pay for his land rent in cash form (in lieu ofkrah) or for registering his newly opened land. In fact, in addition to corruption, the provision of loans to the peasant was also one means of surplus accumulation for the bureaucrat. This could take the following form: For instance, a peasant who had just reclaimed a new piece of land would have to pay fees for the administrative processes in order to get a title. But due to his inability to amass the necessary amount of cash for this purpose, he was forced to accept credit from personnel in land administration. An agreement was made that if there were to be any default, the piece of!and which the peasant pioneered with his sweat and blood was to be transferred to the creditor. This was the notorious system of jual janji, literally meaning promise of sale. Through this system the rank and file of the land office, most of whom came from the peasantry itself or from the ruling class protoge groups, made their wealth and came to form a class of landed bureaucrats ... Where there was no security or credit, default was redeemed through a debt-bondage system locally known as kerja orang berhutang. The debt-bondsman had to work for his creditor, orang emas, until the amount oflabour given was considered equivalent to the amount of debt plus interest ... In 1882 there were about 994 persons, most of whom were peasants, registered as debt-bondsmen in Kedah. 35

The kind of indebtedness which the Chinese revenue farmer involved the Malay peasantry in however, intruded into the production cycle itself, whereby surplus was not extracted via labour but via the manipulation of the terms of trade. By 1913, just four years after the implementation of British indirect rule, Maxwell noted that "the majority of the padi planters are at present in the hands of Chinese padi dealers who advance from time to time during the padi growing seasons small sums of money which are paid in full at harvest." 36 This marked the beginnings of the padi kunca system, under which surplus produce was extracted from the peasant producer not through extra-economic mechanisms made necessary by the peasant's intact subsistence base, but through the firm entrenchment of economic exchange relationships into the peasant reproduction cycle. This was also to prove to be the most efficient form of surplus extraction for the following half century, until production increases through massive technological inputs again changed the relations of production in the padi economy of the region. In 1933, the Rice Cultivation Committee noted that: ... throughout padi-growing regions a high percentage of the cultivators is in debt either to chetties [money-lenders] for mortgages on land or to Chinese shopkeepers

The Making of the Muda Region for advances against their crops for living expenses during the growing period of the crop. The latter form of debt is the most pernicious and results in cultivators obtaining very low prices for their padi. 37

37

Twenty years later, Thomson reported that four-fifths of the peasants were involved in the padi kunca system. 38 Padi kunca generally operated in the following manner: being able to harvest only once a year, with a crop cycle of eight months, peasants frequently found themselves in the position of having to "borrow" rice before the next harvest. Since there was already in the eightenth century an active rice market, the price of padi was also subject to considerable fluctuation, reaching a peak just before the harvest and slumping immediately thereafter. Peasants "borrowing" padi just before the harvest had to return not the same amount of padi but the amount of padi with the same monetary value just after the harvest. The interest rates under these conditions often exceeded 100 per cent. By 1911 there were already 119 licensed Chinese padi dealers in Kedah and in the course of the twentieth century, rice mills, both big and small, began to dot the countryside. The padi was usually acquired from the peasant by the village shopkeeper, who extended him credit under the padi kunca system. In order to finance these credit operations however, the shopkeeper was in his turn allied to a mill owner, who in this way, assured himself a regular supply of padi. As Thomson notes: The total volume of finance employed in making loans of this type is difficult to calculate with any exactitude but it is noteworthy that one bank alone in North Kedah advanced nearly $12,000,000 (Straits Dollars) to the local mills between January and July 1953. 39 Though padi kunca was practised primarily by the Chinese padi merchants, it seems to have been widespread as well among the agrarian elite who had developed at the village level. In the village I studied, I was told that only three people were able to "help" in the old days, among them the Tok Guru, whose surplus came from zakat collections. His grandson informed me that his land acquisitions were financed by padi kunca dealings. Padi kunca however was only good for the meeting of small consumption needs. Once this bridgehead was created however, given the very high interest rates, and the frequency of crises which could so easily engulf a peasant pioneer, the need for credit in larger sums might arise. This led then to the system ofjual janji in its notorious form, as linked to the Chettiar moneylender who provided larger credit sums with land as security. Should the debt not be repaid within the specified number of years, the peasant would lose the right to his mortgaged land. This seems to have been the major means of dispossession of the Kedah peasantry in the years up till the middle of the century. The vulnerability to indebtedness was hastened by the increasing need for cash consequent upon the imposition of indirect rule in Kedah in 1909. The abolition of corvee in 1909 due to pressure from the British Adviser was replaced by a more efficient system of land revenue collection 40 as well as the imposition of new taxes -

38

THE FRAMING OF THE STUDY

fees for cattle licenses, forests clearance, hunting, picking jungle produce such as wood, fruits and rattan as well as legal controls - especially popular forms of rural entertainment such as cock-fighting, bullfights and performances of the wayang kulit (puppet show), and menora andjike. 41

The integration into the colonial economy meant increasing peasant demand for consumer goods 42 and increasing dependence on the world market. Under these circumstances, the occasional drought or poor harvest or other crisis situations, and its resultant vicious cycle of indebtedness, led to widespread poverty and to the emergence of a social phenomenon which may be worth mentioning at this point, namely, social banditry. Cheah Boon Kheng notes that gang robbery or dacoity as it was called in colonial Burma and India, was a form of rural crime which was quite endemic in the central rice-growing plains and the northern frontier areas of Kedah in the period 1909-1929. 43

Of particular interest to us here however, is the peasant perception of the criminal activities of these "bandit gangs", which Cheah has analysed with the aid of folklore and oral history of the villages where the bandits were known and admired. Describing the career of the bandit N ayan, who was active in the twenties, Cheah notes: ... a local bandit chief, Sulaiman Kerekau of Guar Kepayang arrived at Nayan's kampung. Nayan was persuaded to join and lead his robber band as "commander and defender of the poor". Sulaiman explained to Nayan that he and his men had been exploited by the rich landlords. Some had been dispossessed of their ricelands, while others had their lands mortgaged to landlords ... Convinced that this was a good cause, Nayan led the robber band in raids at Selarong Batang on the homes of two wealthy men, Haji Murad, a landlord, and Taukeh Ah Leng, a Chinese businessman ... After this, Nayan launched an attack at Kampung Buloh Lima on the home of Hamzah, a wealthy Sumatran trader described by Mansor Abdullah as a greedy money-lender who offered cash loans to peasants which had to be repaid in padi ... The gang also raided areas where the penghulus were known to be rich and oppressive or uncooperative ... 44

These were the "rich" whom Nayan, the "good bandit", would rob, in order to distribute the spoils to the poor, who protected him from the police force. Cheah mentions "the veneration with which poor peasants regard Nayan today" because he took the side of the victim of injustice of the landlords, moneylenders and traders. 45 He himself came from a poor family and was known to have taken on a lot of parttime work, such as tapping rubber in Chinese and European estates. Another account however, suggests that Nayan, despite the qualities attributed to him, was merely a member of someone else's gang: He belonged to a Malay secret society or organization operated by Sulaiman Kerekau, a rural entrepreneur. Of a middle peasant group, Sulaiman owned several re longs of padi lands; he had great business acumen, but had inclined to the seamier type ofbusiness. He operated illegal gambling dens, bull-fights, and cockfights which were popular means of entertainment with the rural folks; he was

The Making

of the

39

Muda Region

also involved in opium smuggling and used to sell the opium in the gambling dens he operated. 46

These accounts have been quoted at some length because of the vivid portrayal of rural differentiation and exploitation which they present. These reports also indicate another major figure on the rural landscape, namely, that of the commercial entrepreneur. Surplus could also be accumulated through theft and the "seamier type of business" not often associated with a subsistence-oriented economy but obviously existent- the basis of this being control over the brute force of young men who could then function as an intimidatory force. "They were drawn from peasants, farm labourers and unemployed youths who drifted from village to village seeking odd jobs, excitement and high living." 47 These young men, and their labour power, seem to have been less integrated with the padi farm as such than with the labour needs of the capitalistically-organized plantations found especially in the south. Material from the village under study suggests the hypothesis that this form of labour integration was mediated by the secret society boss who was an entrepreneur in the interstices between the intruding capitalist and the village economy (see Chapter 14.) These secret society bosses, whose capital was primarily in the form of young men, are perhaps the true heirs of the feudal state since forced labour was abolish by the British Administration in 1909.

CONCLUSION We thus see a highly complex and differentiated "traditional" society which had evolved by the middle of the twentieth century, consequent upon its increasing integration into the evolving colonial economy. The requirements of the colonial economy for cheap rice was met in part by the accelerated land colonization and the development of other forms of surplus extraction from the peasantry. This in turn increased the possibility for surplus extraction and accumulation within the peasantry itself. A new group of rural entrepreneurs emerged on the rural scene including the Chettiar moneylender and the Chinese rice miller but also an emergent Malay landed elite. All this came about as a result of purely institutional changes in the social relations of production, rather than through technological changes in the production process. This was to change with the inauguration of the Muda Irrigation Scheme.

NOTES 1. Rodolphe de Koninck, "The Integration of the Peasantry: Examples from Malaysia and Indonesia", Pacific Affairs 52 (1979): 289. 2. Mahathir Mohamad, quoted in Otto Charles Doering, "Malaysian Rice Policy and the Muda Irrigation Project" (Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1973), p. 43. 3. E.H.G. Doh by, "The North Kedah Plains- A Study in the Environment of Pioneering for Rice Cultivation", Economic Geography 27 (1959): 304. 4. Ibid., p. 307. 5. Ibid., p. 299.

40

THE FRAMING OF THE STUDY

6. Lim, Gibbons and Kassim, "Accumulation of Padi Land in the Muda Region: Some Findings and Thoughts on their Implications for the Peasantry and Development", in Peasantry and Modernization, ed. Hairi Abdullah and H.M. Dahlan, Special Issue of Akademika 20 & 21 Qanuary-July 1982): 21. 7. This account is similar in many ways to that given by Mohd. Ikmal Said, "Capitalist Encroachments in Padi Production in West Malaysia" in Abdullah and Dahlan, op. cit. 8. See Dobby, op. cit., for an excellent account of the ecology of the North Kcdah Plains. 9. Dobby, op. cit., p. 287. 10. Afifuddin bin Hj. Omar, "Peasants, Institutions and Development in Malaysia: The Political Economy of Development in the Muda Region" (Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1978), p. 39. 11. See G. Elwert and D. Wong, "Subsistence Production and Commodity Production in the Third World", Review 3, no. 3 (1980). 12. Dobby, op. cit., p. 299: "Monoculture is here closely associated with the self-contained subsistence farming system almost unmodified to forms involving communal farming yet not entirely in the phase of peasant proprietorship" (author's emphasis). 13. See Afifuddin, op. cit., fcir the most comprehensive treatment to date of the historical development of the Muda region from the perspective of political economy. The following account is largely based on this work as well as Sharom Ahmat, "The Structure of the Economy of Kedah 1879-1905",Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 43 (1970): 1-27 and Cheah Boon Kheng, "Social Banditry and Crime, in North Kedah 1909-22", Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 54 (1981): 98-130. 14. Afifuddin, op. cit., p. 88. 15. Ibid., p. 16. 16. Ibid., p. 34. 17. Ibid., p. 92. 18. Ibid., p. 42. 19. Ibid. 20. Sharom Ahmat, "The Structure of the Economy ofKedah 1879--1905" ,Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 43 (1970): 2. 21. Ronald D. Hill, Rice in Malaya: A Study in Historical Geography (Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 55. 22. David Banks, Malay Kinship (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1983), p. 21. 23. Dobby, op. cit., p. 307: "In the period 1931-41 for which detailed statistics are available new padilands were carved out from the swamp by peasants at the rate of 5,000 acres a year, without the use of any but their own local equipment and without any significant inducement." 24. Hill, op. cit., p. 47. 25. Ibid., p. 58. 26. T.B. Wilson, "The Inheritance and Fragmentation of Malay Padi Lands in Krian, Perak", Malayan Agricultural Journal 38, no. 2 (1955): 79. 27. Afifuddin, "Peasants, Institutions and Development", p. 65. 28. Ibid., p. 69. 29. Ibid., pp. 50 ff. 30. Dobby, op. cit., p. 299. 31. Nonetheless, it should be borne in mind that Kedah was never the classical agrarian state whose revenue was derived primarily from agriculture. According to Sharom Ahmat, opium and spirits were a more lucrative source of revenue than padi and rice for the Kedah state. 33. Sharom Ahmat, op. cit., pp. 2-3. 34. Afifuddin, op. cit., p. 73. 35. Ibid. 36. Quoted in Afifuddin, op. cit., p. 105. 37. Quoted in Otto Charles Doering, "Malaysian Rice Policy and the Muda River Project" (Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1973). 38. Thomson, A.M., "Report to the Government of the Federation of Malaya on the Marketing of Rice" (Rome: Food and Agricultural Organisation, 1954), p. 26. 39. Thomson, op. cit., p. 27. 40. Cheah, Social Banditry and Crime, p. 111. "The Land Office especially increased its staff, looked into land tenure and speeded up the collection of land revenue." 41. Ibid., p. 111. 42. Sec Afifuddin, op. cit., pp. 113 ff.

The Making of the Muda Region 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Cheah, op. cit., p. 98. Ibid., pp. 120-21. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., p. 122. Ibid., p. 105.

41

Part 11 The Anatomy of the Village

4 The Village in Its Social Setting

THE GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION Kampung Gelung Rambai (see Fig. 4.1), the village chosen for study, is situated 17 miles north of Alor Star, in the district ofKubang Pasu, that part of the North Kedah Plains dominated by swamp forest (glam) which was still being cleared for cultivation in the mid-fifties. The name of the village itself is a clue to its ecological past, gelung in Malay meaning a muddy and swampy ground. Ramai (from which rambai is probably derived) means many or densely populated, and according to the villagers, there was once a muddy and swampy piece of ground where the kerbau (water buffaloes) grazed and wallowed at the edge of the kampung. 1 The village, however, has the form of a clustered settlement (see Fig. 4.2), which indicates settlement long before the massive pioneer clearings in the fifties. Its early clearance and settlement is probably related to its situation in the valley of the river, Sungeijalan Pedis, which, as is noted by Shadli, was "once locally famous as the chief means of transportation used by the villagers to Alor Star, or to Kangar, the capital town of the state of Pedis. The river was used by merchants and traders who sold goods and bought produce. " 2 The location of the village on the earlier main transport artery between the state capitals of Alor Star and Pedis, dispels the notion of an originally isolated, selfsufficient village economy and society. Today, the river is no longer passable but the village continues to be well-integrated into the regional and national economy via its proximity to the main transport lines, both rail and road. About 500 yards from the south-western end of the village, there is a small railway station which lies on the main trunk line from Penang to Padang Besar, on the Tha1-Malaysian border. A red-silted dirt track leads to the village of Tunjang, a mile away, that is situated on the main

FIG. 4.1 The Location of the Village Mukim ]eram Kedah

c

N

~

--

LEGEND

Scale. I : 12,240

Railway Road

---- Sand Rd. ----- Path

~2 ~

~

Source: Mohd. Shadli Abdullah, op. cit., p. 30.

Canal Rubber Paddy Mosque

cc

-·-·-

--

Houses Kampung Boundary Halls

FIG. 4.2 Plan of the Village (not drawn to scale)

/1

KOTA BULOH

RUBBER

PAD/

Kg. Be/ukar

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'

1

Kg. Binjai

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---

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GELUNG \ ~ RAMBAI \ (BAWAH) \ I

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DARAT

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I

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/

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____ , \

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PAD/

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'''

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Mosque Neighbourhood Boundaries

I

I

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RUBBER HUJUNG

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Tunjang

48

THE ANATOMY OF THE VILLAGE

Kodiang-Kangar road. In 1976, there were 245 bicycles, 60 motor-cycles and one car, which traversed this village road almost daily. 3

THE SOCIAL REFERENTS Within walking distance are a number of other villages with which close social ties are maintained - Kampung Belukar to the north, Kampung Binjai to the east, Kampung Tanah Rang to the south-west and Kampung Tunjang to the south. The absence of clear physical boundaries marking off the one village from the other is striking- for example, the northern end of the village merges into Kampung Belukar in the perception of the uninformed outsider, who misses the narrow strip of padi land separating the two settlements. The absence of a marked collective village identity is reinforced by the fact that the mosque congregation is not limited to the village but includes the villagers ofKampung Gelung Rambai, Belukar, Binjai and Tanah Rang, although the mosque itself is found in Gelung Rambai. Since most of the collective concerns of the villagers centre around events, both calendrical and biographical, in which the congregation participates, like death, marriage, and religious feasts, the sharing of the mosque relates the individual to a social identity beyond the confines of the village boundaries. Beyond the village is Tunjang, the Chinese-dominated market town which has become an integral part of the social and economic world of the village. Consumption goods of urban or regional origin are acquired in Tunjang, either from the grocery shops, mostly Chinese-owned, or from the twice-weekly markets (known locally as pekan nat) on Thursdays and Sundays. The production cycle is also primarily oriented towards Tunjang, which is also the centre for production goods acquired on credit, for example, fertilizers, and the sale of produce, namely, padi. The primary school is situated there, as is the government clinic, in both cases marking the first line of incorporation into the network of national infrastructure. The state parliamentary candidates from both parties have established their homes in Tunjang and together with the existence of Malay-owned grocery stores and meeting points, coffee-shops and so on, Tunjang serves as a relay station in the politicization of the villagers, that is, in their participation in the political community of the nation. Another six miles away from Tunjang is the district capital,Jitra, the administrative centre, with the secondary school, the court, the post office, the local MADA office, the private doctor, the pawnshop, and stores catering not to daily consumption needs but to occasional "luxury" needs like clothing. One goes to Jitra once a month to collect the postal remittance from the son serving in the Armed Forces, or to make bigger purchases- in the anonymity of a "big town", one can bargain more freely and strike better bargains. Alor Star, the state capital, is another ten miles from Jitra. Here are the local branches of national banks, which provide wealthier villagers with production credit, as well as the headquarters of the Muda Agricultural Development Authority, the general hospital for the very ill but also for child deliveries, the private educational

The Village in Its Social Setting

49

institutions where a few village children study for their A-levels, and the interview centre, for those aspiring to a clerical job in government service. Here is also the seat and symbol of power, to which one marches in protest, as the villagers did in a massive protest march in 1981. We could add Penang, or Kuala Lumpur or Pahang, where in recent years an increasing number of villagers have found employment, to the list. The point is clear, that social processes within the village cannot be understood in terms of the village alone. Interestingly however, the historical process seems to be not merely one of increasing integration into a regional and national economy, but also a re-direction of linkages which have always been present, in this case, a re-orientation away from the north towards the south.

THE HISTORY OF THE VILLAGE In 1979, there were 133 households in the village, dispersed over the different neighbourhoods distinguished within the village itself- Darat, Kota Buloh, Bawah, Hilir and Hujung (sec plan of the village). The founding date of the village and the history of its subsequent growth lies beyond the living memory of the present inhabitants but Shadli notes that the kampung "is believed to be more than 150 years old". 4 The following reconstruction is derived from the genealogical knowledge of present informants which extends backwards for two generations, giving a historical depth of approximately sixty years. An old lady in her late seventies recalls that in her day, there were twenty-three households distributed almost equally between Darat, Bawah and Hilir, with Kota Buloh having only four households, a hint that Kota Buloh (meaning bamboo) and Hujung were latter spillovers from Darat, Bawah and Hilir. At that time, only three people boleh tolong (could help) the others, should they need to borrow. One of them lived in Kampung Belukar. Another was Tok Hj. Met, from whom stems fifteen current village households. 5 Tok Hj. Met was the village koranic teacher, which entitled him to substantial amounts of zakat, the muslim tithe of onetenth of the padi harvest. He thus enjoyed a surplus in rice stocks every year, which he used to "lend" to needy villagers who had the misfortune of finishing all their reserves of rice before the new harvest. The returns were so high under the then prevailing padi kunca system that by the time of his death, he left 35 re of padi land and 16 re of rubber smallholding, all acquired via purchase, to his four children. Helping him to cultivate his fairly large estate was his "coolie" (the term used by the villagers themselves), Tok Awang, who remained until his death in debt-bondage to Tok Met. Another figure in the village who could have helped was Penghulu Y ah, who inherited the penghuluship from his father Tok Osman Putera Dewa, about whom nothing further is known. Penghulu Y ah' s brother, Tok Man and sister, Jaharah, lived in Darat and today, their descendants make up ten households in the village. Penghulu

50

THE ANATOMY OF THE VILLAGE

Yah left an estate of 60 re upon his death, cleared, according to his grandson and my informant, with the aid ofkerah or corvee labour, to which he was entitled as penghulu. According to a villager who is renting part of the land belonging to the original estate however, this piece of land was opened by him on his own account but upon going to the Land Office to register his claim, he found that it had already been registered in the Penghulu's name. The office of penghulu was not passed on to his eldest son, Chin, for reasons not recorded in the genealogy. Interestingly enough however, Chin then became the head of the "secret society" (the word used by informants was "gang"), whose activities are encompassed by the phenomenon of social banditry described by Cheah Boon Kheng as being prevalent in Kedah in the early years of the century, and which still exists today. 6 Chin cheated hi~ brother and sister of the family estate by inducing his father to transfer the estate to him via hebah, a testamentary act often used to bypass the provisions of Islamic law, but got himself heavily into debt and had to sell the entire estate to a businessman from Alar Star. His dispossessed brother, on the other hand, died a wealthy Haji, having married as second wife, the daughter of a prostitute operating under the protection of Chin, who was heiress of 24 re of padi land. As we shall see later, the social fortunes of their descendants have fluctuated tremendously in the course of the last sixty years, some of them filling the ranks of the poor and middle-income villagers today. In those days when only three could help, there were those who obviously needed help. The family of Tok Musa for example, who lived in Bawah, the same neighbourhood as Tok Hj. Met. Tok Musa was an outsider, married into the family ofHj. Man, who has left an estate of 20 re to be distributed among his three sons and daughters according to adat, that is, equal shares to all. One of his sons however, Man, in whose name 9 re had been registered as a technical measure, since he was penghulu of the mosque and thus entitled to exemption from land tax, refused to redistribute the land, as a result of which Tok Musa's wife was left with an inheritance of only 2 re. An informant recalls that Adam, Tok Musa's only son, used to borrow padi from Tok Hj. Met. That Ismail, Adam's son, is today one of the wealthiest peasants in the village, is attributed in turn to his money-lending activities with capital accumulated through the sale of chicken excreta to Chinese vegetable farmers. Another Tok Musa, then living in Darat, was cheated of his inheritance in a similar fashion by his brother, Tok Mat, who was also a pegawai mesjid (office-bearer of the mosque) and therefore exempt from liability to land taxation. The land which they had jointly cleared was registered in Tok Mat's name, a fait accompli to which his descendants later exercised full claim. Tok Musa's grandchildren were left with no inheritance whatsoever and had to pioneer new land again themselves. Interestingly, Yaacob, the grandson of Tok Mat, gave a totally different version of the story, claiming that his uncles had voluntarily renounced their right to his grandfather's estate. These four families account for about sixty of the eighty-one households in Gelung Rambai today, if we exclude Hilir and Hujung, which are at the other end of the village. The history of these families as described above, reveal the development of

The Village in Its Social Setting

51

a village trying to find its way through the conflicting demands of adat conceptions, Islamic law and European legal institutions in the context of pioneering "frontier society" conditions and the relentless commercialization of the economy.

THE VILLAGE ECONOMY Discounting subsistence production, in which all village households engage, the major economic activity and source of income for the village is padi cultivation. 7 Only one economically-active household in the village did not participate at all in padi cultivation. This was a family totally dependent on rubber tapping, which forms the major secondary source of income for the village populace. Both padi and rubber is cultivated in the form of personal holdings as well as in wage labour, wage labour having become the most important source of income after padi operation. An important development is the increasing significance of wage labour outside of the village economy (padi and rubber), especially as casual construction labour for the nearby towns. Animal husbandry, handicrafts and petty trading are marginal activities, engaged in primarily by the poor households. The poor households also contribute a major share of the young men who have joined the army (fifteen, as of June 1979) and who now contribute a significant share to household incomes. Young men and women are also leaving the village in search of job opportunities elsewhere, although this is a relatively recent phenomenon. The pressure on land indicated by the increasing drift to wage labour both within and without the village has also led to the illegal clearing ofland for rubber cultivation, in which about fifteen households are involved. Working on illegally-opened land began in 1970 and gained momentum two years ago. We may thus conclude that while padi cultivation was the major occupation, village households were engaged in a multiplicity of income-earning activities which were taking place increasingly outside the village economy.

NOTES 1. This is reported in Shadli Abdullah's earlier study of the village, which also provided other valuable base-line information for the present study. Mohd. Shadli Abdullah, "The Relationship of the Kinship System to Land Tenure: A Case Study of Kampung Gelung Rambai, Kedah" (Master's thesis, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, 1978), p. 29. 2. Ibid., p. 31. 3. Ibid., p. 32. 4. Ibid., p. 14. 5. This name, as are all others used in the book, is a pseudonym. 6. Cheah Boon Kheng, "Social Banditry and Crime in North Kedah, 1909-22", JMBRAS 54 (1981): 98-130. More will be said about the "gang" in a later chapter. 7. Subsistence production as used here refers to use-value production including cooking, child care, transformation of padi into rice, vegetable gardening, and so forth.

5 The Village Households: Indicators of Social Differentiation

INTRODUCTION What does the village look like today? Who lives there, what do they live from, how are they related to each other? In slightly more academic terms, the questions could be rephrased as concerning the sources of household income, the extent of social differentiation or the social organization of production. The following chapters will attempt to provide answers to these questions, beginning with a concrete description of the village households, followed by an analysis of the economy and society. In other words, an attempt will be made, not merely to provide an anatomy of the village, but also the underlying mechanisms which animate the process of production and exchange taking place within it and between the village and other social units. 1 The research was carried out during the author's one-year stay in the village from April 1979 to March 1980. The presentation of the material follows closely the actual research procedure itself, in the course of which the blurred and indeterminate village contours gave way to a meaningful pattern. An overview of the households in the village was first obtained (from a census taken on all the village households) in order to obtain base-line indicators like demography, landownership, size of farm operation and so forth. A deeper understanding of the dynamics ofhousehold formation and the household economy was then facilitated by a six-month survey of fifteen sample households, taken as representative of well-to-do, poor, and middle-income households in the village. At first count there were 133 households in the village but during the period of field work (one year), two households were dissolved; one was an old lady formerly living alone whose illness forced her to move in with relatives and another, a young nuclear family where divorce led to the dissolution of the household. The woman left with

53

The Village Households

the children for the village of origin; the man sold the house and left to look for a new life in Pahang. Rather than applying an arbitrary criterion like size oflandownership or operation, it was decided to base the initial understanding of village structure on a villager's own perception ofhow the households should be differentiated. 2 The traditional terms for differentiating households are susah (difficult) and senang (easy). From their daily conversations, it is clear that society was originally classified according to this bimodal scheme. However, the villagers do now make a further distinction, those who boleh gagah (can manage) or sedang (middle) as distinguished from those who are susah or senang. Using these terms, the following table (Table 5.1) was derived: 3

TABLE 5.1 Distribution of Village Households According to Type Type of Household

Susah (poor) Sedang (middle) Scnang (well-to-do) Total

Number of Households

47

70 16

133

SUSAH(POOR)HOUSEHOLDS Poor households are not identical with landless or proletariat households totally dependent on wage labour. Of the 47 poor households, 10 did not operate any padi land; the remaining 37 households operated 88.25 re giving an average farm size of 2.4 re per household (see Table 5.2).

TABLE 5.2 Size of Padi Farm Operation by Poor Households Size of Padi Farm

Number of Households

None Less than 2 re Between 2 to 3 re Over 3 re

10 12

Total

47

23 2

Note: All data in the tables related to village households refer to the main season 1979/80; data on land is given in relong, which is equal to 0.7 arre.

54

THE ANATOMY OF THE VILLAGE

Of the 10 households not engaged in padi cultivation, 3 are not working households at all. One woman is supported by her daughter, who in turn is allowed to operate her 2 re ofland for free; in effect, she survives on rent. Two, one old woman staying alone and the other, a solitary old man, are dependent on welfare and alms from fellow villagers. Of the remaining 7 households, 2 derive their livelihood from rubber tapping and the other 5 are all dependent on wage labour opportunities within the padi economy, that is, transplanting and harvesting, for their livelihood. These 5 are however all female-headed households with a denuded family structure. 4 We can thus make a distinction between those poor households which are no longer capable of reproducing themselves demographically, and those whose poverty is indicated in inadequate farm sizes and the corresponding necessity to supplement income by engagittg in wage labour. Of these 37 poor padi cultivators, 18 owned land, leavmg 19 landless households of which a number operated ancestral land (sec Table 5.3).

TABLE 5.3 Forms of Access to Land by Poor Households Form of Access

Area in re

Ancestral land (pesaka) Land owned by HH

No. Hh

21.25

25

15

24.5 2.75

28.7 3.2 43.1 29 10.6 1 2.3

18 2 21

Land owned by spouse Land rented in: Cash rent BSTS Lease Share-cropping

36.75 24.75 9 1 2

Total

85.25

Abbreviations:

%

100

HH Household head Hh Household BSTS Bukan Sendiri Tanpa Sewa, see eh. 8, p. 135.

The 19 landless households were operating either ancestral land which they would eventually inherit, or rented land. The implication, that landlessness as such is not a significant element of the village social structure, thus confirms Shadli's fmding in 1976 that of the 29 landless households in the village, "only nine households (seven per cent) are without land and without any prospect of owning land, unless by purchase". 5 Thus the poor households cannot be characterized as constituting a landless proletariat. 6 However, it is significant that all the households, both farm-operators and non-farm operators, have some sources of non-farm income.

55

The Village Households

TABLE 5.4 Sources of Non-Farm Income of Poor Households No. of Households

Sources of Non-Farm Income

Wage-labour in padi economy Wage-labour outside the village Rubber share-cropping Handicrafts Petty trade Cattle husbandry Welfare Zakat (religious alms)

31

21 5 3 3 3 3

7

These poor households can thus be characterized as operators of marginal farms who are thus forced to engage in wage labour in order to survive. Of particular significance is the fact that wage labour outside the village has come to assume almost as much importance as wage labour opportunities within the village in the poor households' struggle for survival (see Table 5.4).

SENANG (WELL-TO-DO) HOUSEHOLDS 7 In contrast to the households identified as poor, all the well-to-do households participated in padi cultivation, although this did not mean that the well-to-do household was necessarily a large farm operator, as can be seen from Table 5.5. TABLE 5.5 Size ofPadi Farm Operation by Well-to-do Households Size of Padi Farm

Less than 10 re 10-12 re Over 20 re Total

No. of Households 7

7 1

15

The total area operated by these 15 families amounted to 196.5 re, with an average farm size of 10.6 re. The smallest farm was 4 re, the largest, 23 re. Land owned by the household head would also have been a poor indicator since one household head owned no land whatsoever and the average size of land owned per household was only 6.2 re (see Table 5.6). An important source of access to land for these household heads is ancestral land (15 per cent of operated area) and land belonging to the spouse (23 per cent of operated

56

THE ANATOMY OF THE VILLAGE

TABLE 5.6 Forms of Access to Land by Well-to-do Households Total Area

Average per Hh.

Land owned by HH i) inherited ii) purchase iii) opening

94.0 19.5 62.5 11

6.2 1.3 4.1 0.06

14 3 9 2

47.8 9.9 31.8 5.6

Land owned by spouse i) inherited ii) purchase iii) opening

45 40.9 3

3 2.7 0.1 0.2

10 8 1 1

22.9 20.8 0.36 1.5

Ancestral land i) HH ii) spouse

29 14.4 14.6

2 0.9 0.9

10 6 5

14.8 7.3 7.4

Land rented in i) rent ii) BSTS iii) lease

27.2 7.7 2.5 17

1.8 0.5 0.16 1.1

5 2 1 4

13.8 3.9 1.2 8.6

Land rented out i) rent ii) BSTS iii) lease

36.5 9 23 4.5

2.4 0.6 1.5 0.3

7 1 6 1

18.6 4.5 11.7 2.2

196.5

9.8

15

Form of Access

Total operated area

1.1

No. of % Hh. Total Operated Area

area). Rented land accounted for 14 per cent, the most important source of rented land being from leases (11.5 per cent). Land rented out amounted to 24.8 per cent, of which 12.5 per cent was in the form of BSTS. 8 Only one household leased out any land; this was obviously a transitional state of affairs since the recent deaths of his wife and son had left the household head alone with a daugther. The well-to-do peasants in this village can thus be characterized as those working their own land, in the main neither tenants nor landlords. Only 5 of the 15 however, were solely dependent on income from padi farming. Of the remaining 10, ownership of rubber was the most important source of secondary income. Another major capital asset was the ownership and rental of pedestrian tractors (known in the village by their Japanese brand name kubota), which was a source of secondary income for another 5 households. Only 2 of the 9 households with rubber holdings tapped their own rubber and only in one household did a household member take on wage-labour, namely, the son of the household head. Well-to-do households are thus relatively self-sufficient in land with surplus invested in machinery or outside the padi economy; they are however not major employers of labour and do not engage in wage labour themselves.

57

The Village Households

SEDANG (MIDDLE) HOUSEHOLDS As is to be expected, middle households are not as easy to characterize (see Tables 5.7 and 5.8). In comparison to the other two categories however, we may note that: 1. possession of land by the household head and spouse in all cases derives from inheritance; 2. rented land, in all forms- cash rent, lease and BSTS- play an important role in the constitution of the family farm; 3. non-farm income also contributes substantially to the livelihood of the middle households but in comparison to the poor households, the middle households seem to be characterized by a higher level of skills which enable them to participate in better-paid off-farm employment. TABLE 5.7 Forms of Access to Land by Middle Households Form of Access

Area in re

Ancestral land

29.25

Land owned by HH

84

Land owned by spouse Land rented in: Lease Cash rent BSTS Land rented out: BSTS Lease Cash rent Total operated area

17 186 47.7 109.3 29 14.5 3.5 8 3 316.4

TABLE 5.8 Sources of Non-Farm Income of Middle Households Sources of Non-Farm Income

Carpentry Tailoring Driver Kubota operator Born oh Agricultural wage labour within village Casual wage labour outside village Petty trade Salaried employment Rubber tapping

No. of Hh

6 1 3 3 1 17 1 5 2 14

58

THE ANATOMY OF THE VILLAGE

INDICATORS OF SOCIAL DIFFERENTIATION Interestingly enough, the emic categories do seem to reflect real structural differences in the economic situation of the households. One could say that the susah households are those whose wage labour income exceeds farm income, sedang those whose farm incomes are supplemented by skilled labour and senang, those whose farm incomes alone provide sufficient reserves for further accumulation. The rest of the chapter will be devoted to a comparison of the three household types according to a few key indicators.

Access to Land If we look at Table 5. 9, we see that differential access to land does, indeed, distinguish the three different groups. The average farm size operated by the poor households amounted to 1.96 re, as compared to 4.58 re for the middle households and 10.6 re for the well-to-do households. However, farm size alone would have been a misleading criterion. If we were to take a cut-off point of 7 re for example, 3 of the 14 household classified here under well-to-do would have to be reclassified for cultivating 7 re or less, while 15 of the households classified as middle cultivated 7 re or more. More instructive perhaps is the differential pattern of form of access to land for the three different groups. Whereas land owned by the household head amounted to 27.7 per cent for the poor househ9lds and 26.6 per cent for the middle households, 47.9 per cent of the total operated area was in the personal ownership of the well-to-do household heads. There is good reason to believe that the reason for this is due not only to a large inheritance but also to the purchase of land on the part of these wealthier households. As a matter of fact, 15 households have bought padi land amounting to a total area of 68 re since the end of the war; it should be noted though, that of these 68 r'e, only 11 re were bought after the introduction of double-cropping, which indicates that the frequency of land transactions has dropped since then. Even more startling is the difference in value which land owned by the spouse of the household head has for the three different groups. Just 3.1 per cent of the total area operated by the poor households belonged to the spouse; for the middle households, it was a mere 5.3 per cent, but for the well-to-do households, it came up to 22.9 per cent. In a later chapter, the frequency of marriages between poor young men and daughters of well-to-do families in the days when labour was scarce and the adat law of inheritance was still predominant will be described. Well-to-do households thus seem to be those in which property has either been brought together, or where a poor young man has married into a well-to-do family. Tanah pesaka, an undivided ancestral estate, was a more important source of access to the poor households than to the middle or well-to-do ones. This is probably an indication of the more subsistence nature of the padi production of the poor households. The division of the ancestral estate is not only expensive but its non-

TABLE 5.9 Forms of Access to Land by Village Households Poor (n = 45)

of Access

Middle (n = 69)

Well-to-do (n = 15)

Area

%

No. Hh

Area

%

No. Hh

Area

%

No. Hh

Land owned by HH Land owned by spouse Ancestral land BSTS Rent Lease Share-cropping Land rented out BSTS Lease Rent

24.5 2.75 21.25 9 27.75 1 2

27.7 3.1 24 10 31.4

18 2 15 21 1

26.6 5.3 9.2 9.1 34.5 15

29 7 18

1.1

84 17 29.25 29 109.25 47.75

94.3 45 30 2.5 7.7 17

47.9 22.9 22.9 1.2 3.9 8.6

15 10 10 1 2 4

Total operated area A vg. operated area

88.25 1.96

Types

12

2.2 3.5 8 3

23 4.5 9

316.25 4.58

196.5 10.6

7 6 1

60

THE ANATOMY OF THE VILLAGE

division also hinders the possibility of sale, an important consideration for the maintenance of subsistence production. Of particular interest is the role of tenancy for the three different groups. For the well-to-do households, rented land was the least important of all the different sources of access, although it is interesting to note that lease is the most important of all the three rental forms. For the poor and middle households on the other hand, cash rental is the most significant form of access to land, although lease is also important for the middle households (in fact, the highest percentage among all three household groupings). Interestingly enough, BSTS is fairly insignificant, accounting for 10 per cent ofland operated by the poor households, 9.1 per cent for the middle households and 1.2 per cent for the well-to-do households. Incidentally, the low incidence of BSTS was also noted by Shadli Abdullah. He recorded 39 re under BSTS in 1976/77, which agrees with our figure of 40.5 re in 1980. 9 Although far more data would be required for a conclusive argument, it seems to me that Table 9 is highly suggestive about the way that the process of social differentiation is taking place within the village with respect to access to land. Whereas the well-to-do households arrive at their larger holdings through land purchases and leases, the middle households do so through cash rentals and leases, while the poor households are trying to hold on to their ancestral land and are being increasingly forced to enter into unfavourable share-cropping arrangements in order to gain access to rented land.

Type of Farm Operation The kind of farm operation can also be sharply distinguished, as can be seen from Table 5.10. Whereas all the poor farm operators had to rent in a pedestrian tractor (kubota) for the ploughing, 19 per cent of the middle households and 57 per cent of the well-to-do households had access to a kubota. Whereas 88 per cent of the poor farm operators did the transplanting with their own labour, only 47 per cent of the middle households and none of the well-to-do households did so. Similarly, none of the wellto-do households expended their own labour on harvesting, compared to 2 per cent of the middle households and 36 per cent of the poor households. It should be noted however, that the employment ofhousehold as well as hired labour would have been much higher had it not been for the introduction of the combine harvester a year ago. This found favour in particular with the middle and well-to-do households although it should be noted that 23 per cent of the poor households also turned over the entire harvesting to the combine. Table 5.10 thus reveals a trend towards the development of two kinds of farms. On the one hand, a small farm that is still run very much with the aid of family labour and on the other, a kind of farm operation in which the farmer is primarily a "farm manager", or, as one of the poor farm labourers in the village said of a middle farmer, dia sudahjadi towkay (he has already become a towkay). All the major work processes are executed with the aid of hired labour or machinery, which is, of course, far more cash-intensive than labour-intensive.

TABLE 5.10 Type of Farm Operation by Village Households Type of Farm Operation Household Type

own/ family

hired labour

both

100

35 88

3 8

27 47

39

No. ofHH %

Middle: (n= 58)

No. ofHH %

11 19

47 81

Well-to-do: No. ofHH (n = 14) %

8 57

6 43

M= combine harvester OL = own labour HL = hired labour

Harvesting

own labour

rental

Poor: (n = 39)

Abbreviations:

Transplanting

Plou:?hing

own labour

hired labour

comb. harv.

MjOL

MjHL

OLjHL

4

14 36

2 5

9 23

5 13

2 5

7 18

16 28

15 25

1 2

2 3

42 72

12 21

1 2

13 93

1 7

1 7

9 64

3 21

1 7

1

62

THE ANATOMY OF THE VILLAGE

The Role of Wage Labour Table 5.11 points to another vital difference between the households, namely, whereas the well-to-do households hire in labour, as could be seen in Table 5.10, poor households are essentially wage labour households. None of the well-to-do household heads participated in wage labour; 27 of the poor households, on the other hand, engaged in farm wage labour while 17 also worked as labourers outside of the village economy. Middle households also supplemented their income with wage labour but it should be noted that this was more in the direction of skilled labour, primarily carpentry and the transportation of padi, which is facilitated by the ownership of the motorcycle. TABLE 5.11 Participation in Wage Labour by Village Households

Poor: Middle: Well-to-do:

No. ofHH No. ofHH No. ofHH

Agriculture (padi)

Contract (manual labour)

Transportation of Padi

Skilled

27 15

17 5

3 6

11

Family Structure and the Family Development Cycle Distinct differences in household size and family structure can be discerned for the different households, as can be seen from Table 5.12. Of the 38 poor households on whom I have demographic data, 12 were either single or denuded families, of whom 9 were female headed, that is, either old men or women living fully alone and dependent for their survival on charity, or older women and men, either divorced or widowed, living with a grandchild or adopted child. These households depended for their survival partly on wage labour and partly on zakat. The nuclear family structure, which is usually taken to be the typical Malay form, is predominant for the middle households, making up for 87 per cent of the households. The prevalence of the stem structure for the well-to-do households is significant, making up for 45 per cent of the households. None of the middle or well-to-do households were of a denuded form. A more detailed analysis of the family development cycle is presented in Chapter 12. Suffice it to say here that although a correlation can certainly be found between farm size and family size (compare Table 5.9 and 5.12) the causal correlation cannot be made to run in only one way. Chayanov's account of demographic differentiation presumes that the family development cycle operates in an organic, biological fashion, whereas the data here show that this is not so. 10 The poor do not succeed in completing their life cycle in a way which would correspond to the socio-cultural norm, and this lack of success is clearly related to the inter-play of socio-economic factors.

63

The Village Households

TABLE 5.12 Demographic Features of Village Households Structure Avg. Hh size

HH

n

Poor 1 %

3.7

20% (=9) female

Middle

4.6

100%

male

7

100%

male

22 58 55 87 8 57

Household Type

~IQ

W ell-to-do 2 % Notes:

1

2

3 8 5 8 6 43

d

with 3rd generation

12 31 0 0 0 0

1 3 3 5 0 0

7 households missing 2 households missing

Abbreviations: n s

d

nuclear stem denuded

CONCLUSION Considerable inequality in access to resources as well as differences in the pattern of utilization of these resources certainly do exist in this village, rendering notions of "egalitarian rice-producing societies" or "homogenous peasant units" definitely inapplicable. On the other hand, no distinct pattern of polarization and exploitation based on the ownership of the means of production can be discerned. Unravelling these multifarious threads which interweave to form this complicated picture will be the task of the following chapters. NOTES 1. Compare the title of the village study conducted by Y. Hayami, Anatomy of a Peasant Economy (Los Banos: International Rice Research Institute, 1978). 2. The problems which arise with this procedure are indicated in the following footnote. 3. The informant was formerly headman of the village and still retained considerable influence. Through his active and life-long participation in village affairs, he was well acquainted with the economic position of the various households and it was decided to use his evaluation as "expert information". When asked the first time, he classified 45 households under the susah category, 44 under the sedang category and 44 under the senang category. However, when asked a second time some months later, the same informant made a totally different assessment, giving 73 as susah, 44 as sedang and 16 as senang. Obviously, at least two sets of criteria can be used, one which is stringent on the question of poverty (susah), namely, the first count, and the other on the question of wealth (senang), namely, the second count. It seems that the most interesting information from the categorisation is the stringent definition of who the poor in the village are, and who the well-to-do. The above table is thus derived from the collapsing of the two sets of evaluation, retaining the extreme values for the susah and the senang categories. For working purposes, the three terms have been translated as poor, middle and well-to-do. 4. Following Djamour, Malay family structure can be described as denuded when one or both parents are absent. See J. Djamour, M a/ay Kinship and Marriage in Singapore (London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1959), pp. 54 If. for a classification of Malay household types.

64

THE ANATOMY OF THE VILLAGE

5. Shadli, op. cit., p. 77. 6. The significance of this can be seen when compared with the findings for the Philippines, for example. In Hayami's village, 43 per cent of the households were landless, with villagers owning less than 2 per cent of the rice land and 30 per cent of the coconut land; see Hayami, op. cit., pp. 14 ff. In two other Filipino villages studies by Ledesma, landless workers make up 38 per cent and 26 per cent of the village households respectively. See A. Ledesma, Landless Workers and Rice Farmers: Peasant Subclasses under A&rarian Reform in Two Philippine Vil/ages (Los Banos: International Rice Research Institute, 1982), p. 99. For Indonesia, the 1965 Agro-Economic Survey found that 50-60 per cent of the households in forty sample villages were landless and a further 20 per cent owned only a family compound. Edmundson reports that only 90 households in a village of 550 households owned sawah. Cited in]. Alexander and P. Alexander, "Shared Poverty as Ideology: Agrarian Relations in Colonial Java", Man 17 (1982): 603. 7. Information is available on only 15 of the 16 well-to-do households. 8. BSTS (Bukan Sendiri Tanpa Sewa) is a term coined by the CPR Study, translated into English as "family tenure". It refers to the free rental of land to close kin. D.S. Gibbons et al., Land Tenure in the Muda Irrigation Area (Final Report, Centre for Policy Research, Penang), p. 41. See, however, the discussion in Chapter 8 pertaining to this issue. 9. Shadli Abdullah, op. cit., p. 109. 10. Refer to the discussion in Chapter 2.

6 The Sample Households: Patterns of Social Differentiation

INTRODUCTION In order to arrive at a deeper understanding of the household economy and the process of differentiation evidently occurring at the village level, more intensive "case studies" were then made of sixteen village households. These sixteen were chosen according to three criteria: that of stratification, that is, according to the household types senang, sedang and susah, identified earlier; that of variability, that is, where possible, with different family structures, and thirdly, the limits of the possible were set by personal access and the availability of a family member willing and able to fill in the questionnaires and answer diverse other questions. These sample households were not chosen by me but by my adoptive father in the village, according to the parameters set above. As such, they may reflect his personal friendships in the village; on the whole, however, they seem to be fairly representative of the village households, and care was taken to include households from both the major political factions in the village. Data collected on these sample households is of three kinds: 1. biographical 2. income and expenditure data 3. time utilization data 1 To begin this chapter, an introduction of the various households with the biographies of the household heads, followed by an examination of their budgetary and labour utilization patterns, is in order.

66

THE ANATOMY OF THE VILLAGE

THE LIFE HISTORIES Senang Households We shall begin this series of household portraits with the well-to-do households and appropriately then, with Ahmad D, the largest landowner in the village. He owns a total of 12.75 re of padi land, operates altogether 17.5 re and estimates that every padi season nets him a profit of $5000, certainly a not inconsiderable sum. What does a well-to-do man do with his money? In 1968, he made his first major investment with the construction of a house which would cost at current prices at least $15,000. In 1970 he bought a pedestrian tractor in partnership with his brother. Five years later, he bought a motorcycle for $2000. In 1978, the marriage of his eldest son cost him $4000, although this sum may be exaggerated. In the same year, he bought a piece of kampung land for $4000, which is meant to serve eventually as a house plot for his married son. In 1979, he paid $7,050 for 1.25 re of padi land, one of the few cases of land transactions which have taken place at all in recent years in the village. It would be a mistake, however, to see this as the typical consumption pattern of the leisured "landed class". Ahmad, in fact, had little going for him upon the death of his father, who left a mere 3 re of padi land tor him and his brother Ibrahim. Then twenty years old and already married for two years, Ahmad was operating these 3 re with his mother and Ibrahim. The turn in fortune came with Ibrahim's second marriage to a wealthy woman whose estate demanded his full attention, thus leaving Ahmad with full usufruct over the family property of 3 re. By the time he was 25 years old, he had saved enough to pay the dowry for a young divorcee tram a wealthy family. The in-laws provided the new couple with free access to 1.25 re of padi land, as well as another 2.5 re ofland for rental in kind. In addition, 3 re of rubber smallholding were rented out to the daughter on a share-cropping basis. The padi lands were soon claimed by the brother-in-law but access to the rubber smallholding continued until 1960. It became the mainstay of the family economy, from which daily household expenses were met. Proceeds from padi cultivation, which were then of an annual nature, were pure savings which Ahmad ploughed back into the land- in the form of beli usaha, that is, buying newly cleared land not completely ready for cultivation. In the course of the fifties, he bought 10 re of land in three separate transactions, as well as cleared the land that had already been registered in his father's name. Part of the land which he bought was originally entrusted to others who, in return for clearing the land, were entitled to work the land for a fixed number of rent-free years. It took thirteen years before the land bought in this manner produced full yields. The fifties were thus the years of expansion. In 1963, Ahmad staked claim to 8 re of land in Merbuk, some miles away from the village, but this was declared illegal by the government. The sixties were characterized by the construction of the house, the seventies by the marriage of the children. Ahmad, today fifty-six years old, heads a household which includes his eldest son, daughter-in-law and grandson, as well as another grandson from a divorced daughter. At forty-five, Hassan E is one of the most important men in the village. He was

The Sample Households

67

the former PAS (Parti Islam Se-Malaysia- the opposition party) leader in the village and up till today, still figures prominently in village politics. He was also the treasurer of the Syarikat Mati (Death Society), one of the most important of the village associations. Early this year, he confirmed his status in the village by holding the largest kenduri (feast) in recent memory on the occasion of his daughter's marriage. 4000 guests were invited. The material basis to this wealth of influence is not difficult to identify. In a village where until two years ago, there were no other cars, a VW van and a Ford Escort grace his front porch. He had bought his first car in 1954 and until the other cars came onto the scene, he ran the village's unofficial taxi service. His is also the largest village grocery (altogether there are four). Yet he is an outsider to the village and in the village itself, does not have a single re long ofland to his name. The real basis of his good fortune is the 11 re ofland inherited by his wife, who belongs to one of the older-established families in the village. Fatimah, the wife, is now forty-three years old. At eighteen, her family had married her to someone in Sungei Korok but after the second night there, she came home and refused to return. Before the year was up, they were divorced. Three years later, she married someone else, and this time, the marriage lasted scarcely a year. But within a year of the second divorce, Hassan E asked for the hand of the twice-divorced heiress, and this time he came to stay. Hassan E was born in 1933 in Kepala Batas, a town about fourteen miles away from Gelung Rambai. After five years in school, he entered a pondok (religious school) for two years, then switched to another pondok for a further two years. The total family inheritance was 10 re, which however, had to be shared with three other siblings. After leaving school Hassan E went to Bukit Pinang to help his sister with rubber-tapping before finally returning to his home village of Kepala Batas to work on the family land which his brothers had been farming. Within six months, his brother had found him a wife in the person of Fatimah. Hassan thus came as a virtually landless young man to join one of the richest families in Gelong Rambai. He earned his keep by helping on the family farm, the first time he had ever engaged in padi cultivation. To supplement his income during the offseason, he went fishing in the swamps. However, it was the fields ofhis in-laws which made his fortune. The 2 re, officially his in his home village, have never been worked by him and continue to be operated by his brother and sister without any rent being paid. After five years of living together with the parents, Hassan and Fatimah were allowed to set up their own household (asing) with 5 re given to them for cultivation. They also supplemented their income by engaging in wage labour and for one year, they even rented 4 re of a rubber smallholding on a share-cropping basis. Upon the death of the parents twelve years thereafter, Fatimah received 11 re as her share of the inheritance so that their farm operations increased more than twofold. Some years ago, Hassan added to the size of the operations by leasing 3 re of land. After the period of the lease expired in 1980, he took up another lease, for three seasons, of2 re. But as early as 1954, Hassan had used the proceeds from the sale of padi to buy

68

THE ANATOMY OF THE VILLAGE

the means to other sources of income. In 1954, he had saved enough from his 5 re to buy his first motorcar. By now, he has run through eight cars. Although he does not have a taxi license, he has held a virtual monopoly over the village taxi service for the last twenty years. In 1962, he opened the village store which is now the biggest in the village. The business was financially linked up with a "towkay" (Chinese businessman) from Tunjang, who provided all the goods in the shop on credit, amounting to $8,000 to $10,000 a year. In return, all padi sold to the store by the villagers had to be sold to the towkay by Hassan. In 1974, he broke up with the towkay and now has four different suppliers for his goods, meaning that he can look out for the supplier with the lowest price. He can afford to do so now because with double-cropping, senang pusing duit (easy to get cash). His cash income from the sale of his own padi is now realized twice a year, hence his need for credit is much lessened. In 1974, he made his next big investment by buying a kubota, a hand tiller. Four years later, he made his first major long-term investment by buying 4 re of rubber land in Changloon, about seventeen miles away from Gelung Rambai. This land belongs to the state and is thus tanah haram (illegal land). It was thus a "purchase" ofland which had been illegally cleared from the jungle, for which he paid M$2,300, land which still requires much input and investment before it can begin to give returns. Apart from these investments, two events have been the occasion of great expense, namely, the marriage of his two older daughters. The first took place in 1974, the second in 1980. With the two gone, the household now consists of only four members, Hassan and Fatimah, the third daughter, aged twenty, and a son, aged eighteen. A similar pattern of development is to be found with Mohammed H's household. After five years of marriage with his first wife (he married her at sixteen), he divorced her to marry the youngest daughter of a wealthy peasant in Gelong Rambai, who had herself been divorced and had been staying at home for six years. Mohammed came to live with the in-laws and operated their 11 re of land. He began to accumulate property for himself first by renting land, until he was eventually operating 25 re of padi land altogether. In 1961, he had finally saved enough money to buy 3 re ofland and in 1968, another 4 re. With the introduction of double-cropping in the following two years, he made his final investment- $2,400 for a hand tractor. By the mid-sixties however, the need for providing his children with their own means of production was beginning to halt his expansionist drive. In 1965, his eldest daughter, from his first wife, was married. Expenditure on the kenduri was $1000, which according to him, absorbed the entire year's padi savings. As a result, he did not have sufficient money for the children's education and had to borrow $600 from his towkay. The daughter and the son-in-law lived with them for one year, after which they established their own separate household. Mohammed gave them the 3 re which he had bought earlier (in his name) to operate. In 1968, Mohammed's second daughter was married but since she had been brought up by an aunt, the aunt was responsible for all the expenses. However, shortly after

The Sample Households

69

she came back to live in Gelung Rambai, he gave her the 4 re which he had also bought to operate. In 1975, one son was married. After this, the son was given 1 re to operate. In 1978, another daughter got married but expenses this time amounted to only $700. In 1979, first his daughter, then his son got married. Both of them, as well as the inlaws, are living with him. The daughter's marriage cost him $1000, the son's another $1,200. He has already given 3.5 re to this son to operate and intends to let the son establish his own household soon. He also intends to let the son-in-law take over the management of the farm-holdings soon. Abdullah A belongs to the same generation as Mohammed H, Ahmad D and Hassan E, with the similar biographical twist of having tu mpang (ridden) on the fortunes of their wives, as well as the pattern of expansion slowed down by the need to establish households for their children. The one exception is Ishaak M. Ishaak M is only 40 years of age, with his eldest son still schooling in Alor Star, but he is already the largest padi cultivator in the village, with a farm of 19.5 re. In addition, he has 2.5 re of rubber smallholdings plus another 5 re of newly planted rubber smallholdings. Officially however, he is the owner only of 5 re of padi land and the 2.5 re of smallholding. This 5 re was inherited from the grandfather and in 1961, the year in which he also got married, he also rented 3 re from his aunt. With these 8 re, he began to accumulate land. The 2.5 re of rubber smallholding was his first acquisition, bought in 1964. In 1967, he bought 2 re of padi land for $3,000 with a loan from the Syarikat Kerjasama. One year later, he spent $3,500 on the construction of his house, also on credit. In that same year, he bought a motocycle. In the sixties, a lot of money was spent on jewellery but since the onset of doublecropping, no more jewellery has been bought; rather, there has been a steady accumulation of property. By 1975, he was able to pay off his debts and to start again. 5 re of rubber land was brought in Prik for $1000. In 1976, he bought a second-hand kubota for $5,000, $3,500 of which was on loan. In the same year, he leased 2 re of land from an uncle for sixteen seasons- for $4,000, only part of which was paid at once. In 1977, he bought 2 re of a fruit orchard for $1000. That year, he leased a further 2.5 re for four seasons. In 1978, he leased another 2 re and shared a lease with his uncle for a further 2 re. That year, he bought 1.5 re of land of $9,000, of which $2,500 was borrowed from his towkay. But as of now, according to Ishaak, he is going to concentrate on developing his 5 re of rubber smallholding in Prik, which he bought in 1975. He estimates that rubber is twice as profitable as padi cultivation, and intends to buy another 2 re of rubber smallholding soon. When asked for the secret ofhis success, the village reply is "dia pandai pusing" (he is clever at using his capital). It is also noted that he is the first to leave for the fields and the last to return home. I would venture to speculate that this kind of rapid accumulation (by the age of 40) on the basis of agricultural production itself, was possible only in the seventies, with the advent of double-cropping and the mechanization of the ploughing process. This would imply that the present farmers cultivating more than 10 re of land would probably resemble the model presented by Mohammed H and the other four in the sample (and in fact, of the total number

70

THE ANATOMY OF THE VILLAGE

of 16 m the village classified as senang, Ishaak M is the only exception in this respect). The drive to expand as such, of which Ishaak M is such a convincing example, is, it seems to me, more characteristic of the "middle" category of farmers in the village. Middle households seem to be composed primarily of nuclear-type households which are trying to expand, often with the aid of access to family-based resources.

Sedang Households A typical case is provided by Haid Y (aged 40) who is one of the most prominent "middle" peasants in the village; his influence is derived partly from his two-year stint as Imam (mosque leader), and from his present position as head of the local PAS faction. This influence is also due in part to the fact that he belongs to one of the largest and wealthiest families in the village, his great-grandfather having once been the Tok Guru (religious teacher) and the richest man in Gelung Rambai, with over 30 re of padi land to his name. Through the usual process of fragmentation, however, Haid himself inherited only 2 re 3 penyeru (1 p = one quarter of a re). Between them, Haid's parents had 8 re and due to this relative wealth, they could send him for thirteen years to various Arabic schools - in Kodiang, Jitra and in Province Wellesley. After returning home from his studies, he helped his father with agricultural work but it was not until three years later that he began real work in the fields. This went on until his father's death in 1967. He had married, shortly before his father's death, but after the birth of a daughter, the wife left, leaving the daugher in his care. He remarried three years later and now lives with his second wife and their four children, while the daughter lives with his mother-in-law. After the father's death Haid, as the eldest son, divided the estate between himself and his siblings according to what is said to be Islamic law. In effect, he took his mother's estate of 3 re (part of it subsequently acquired for building a canal) while his six other brothers and sisters had to share their father's 5 re in unequal portions. The size of his farm operation, however, is, as a rule, much higher than his actual land holdings. He manages this through taking short-term leases, mostly from relatives, and after the expiry of one lease, taking up another one. Thus, three years, ago, he paid $500 for a four-year lease on 1 re. 1 p. of land. When that expired, he took up 2.5 re for six seasons. This, however, required more capital, $1,800, and he solved this problem by taking up the lease on a joint basis with a friend. This year, they took up a further lease jointly of 2 re. But his relative prosperity is not due merely to his padi farm, which he actually manages rather than works. Almost every labour process is executed by wage labour and his wife takes no part at all in padi cultivation. From the family inheritance, he also has 1 re of rubber land which he rents out on a share-cropping basis which is a further source of income. Another source of income comes from his skill as a carpenter, which he began learning in 1963. In 1968, he started doing carpentry professionally.

The Sample Households

71

In 1972, he was designated amir (collector of the religious tax) by the government. He gets a 12 per cent commission on the amount he collects. Even since the entry of the combine harvester two years ago, a great need for speedy transportation of padi has arisen and now a major source of his income is also derived from using his motorcycle to transport padi during the harvesting season. In addition, for the first time this year, he has become an unofficial agent for the lorry concern which transports padi to the government mill or LPN (Lembaga Padi Nasional- the National Padi Authority). He gets a commission on every sack he procures. Manan Has well as Ali Y and Ariffin 0 resemble Haid Y in having inherited some family property which is the basis of the farm operation. Manan H operates 7.5 re ofland which belongs to his mother. He was married only in 1976 and all the surplus he accumulated in the following three years was spent on renovating his house and on buying a motorcycle. But in 1979, he bought a kubota. So far, he has been doing all the agricultural work by himself since his wife has to look after their two young children of two and four years of age, but as of the last season, the wife was able to help out with transplanting. Manan himself estimates that they would be able to handle up to 10 re of padi land. A slight divergence from this pattern is offered by Mat Y, whose father had sold all his property. After working for several years as a rubber tapper, Mat managed to save enough to marry. The dowry was $300, since the wife had already been married earlier, when she was 16, and divorced after two years of marriage. With her oneyear-old child, she had returned home to live with her well-to-do parents until she married Mat. After their marriage, they lived together with his wife's parents for three years, during which time Mat helped his father-in-law with agricultural work. At the same time, they tapped his wife's grandmother's smallholdings on a share-cropping basis. In 1977, they set up a separate household by building a house of their own, but on her father's property. The couple themselves spent $400 while their father-in-law contributed $1,500. Upon their moving out, the grandmother gave them 1 re to operate, rent to be paid once a year in kind. Mat also continued to operate his fatherin-law's hand tiller, which secured additional income for him. In 1978, with money accumulated through kut (a collective savings scheme) they joined two ofher relatives in leasing 4.5 re of land, each having to pay $700 for 1.5 re. In that year, they also rented in 1 re from his wife's uncle. An exception to this pattern of young men working their way up is Din D, who at 55 is the oldest in the "middle" category of those sampled. An orphan, he was left without any resources upon the death of his aunt, who had brought him up. His neighbours remember him as being extremely poor. In spite of this, he had managed to open 3 re of land while working on his aunt's land but at the time of her death, this land was not yet productive. As his sons grew up, however, and with the introduction of double-cropping, which increased the demand for harvesters and threshers, he and his three sons became a formidable harvesting team. He had also acquired some carpentry skills, which were also in demand as double-cropping increased the prosperity of the village in the initial years. With surplus cash accumulated through this wage labour, he was able to pay for a tractor to level the

72

THE ANATOMY Of THE VILLAGE

land which he had cleared so long ago, and this is the land which he now operates, now that he is too old for strenuous labour like threshing. Susah Households Of the poor, only one was totally landless, having sold his inheritance under the pressure of increasing impoverishment- Yunos I. Born into a wealthy family, he began his farming career, upon his father's death, by operating 13 re of padi land, 8 of which he eventually inherited. One year after his father's death, Yunos, at the age of sixteen, married Hawa; a daughter from a poor family, who came to live with him and his widowed mother. The turn in his fortunes seems to have been heralded by the death ofhis much-beloved mother a year later. During a thunderstorm an uprooted coconut tree crashed over the house, crushing the mother, who was alone within, to death. Yunos mortgaged part of the land for the first time in order to raise money to build a new house. Seven years passed before he could redeem this first mortgage. His expenses in the next few years were heavy with the arrival of one child after the other. His mother-in-law also came to stay with the family. In particular, however, Yunos' sociability and engagement in politics (Parti Negara) made deep cuts into his budget. In 1949, he mortgaged another 2 re ofland, again under the arrangement that the creditor had usufruct until the loan was returned. In 1954, he mortgaged another piece of land to someone else in order to retrieve the penultimate one. It was in 1956, however, that the first fateful jual janji arrangement was made whereby the land would pass into the hands of the creditor should the credit not be returned within the stipulated time period. In this case, he received a loan of $1,000 by mortgaging 3.5 re for a period of three years, at an interest rate of 30 per cent a year. It was only when the three years ran out that his father's estate was officially divided between him and his brother in order to facilitate sale of the land. In 1959, the first land sale was made in order to redeem the 3.5 re which had been mortgaged. Two years later, another 2.5 re were sold. This was followed by the sale of the last 2 re of padi land in 1964, and the sale of the rubber small-holding in 1965. Thereafter, his wife's pesaka was mortgaged in order to raise money to lease 4.5 re for a seven-year period. When this ran out, he did not engage in padi operations any further. Since then, the family has been dependent on wage labour. The most difficult time for the family was when the children were still young and his wife was fully tied down by domestic duties. After the birth of the fifth child, however (there are seven altogether), when the older children could look after the younger ones, Hawa began engaging in wage labour. In 1961, two sons left school and started contributing to the family income with their wage labour as well. They went north to tap rubber, returning once a week with rice and firewood. During the the padi season, they engaged in wage labour within the village. In 1967, Yunos and his wife went to Changloon, a town in the north, to tap rubber for nine months, leaving the two older children in the village. The situation gradually improved, especially in the seventies. The second son left

The Sample Households

73

the village to join the army, and sent monthly remittances home. The two older daughters married well and helped occasionally with expenses for the younger children. Now only the youngest daughter is still schooling; the youngest son is earning his keep with wage labour, and the wife is the main income earner through wages earned from transplanting and harvesting. The account given by her when asked how she managed to survive is revealing: every month, she receives $20 from her second son, who works in the army. But in addition, her eldest son, who lives in a nearby kampun"(!, would pass by every five days or so with fish and vegetables. Her daughter, who lives in Tunjang, a town some two miles away, brings enough cooked food for the whole family when she comes to visit - every week or so. In addition, whenjamilah, the youngest daughter, needs to buy something in connection with her schooling, for example, seasonal bus tickets, or school uniforms, then this daughter would be likely to pay for it. Basically, said Yunos' wife, "I'm responsible only for the rice". This pattern of financial support from the adult children, both in cash and in kind, is also typical of the family of Saad A (aged sixty), one of whose sons is also in the army. In terms of cash income alone financial support from the children accounted for 21 per cent of the total in 1979/80. In addition, food and clothes and help with school expenses were provided by those children living in close proximity to the village. When the wife fell ill for example, one of the daughters paid for the taxi fare necessary for taking the mother to hospital. Saad A's household is also dependent on income from agricultural labour- the wife and daughter engaging in transplanting and harvesting - since the size of the padi farm is far too small to permit survival. In Saad's case however, his shortage of land cannot be attributed to premature sale. His parents operated 3.5 re of land but as the eldest son, he had no access to the family property until their death and the division of the estate, upon which he received 1. 75 re, part of which he now operates and part of which he has made available to one of his children. Even before his marriage at 25 years of age, however, Saad had opened 2.5 re of land while still living with his parents, but upon going to the Land Office to register the land in his name, it turned out that this land had already been claimed by the Penghulu. Officially then, Saad became a tenant of the Penghulu, operating the 2.5 re for free for some years before having to pay rent, first in kind, subsequently in cash. Before this land became fully productive, however, Saad had to supplement his income by engaging in agricultural and other forms of wage labour, especially after his marriage and the birth of the children. Both these men therefore, Yunos I and Saad A, similar in age to the wealthy like Hassan E or Ahmad D, are completing their family development cycle by receiving rather than giving. Far more problematic is the case of women who not only have limited access to factors of production but also to means of production. We see this in the case of Minah A for example. Coming from a poor family, the only land she has claim to is a piece of padi land of0.5 re, which is gilir (rotated) between the heirs. As a child, even before her father's death, she had already earned money by stamping padi and feeding chickens. At seventeen, she began transplanting and harvesting work and at twenty, she married and went to live with her parents-in-law.

74

THE ANATOMY OF THE VILLAGE

Unfortunately, her husband died two years after the adoption ofher niece as daughter; after his death, she returned to her village with her adopted daughter, and has been earning her livelihood by wage labour ever since. Her daughter started wage labour at nineteen and is today the major wage earner in the household, having remained unmarried although having reached the age of thirty. The wife of Mat Y has similar "breakdowns" in her biography. Born in 1940 in Perlis she was married at eleven, divorced a year later, and remarried at thirteen Mat Y from the village. Her first child was born when she was fifteen and within ten months of the birth, they left for Sungei Patani to work as rubber tappers. After two years there, they returned to live in Gelung Rambai with Mat's parents and after establishing their own household, were given 1 re of land to operate. Aishad is responsible for managing this 1 re and the additional1 re they have rented, while Mat supplements the income with trading. Unfortunately however, Mat married again a few years ago and maintains two households now, with the consequence that Aishah has to fend largely for herself and the family. This she does by engaging in wage labour as well. Future fmancial aid from the children will be hard to come by: the eldest daughter has married but lives in Pedis and the eldest son died recently of asthma. This pattern of wage labour plus small farm which is operated by the wife, is also found in our fmal case, that of Shadli D. Shadli,just forty, had to give up a fairly wellpaying job as a contract worker in December 1979 because of his failing health. His own 2 re of rain-fed padi land is left to his wife to operate, while he engages in casual wage labour - a typical pattern for the poor nuclear families in the village. Together, they have to feed their household of six- one daughter of sixteen who does the housework, another daughter of fourteen and a son of eleven who both attend school and a grandchild of three. Actually, the household is intimately linked with two others- Shadli's widowed mother, who lives in a village some 15 miles away and widowed mother-in-law, who has a house on the same compound. Food is very often shared with the mother-in-law, who lives alone, and the youngest son often sleeps in her house. The widowed mother lives with Shadli's eldest son and younger daughter. The eldest son operates the 3 re belonging to his grandmother there. Shadli's father died when he was a child. After his marriage at eighteen, the couple continued to live with his mother for five years, until they moved back to his father's village to operate the 3 re there, while his mother operated the 2 re ofland in Gelung Rambai. After three years, they returned to operate the 2 re in Gelung Rambai while the other household moved over to the other village to operate the 3 re. Shadli gives $10-20 every month to his mother for his daughter's expenses. While operating the 2 re, Shadli and his wife had been supplementing their income by engaging in casual wage labour, both in the padi sector and in the rubber estates. Two years ago, their livelihood improved as Shadli managed to fmd a job as a labourer on a construction site, which pays $8 per day, instead of the $2.40 as a rubber-tapper. Noteworthy is that throughout all these years, no investment has been made by the family - no new land rented or bought. The reason lies in the fact that before Shadli got the job as a casual labourer, the family hardly had enough to cover current expenditure. It was only in November oflast year that the family recovered its pawned

The Sample Households

75

jewellery and got beyond the indebtedness line. In fact, one of my informants said that since Shadli got the job as a contract labourer, they are no longer really poor. However, in the peasant economy, contract work is no guarantee of security, as is evident in Shadli's case. His health is failing and he has had to return to casual labour in the village, including threshing, where the returns are much lower, especially since he is no longer a strong young man. It is under these circumstances that he is contemplating taking legal action to reclaim 2.5 penyeru (1 p = one quarter of a re), which is part of the land which his mother is operating but which is legally under his uncle's name. This has been the fait accompli ever since the uncle cheated at the Land Office dozens of years ago. The mother has been allowed to continue to operate the land, but in fear that upon her death, the uncle would claim the land, Shadli is now thinking of securing the land.

THE NATURE OF THE HOUSEHOLD Since the income and time budget data have been collected around the household as a unit of data-collection, it may be useful at this point to clarify the nature of the household as a possible unit of analysis. 2 Both the data collection, and the data analysis of most studies on the household budget are based on two assumptions: 1. that the household, the unit which resides together, corresponds to that of a nuclear family, with the man as income-earning head of the household and the woman as housewife, with children of school or pre-school age, 2. that this family structure is the unit of income and expenditure, or in other terms, that this is the unit of production and consumption. 3 The summary of the problem in the FAO study is typical: In surveys of this type much hinges on the definition of the household, that is, the basic data collection unit ... Generally speaking the nuclear family consisting of the spouses and unmarried children is overwhelmingly predominant among the Malay peasants ... Therefore, in order to measure total household income it would have been necessary to monitor the receipts of all household members. This was, however, considered impractical ... 4

These two assumptions which infuse the methodology in the FAO study are misleading as the following analysis of the composition and internal structure of the household and household economy will attempt to show.

Household Composition and Family Structure Of the sixteen households in the sample, (see Table 6.1), only four were structured in the way said to be typical of "the nuclear family consisting of the spouses and unmarried children". Actually, there were ten families which would be classified as possessing a nuclear structure, but of these ten, only four were functioning as a joint unit of income and expenditure namely, IM, HE, MH, and HY. 5 In the remaining six cases:

76

THE ANATOMY OF THE VILLAGE

TABLE 6.1 Demographic Features of Sample Households Household

Age of HH

Well-to-do 1. Ishaak M 2. Ahmad D 3. Mohammed H 4. Abdullah A 5. Hassan E Average:

40 56 58 51 45 50

Middle 6. Mat Y 7. Din D 8. Ariffin 0 9. Ali Y 10. Manan H 11. Haid Y Average:

34 55 32 38 30 36 45

No. of Hh Members

7

Type of Family Recordert nuclear stem stem nuclear nuclear

Hh Hh son-in-law daughter daughter

4 6 2 5 5 5 5.4

nuclear nuclear nuclear nuclear nuclear +kin nuclear

Hh daughter wife daughter Hh Hh

5

nuclear + kin nuclear denuded nuclear + kin nuclear

son daughter daughter daughter daughter

8

10 10 5 8

Poor

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Shadli D Mat Y Minah A Saad A Yunos I

Average:

40 40 56 60 54

5

50

5.6

8

2

8

Notes: All tables related to the sample households refer to the main season 1979/80. t The use of the recorder is discussed in the appendix on research methodology.

AA: the household property actually belongs to the wife and she apparently has her own separate income. In addition, the son works for the civil service and has access to his own separate income; DD: the sons have their own source of income; AO: wife earned considerable income of her own; MY: income has to be shared with two households since the household head has a second wife; YI: wife has separate income; in addition, expenditure of the household is considerably influenced by the aid received from other households; MY: property belongs to the wife and she also earns considerable income from wage labour; in addition, she has a child of her own who lives with her parents but for whom she occasionally has to make some financial contribution. In addition to these nuclear families, there are the non-nuclear families.

The Sample Households

77

AD: the son, daughter-in-law and grandchild live with the family in addition to the grandchild from a divorced daughter; MH: the son, daughter-in-law, the daughter, son-in-law and child, live together with the family. In addition, the household income finances three daughters who are studying in an Islamic school in Baling; MH: although this is not a nuclear family, because the grandmother is living with the family, it corresponds in its functioning to the model of a unit of income and expenditures; SD: the essentially nuclear family structure here is complicated by the addition of a grandchild, and the loss of a daughter who lives with the household head's grandmother. Income from this household goes towards the support of this child in the other household, and in addition, income and expenditure from this household also supports the mother of the spouse, who lives next door; MA: this is a denuded family, made up of a widowed, childless woman and her adopted daughter plus occasionally, her young nephew; SA: living with SA is his daughter and her illegitimate son, and a grandson who has his own separate income, as well as a number of children. The actual composition of the household exceeds the income and expenditure insofar as a great deal of help in kind is received from the children attached to other households. The household structure is complicated by the fact that the boundaries of this unit arc extremely fluid, if seen over time, even over a short period of time. In Table 6.1 the convention of totalling the number of household members and then giving the averages for the three different categories has been followed. There again, however, some of these simple ftgurcs are definitely fictive. When the survey first began, ten people were living in Mohammed H's house. In the course of the survey period, a baby was born, and all throughout the survey period, its parents were thinking of moving out and would have moved out if the opportunity had presented itself. Just towards the end of the period, th~ee members did move out to form another household unit. During the survey period of six months, three daughters of the household head who were currently studying in an Arabic school elsewhere in the state returned home during the school holidays for a period of three months. Did they belong to the household although they do not reside there? Their entire living expenses were paid by the father, and during their stay in the village, they help with harvesting on the family farm. Another troublesome case is that of Minah A. After much indecision, the number of household members was recorded as two, because this was how the questionnaire was answered. However, most times, three people resided in that house, including a young (ftftcen year old) grand-nephew of Minah A, who had run away from home a number of years ago. In the case of Shadli D, his grandchild had come for a visit and liked it so much that he decided to stay- at least for the period of the survey. On the other hand, Shadli's fifteen year old son frequently slept in his grandmother's house, just a few yards away from the family home.

78

THE

ANATOMY OF THE VILLAGE

In fact, having proceeded in the same empirical fashion as all statisticians, taking the household to be the sum of its eo-residential parts, we are now forced into a more serious consideration of the definition of the term household. Who belongs to a household and who does not? Does the family father who has emigrated into the town and lives there for 11 months in the year belong to the household, although he does not reside in it? It is at this point that we see the significance of the second assumption usually made in household studies, namely, that "this family is the unit of income and expenditure". In other words, a second criterion in terms of function (not merely structure, which is what the criterion of eo-residence is), is applied, namely, that this eo-residential unit functions as a unit of production, in the sense of consumption. This is the position taken by Wallerstein and his students, for example, as can be seen from their definition of "the household as an income-pooling unit". 7 In contrast, others, for example those at Bielefeld, have chosen to accentuate the notion that the household is simultaneously a unit of consumption, as well as a unit of production. 8 To what extent do these definitions apply to the Kedah reality?

The Household as a Unit of Consumption? To maintain that the household functions as a unit of consumption would imply two things: firstly, that consumption takes place within the boundaries of the household, and secondly, that income is in fact pooled and not consumed individually. I do not have any data on the actual percentage of household incomes spent on kenduris or feasts to which friends, relatives and neighbours are invited, or the percentage of consumption accruing from participation in feasts but anyone who has spent some time in a Malay or Indonesian village cannot help but be struck by the number of feasts which seem to be taking place all the time. Further in the text, however, I have given the accounts of a wedding feast that occurred in the village while I was there. This was an especially big feast and the amount consumed was certainly not negligible. It should be noted too that the breakdown of the fmancial sources for the kenduri indicates that the household, in whose name the feast was given, was certainly not the sole unit of expenditure for the occasion. My impression was that a significant percentage of the meat consumption, especially for the poor households, occurred at feasts, where the unit of consumption is not the household but a wider kinship grouping, or the neighbourhood, or the village. To maintain, however, that no units of consumption smaller than that of the household exists is to risk floundering in even deeper waters. As has already been discussed above, and as tabulated in Table 6.2, many households are composed of more than one income-earning member. Only four households had household heads earning all100 per cent of the cash income accruing to the household. Whether this income is pooled within this eo-residential unit is a question that has to be answered empirically, and cannot simply be assumed. I must confess that I do not have precise answers myself but on the basis of incidental questioning on this issue, it seems to me

79

The Sample Households

TABLE 6.2 Distribution of Sample Household Income (in M$) by Household Member Total Hh Income

HH $

1 2 3 4 5

8958.70 9858.60 5848.20 6794.35 8432.90

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Household

%

Spouse $

%

Children $

%

8958.70 9130.80 3851.75 5796.80 8432.90

100 92.6 65.8 85.3

692.80 36 389.55

7 0.7 5.8

35 1960.45 608

0.4 33.5 8.9

1429.60 3206.80 2749.10 3533.50 3602.20 3724.75

1273.10 2769.80 2378.40 2606.50 3602.20 3724.75

89 86 86.5 73.7 100 100

156.50 8 370.70 53

11 1 13.5 1.6

429

13

874

24.7

2135.30

1460.50

68

674.80 111.90

32

n.a.

n.a.

846.90 2039.05 2037.60

n.a. n.a.

1774.05 932

87 45.7

n.a.

140 1016.60

9.30

n.a. 7 49.8

125 89

6 4.5

Note: This does not include the value of subsistence production. All income figures in this and the following tables refer to the seasonal income incorporating the months from October 1979 to March 1980. The numbering of the households in this and all following tables follow the order given in Table 6.1.

that in many cases, separate accounts were kept by the different income earners. In the household of Saad A, for example, his grandson had rented 1 re of padi land and all costs and proceeds belonged to him. In the case of Mohammed H, the 33.5 per cent of cash income earned by the children was derived from wage income earned by his son and son-in-law. This money was kept by them for their own use as they both had families of their own, although living within the same household. The case of Ali Y is also instructive. The eldest daughter lived in the household and commuted to work every day, having found a clerical position in a government office in Alor Star. Instead of "pooling" her income with the rest of the household, she "presented" her mother with $50 or so every month, as soon as she could "afford" it, and this gift from her was recorded in the questionnaire in a separate column as income of the mother. She also undertook to finance special expenses like the purchase of a cupboard for the household. We see, of course, in all these cases a certain degree of sharing within the household, especially in regard to food and housing. Nonetheless, the crucial point is that there are limits to this sharing, indicating that the household does not always function as an income-pooling unit. This approach to households conceptualizes them as units of consumption; another ~chool of thought and research has placed the emphasis on the role of households as

80

THE ANATOMY OF THE VILLAGE

a unit of production, or more specifically, as in the Bielefeld formulation, that the distinguishing characteristic of peasant households lies in the fact that they are units of consumption as well as units of production.

The Household as a Unit of Production? Among those who have conceptualized the household in the above terms, we can mention the work of Sahlins, Meillassoux, and Chayanov, all of whom developed models of household production ("the domestic mode of production" in Sahlin's work, the "social organization of subsistence production" by Meillassoux, and the emphasis placed on the central role of family labour and self-exploitation in Chayanov's work) in which the production of the household members is directly secured by, and related to, the use-value production which the household as a unit engages in. 9 In other words, inherent in the definition of the household as a unit of production and consumption is the assumption that primary reproduction is directly related to production. Let us first clarify the implications of the definition "unit of production". It seems that two empirical conditions have to be met for a household to be said to function as a unit of production:

1. the labour power of the household members should be primarily directed towards a commonly defined and bounded production; 2. labour power outside of the household should play only a minor role in the productive activities of the household, in this case, farm production. Both these conditions may have held for the societies which Sahlins, Meillassoux and Chayanov investigated, but it should be remembered that Sahlins was dealing with tribal societies, Meillassoux was developing a model for "subsistence economies" and Chayanov was talking about Russian households at the turn of the century with one crucial assumption in the model, namely, that land scarcity had not become apparent. The question is whether a conceptual definition developed on the basis of such studies applies to the eo-residential units which constitute "households" today. On the basis of the data collected on this sample ofKedah households, I would argue that neither of the two empirical conditions essential for the validity of the definition, are present. If we look at Table 6.3, where the economic activities of the household are tabulated, we see that "occupational multiplicity" is the most appropriate concept to describe the various activities of the household members. No household was completely devoted to padi production on the family farm. In every single case, other sources of income were also significant. However, the point is not merely that small farmers also went in search of other part-time additional income; of greater significance is the fact that there was an internal differentiation of labour within the household itself with regard to occupational specificity. In the family of Shadli D, for example, the husband's labour power was primarily devoted to wage employment in the construction sector, while the family farm was

81

The Sample Households

TABLE 6.3 Sources of Sample Household Income by Type of Economic Activity Hh

2 Hh sub. prod. Sale of sub. prod. Padi cultivation

X

X

X X

Rubber tapping Illeg. oper. land

4

5

6

7

8

X

X

X

X

X

X

X X

Wage lab. in village Wage lab. outs. vill. Rubber smallholding

3

X

10

11

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

c c

c

c

X

c

X

X

X

X

X

c

X

14 X

X

X

X

X

X

X

15

16

X

X

X

X

X X

cfs s

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X X

X

X

X X X

X

c

X

Rental of cap. equip. Brokerage

X

X

X

X

X X

Remit. fr. children Abbreviations:

13

X

X

Handicraft Carpentry Bureaucracy

12

X X

X

Animal husbandry Trading

9

-

X

c

X X

:none

: income from household labour including head of household : income of children only : income of spouse only

managed, and operated primarily by the wife. Or take the case of Saad A, where the head of the family and his wife worked on the family farm, the daughter's main source of income was wage labour, and the grandson operated another parcel of rent land entirely on his own account. A similar situation is encountered in the household of Ali Y, where the head of the family works on the family farm, one daughter taps rubber, and the other is a civil servant. In fact, of all the households in the sample, the only households approximating a situation in which household labour power is devoted to a common productive goal is to be found only in the category of wellto-do households, where sufficient means of production allow for this. This point, it seems to me, is a crucial one, and shall be discussed in greater depth later. The second empirical condition I have identified above is that "labour power outside of the household should play only a minor role in the productive activities of the household". In other words, what we arc concerned with here is a particular form of production process, whereby the means of production, in particular labour (land is taken for granted in this argument), is provided by the household itself.

X

82

THE ANATOMY OF THE VILLAGE

The nature of padi farm operation can be gauged from Table 6.4 (Estimated Costs of Production for the Padi Farm). What I would like to point out in particular is the pattern of costs for the middle households. The high labour costs for ploughing, transplanting, harvesting, and transportation should be noted. Haid Y, for example, is entirely dependent on wage labour for transplanting and harvesting, the two major labour processes in padi production. For ploughing, he rents a pedestrian tractor from someone else. All this means that essentially, as a wage labourer said of him, "dia sudah jadi towkay" (he has become a towkay). What he does is management, with no aid from any other member of the household. That Haid Y is not the only one with extensive external inputs can be seen from the table. What is striking, however, is the fact that even the poor households incur monetary costs for external inputs. Saad A and Yunos I did not use family labour for harvesting, and this trend is expected to continue. Changes in the production process will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 7 but for the moment, it should suffice to note that our research data forces us to reject the definition of household as a unit of production. The first conclusion to be drawn is that the use of the concept "household" as a unit of analysis has to be relativized. Its boundaries, both in terms of its composition, as well as its function, are not quite as clear-cut, or as significant, as is assumed by many theorists and statisticians. 10 The argument is thus against a conceptualization of households in terms of a strongly bounded structure that is then equated with a specific function. The implication of the "relativization" referred to above, is that different units (households, neighbourhood, kin groups, village, and so forth) are constituted for different kinds of consumption and expenditure, and that the first problem is the empirical one of identifying which is done where.

THE NATURE OF THE HOUSEHOLD BUDGET Another issue is the conceptualization of a household budget which is based primarily on irregular income and expenditure. Aggregated figures on income and expenditure reveal very little about the actual income that is available to the household at any one time, and therefore the actual consumption and expenditure pattern that the household can engage in, as well as the difference between the recorded cash flow and the real income of a household in the course of a season. Simply deducting the imputed costs of production from the recorded cash flow does not give a real picture of the income and expenditure constraints and pattern because the net farm income of one season finances (at the least overlaps with) the consumption and expenditure of the other. It seems that the above mentioned constraints, namely, that of irregularity of income, as well as the difference between cash and real income, have led to a situation in which these households are dependent for their survival, not only on the access to cash, but also to subsistence production and transfer incomes. Each of these different

TABLE 6.4 Estimated Costs of Padi Farm Production for Sample Households Area Cultivated

Costs of Production Land Rental

Hh

(in relong)

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

19.25 18 10.5 9.25 14

1537 200 200

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

3.25 6 3.5 3 7.75 5

300 450

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

2 2 .75 2.75 1.5

Ploughing 300 62.20 416.25

450

Transplanting 768 540 220 160 490

270

Fertilizer + Insecticides Harvesting Transportation Pump

120

so

160 16.20 177

132.50 175 345

143 100 209.25

155 100 225 264

70 80 27.50 80.50 20

Notes: 1 re = approximately 0.7 acres.

All figures in Malaysian dollars.

250 198

58 10

852.50 880 270 398.75 770

100 242.20 n.a. 35.80 315 +252

123.75 110 210 140 302.50 272.25

29 112 40 41 38.50 129.75

-

17 20

20 110 105

400

-

-

Zakat 1000 1000 855 680 630 150 210 264 227.50 315 313.50

70

13 15 27

30

84

THE ANATOMY OF THE VILLAGE

sources of income is differently regulated, and yet interwoven with each other, as will be seen later in this chapter. A second hypothesis is that a pattern is emerging whereby these different income sources are becoming of primary significance for different groupings of households. This will be discussed in the final section of this paper.

Findings of the Budget Survey The aim of such tables is usually to show whether the budget is in the red, or whether a surplus has been achieved for a particular year, questions which are closely related to the issue of survival, or the degree of wealth or poverty. In the German language, haushalt is not merely the term for household but also budget, and to haushalten means to administer the means which accrue to the unit in a careful manner, in other words, to live within one's means. Table 6.5 shows the balance of income over expenditure within the six-month period and it is interesting to note that no household was in the red. Caution is required however, in the interpretation of the data. The problem is not merely one of data

TABLE 6.5 Sample Household Bu~'?ets: Balance of Income over Expenditure over a Six-Month Period Household

I

II

Ill

IV

V

VI

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

IM* AD MH AA HE

14,743.15 15,829.10 4,852 9,284.40 12,371.10

12,146.75 13,683.20 5,259.10 5,838.55 8,754.55

2,596.40 2,145.90 - 407.10 3,445.85 3,616.55

8,958.70 9,818.60 5,810.80 6,753.40 8,432.90

6,312.40 9,180.55 4,127.15 4,007.45 5,522.05

2,646.30 638.05 1,683.65 2,745.95 2,910.85

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

MY DD* AO AY MH HY

2,165.15 2,818.80 4,861.99 4,552.53 4,178.65 6,460.35

3,279.05 2,332.85 4,622.85 2,290.50 3,533.80 6,101.35

-1,113.90 485.95 239.14 2,362.03 1,118.73 359

1,426.90 3,206.80 2,738.10 3,396.50 3,585.50 3,724.75

1,204.55 1,964.15 3,739.35 1,808.60 948.90 2,250.10

222.35 1,242.65 -1,001.25 1,587.90 2,636.60 1,474.65

2,297.20 902.45 713.50 1,587 1,636.90

1,863.75

433.45

2,135.30

1,548.75 716.15 499.85 1,096.30 1,088.60

586.55

12. SD 13.MY 14. MA 15. SA 16. YI Notes:

n.a.

513.85 1,309.70 1,334.80

n.a.

199.65 277.30 302.10

838.50 1,921.50 1,723.60

Total Cash Flow I! Total Expenditure Ill Balance I-ll IV Estimated Net Income (minus Subsistence Production) V Expenditure (minus Production Costs) VI Balance IV-V *Data available only for a 5-month period.

338.65 825.20 635

The Sample Households

85

quality; rather, additional difficulties arise in this case due to the fact that the production activities of the households arc not bound to the same time-frame as their consumption, as can be seen in the difference between column Ill and column IV. What cannot be done with the present data, however, is to show the extent to which, for example, basic needs arc being met. Since comparative data over time is not available, it cannot be shown whether they are being better met than they were. What can be shown, of course, is the difference in levels of consumption between the different categories of households but this will be done later. The point to be made here, with these figures on household budgets, is the tremendous difference that exists between the total cash flow which a household experiences, and its net income, and that this difference also follows a certain pattern. This is of particular importance for the well-to-do households, whereas the poor households arc characterized by a cash income which is about equal or even lower than its net income. Difficulties arise not only from the discrepancy between cash and real income, but also from the fact that cash income comes in sporadically, depending on when sales are made. These sales may then occur within the period under study, or not at all. But this is not merely a problem for the survcycr, it is a real problem to the households themselves. Unlike the labourer with a regular monthly income, whose income may approximate that of a poor peasant, the poor peasant cannot count on a monthly income, although he has to figure on a regular expenditure.

Discrepancy between Cash Flow and Real Income The following discussion on the discrepancy between the cash flow and real income of village households will have to be followed with reference to Tables 6.6 and 6.7. Three important differences emerge from a comparison of the two tables. Firstly, whereas the net value of padi is considered in the second table (this is often done in all normal tables on net income), the cash flow figures include padi from the previous season- that is, whereas the cash income from the sale of padi in any one season is partly if not wholly derived from the production of the previous season, the net income accuring to the household from its production during the season under study will be realized to some extent only in the following season. In quantitative terms alone, the difference can be considerable. If we look at Table 6.6, we sec that for AO, (Hh 8) income from the sale of padi during the season under study came to $3,737.90, which made up 77 per cent of his total cash flow, whereas his net income for the season from padi cultivation amounted to $1,828.50 (see Table 6. 7) comprising only 61 per cent of his total net income. The fact that the income was derived from different seasons makes any attempt to simply deduct the cost of production from the total sales, thereby assuming that equivalence is arrived at, wholly inadequate. As can be seen from Table 6.4 (Estimated Costs of Production on the Padi Farms), AO's production costs amounted to only $646.50. A simple deduction of this from his total income derived from padi sales would not have solved the problem of net income. The problem, however, is not simply that of a difference in the estimation of income, but perhaps more important, the fact that the difference in pattern between the cash

TABLE 6.6 Seasonal Cash Flow of Sample Households

2

Sources of Income

3

4

5

6

7

4153 85.6

6239.20 67.2

9250.20 74.8

1647 58.4 42.80

103

1056.40

1369.30 63.2 1.00 137.35

9250.20 74.8

1506.65 69.6

1689.80 59.9

I. Sale of Goods

Padi %

Other sub. goods Rubber Land

11693.10 14377.30 77.03 92.19 30.10 1.00 399.50

%

Others (Chicken) Total %

11. Rent Land Kubota Business Others Total %

1785.75 13908.45 14378.30 91.62 92.19

80

1090 1478 433

405 2.66

170 1.09

80 1.6

3001 24

46.80

Total Per month Per capita per month

204 302

22.80

119.90

227.50

284 145 700

119.90 0.9

227.50 10.5

1129 40.1

295 46.80 0.3

%

%

7295.60 78.6

170

Total

Total

4266 87.9

405

Ill. Wage Labour Agriculture Contract Carpentry Handicraft Salary Others

IV. Transfers Realization of savings Repayment of debt Gifts (Children) Gifts (Others) Loans Kut

10

506 10.4

800 380 400 67

45 865.50

317.80 3.4

955

300 130

24 865.50 5.7

1000 6.41

15178.95 15595.10 3035.79 2599.18 433.68 324.89

1671 17.9 4852 808.66 80.86

9284.40 1547.40 154.74

Note: The figures for Hh 1 and 7 are based on a 5-month period.

430 19.9 12371.10 2061.85 412.37

2165.15 360.85 90.21

2818.80 563.60 93.93

Table 6.6 (cont.) 8

9

10

11

12

13

14

3737.39 76.9

1218.77 26.2 37.70 937.55 1000 21.5 23.45

3943.15 94.4 0.50 185

5100.50 76.6

542.20 23.6 35.50

204.90 22.7 368.60

87 12.2

2217.47 47.7

4128.65 98.8

3737.39 76.9

15

1150 72.5

16

581.30 35.5

222

315.65 5322.50 79.9

577.70 25.1

38

889.15 98.5

87 12.2

1188 74.9

530 38.5

13.30

486.50

132

237.90

720 720 14.8 740

619.50 500

355 370.70 920 33.90 404.60 8.3

240 920 19.8

1335 20.1

162 1119.50 48.7

13.30 1.5

486.50 68.2

132 8.3

399.90 24.4

222 5

507 100

50 (95) 15 140 600

500 515 11 4861.99 810.33 405.16

4652.53 775.42 155.08

600 26.1

50 1.2 4178.65 696.44 139.28

40

6657.50 1109.58 221.91

2297.20 382.86 76.57

902.45 150.40 18.80

140 19.6

267 16.8

607 33.8

713.50 118.91 59.45

1587 264.50 33.06

1610.50 272.81 54.56

TABLE 6.7 Estimated Seasonal Net Income of Sample Households Sources of Income

I. Sale of Goods Padi (net)

'Yo Rubber Others Animal Husbandry Sell. of Padi Total % II.Rent Land Kubota Business Others Total %

2

6988.50 74.38

70.27

36

4

5419.20 70.13

9556.80 5108.80 94.12 70.9

so

405 4.3

170 1.6

80 1.1

46.80

204 302

5

5893 66.55

1016.40 n.a. n.a.

10

170

6435.60 83.28

5893 66.55

6

971.05

7 1971

58.14

55.94

137.35 1.00

42.80

1109.40 66.43

2013.80 57.15

653 1478 289 2420 27.33

22.80

119.90

317.50

119.90 1.3

317.50 19

284 145 700

295

Total %

46.80 0.4

IV. Transfers Gifts (subs.) Gifts (cash) Zakat Fitrah Fertilizer Others

40 45

506 7.02

317.80 4.1

37.40

25.95

n.a.

1129 32.04

2.70

116

64 15

153.40 2.1

40.95 0.5

1356.55

932.70

421.45

18.82

12.07

4.75

14.39

9394.50 10153.65 7204.75 1565.75 1692.27 1200.27 223.67 211.53 120.07

7727.05 1287.84 128.78

8854.35 1475.72 295.14

1069.95 278.32 69.58

Total

95 0.9

Ofr>

Total Per month Per capita per month

94.11

405

Ill. Wage Labour Agriculture Contract Carpentry Handicraft Salary Others

V. Subsistence Prod. %

9555.80 5062.80

358.65 65.00 1141.55 8553.70 91.05

3

435.80 1.6

295.05 2.9

2.70 0.1

240.35

64 1.8

316.55 8.9

3523.35 587.22 97.87

Table 6.7 (cont.) 10

8

9

1828.50

1373.50

61.10

34.46

89.79

913.95 61.15

185 0.50

1828.50 61.10

2348.60 58.93

3400

3585.50 94.68

11

1907.75 48.64

12

760

13

190

32.04

14

15

152.50

1297.50

293

15.45

55.79

12

222 35.50 175 45.30 2129.75 54.3

n.a. n.a.

1015.80 42.83

16

48.70 152.50 15.45

1297.50 55.79

341.70 14

505 505 16.8

125.90

740 355

619.50 500

13.30

566

132

237.90

370.70 920 33.90 404.60 13.5

11

500 1045.90 26.24

17

1595 40.66

16.70

162 1119.50 47.21

4.40 107.70

n.a.

566 57.34

132 5.6

16.41

8.40

172.55 272 165

23.60 607 375

120

290.40

120 11

137 3.4

16.70

0.3

243.45

451.65

184.40

11.33

4.86

3985.15 664.19 132.83

3786.60 631.10 126.22

8.1

2992.55 498.75 249.37

197.15 5

3921.90 653.65 130.73

128.40 13

609.55 26.21

1296 53.2

140.15

286.25

398.40

9.9

14.18

23.31

16.35

2371.30 395.21 79.04

987.05 164.50 82.25

2325.30 387.55 48.44

2436 406 81.20

236

328.65

90

THE ANATOMY OF THE VILLAGE

flow and the actual net income can help us to explain certain features of household expenditure behaviour, which would otherwise remain inexplicable. The second major difference between the cash flow and real income occurs in the category of transfer. Loans, realization of savings, and so forth (see Table 6.6) do not constitute net income accruing to the household, whereas real transfers often take the form, not of cash income, but in kind, especially zakat, included in Table 6.7 The third major difference lies in the contribution made by net income "subsistence production", taken into account in Table 6.7, but not in Table 6.6. We shall now proceed to discuss the findings on each of these categories in greater detail.

Sign!ficance of Tranifers To begin with, it can be assumed that the contribution of transfers to the total income of the households has been undervalued. Not only is it understandable that the households were reluctant to reveal the extent of their indebtedness, it is also clear that problems of measurement also arose with transfers in the form of gifts in kind. The kind of difficulty which may arise can best be illustrated with the financing of a kenduri given by one of the households under study (sec Table 6.8). During the season under study, Hassan E threw (on the occasion of his daughter's wedding) what was generally agreed to be one of the biggest kenduris in village history. Since there was no special category in the questionnaire for feasts, the expenses were recorded in the items like expenditure for food, housing and so forth. In order to reconstruct the costs for the kenduri, an extra interview was made with Hassan E after it was all over. "One whole season's padi," he said, "went on the kenduri." Over $1,000 was spent on getting the house ready for the big day. In addition, he said, another $4,000 was spent. After detailed inquiries however, including information supplied by other villagers, it turned out that although the total value did come to roughly $4,000, the actual cash expenditure incurred by Hassan E himself did not even reach $700! Before we launch into a discussion of the kenduri budget, it should be noted that the bride received a dowry of $2,224. This money, together with a supplement of $176 from the father, was used to buy jewellery worth $2,400 for the bride. A glance at Table 20 reveals that whereas the total cost of the kenduri amounted to the pricely sum $3,768.40, the total cash outlay incurred by Hassan amounted to a mere $388.40! Certainly, the small amount of cash the family ended up paying throws a totally different light on the question of why peasants spend "so much money" on kenduris. As a matter of fact, they don't, at least not in the way we had thoughtthrow away $4,000 in one day. What this discussion also highlights, however, apart from the difficulties of measuring income, tranfers and expenditure in peasant households with the aid of questionnaires, is the fact that peasant budgeting involves a skillful play-off of the access to and use of subsistence production, transfers and cash. Given the underestimation, the role that transfers are shown to play must be seen

TABLE 6.8 Expenses for a Wedding Feast ( Kenduri) by a Sample Household

Food

Cash

beef chicken nee sugar condensed milk evaporated milk oil eggs coffee ICe JUICes cakes coconut banana cigarettes

550

Total Entertainment silat rental electricity Total Other foodstuffs groundnuts dried fish vegetables

97.50 25 52 14.40 19 100 3 115 212.50 1188.40

80 300

10

Derau 1 Repayment

Derau Loan

320

Qiqah 2

700

32.50 10 10 10

60 187.50

500

450

250.00

820

700

450

250

820

700

160 150 1498.40 12 18 20

Total

1548.40

Total Cost

3768.40

Cash Income Guests Society members 3

1000 160

Total

7760

Total Cash Outlay

Subsistence

388.40

Notes: 1 "Derau" in this case is actually a system of credit in kind- to be returned in kind. In the table above, the cash values have been given. 2 "Qiqah" is a religious injunction to distribute meat to the poor but wedding kenduris are almost always made use of to fulfil! this obligation, thus at the same time helping out a relative or friend. 3 There is also a mutual aid society for kenduris (pakatan kenduri) which hold in common a stock of crockery necessary for the feast. Members also contribute $3 each to the host. In addition, it should be noted that at least 50 women were engaged in the kitchen at some time or other and about the same number of men were welcoming and serving the guests, especially those from outside the village. These services were offered free.

92

THE ANATOMY OF THE VILLAGE

to be even more remarkable. If we refer again to Table 6.7, we see that almost all the households received income in the form of transfers. Whereas this makes up a small percentage of total income for the well-to-do and middle households, it plays a far more important role in the survival of the poor households. For MA, (No. 14) transfers accounted for 13 per cent of the total net income, for SA (No. 15), 26 per cent and for YI (No. 16), 53 per cent. This is by no means insignificant, forcing us to look again beyond the household as a unit of consumption and reproduction. It should also be noted that a difference can be seen in the kind of transfers which are important as sources of income to the different categories of households. Whereas gifts are the main sources of transfers for the poor households, well-to-do households receive transfers primarily in the form of loans.

Significance of Subsistence Production A note should first be made of the terminology. Subsistence production as used here in the tables refers only to produce in kind which is directly consumed by the household and given a shadow price. Excluded is the value ofhousehold production in the form oflabour, which is especially significant in terms of the reproduction of the habitat and other forms of housework. 11 The significance of this can be seen in the study ofEvenson, Popkin and Quizon. 12 Data which they collected on household labour utilization in t~e Laguna area in the Philippines, indicate that the total value ofhome production, which included cooking, breast-feeding, bottle-feeding, caring of children, marketing and travel, fetching or chopping, household chores, storytelling, care of aged and sick and school or class, (probably a combination of the two, as Evcrs argues), exceeded the total value of market production of the Laguna households. 13 Unfortunately, this kind of data was not available for the present study. The finding ofEvenson et al. is important in the face of the dominant trend towards downplaying the role of subsistence production. If we include household production to mean home production as well, in the above sense, its contribution to the wellbeing of households cannot be overlooked. But even if we were to take only the garden and agricultural production of the household into consideration, as in the tables presented below, then we shall see that direct consumption, unmediated by the market (note in this respect the discussion on the significance of the value of transfers), still plays a crucial role in the reproduction of farm households. If we look at Table 6.9, we see that for all households with the exception of one, the value of subsistence production exceeded $150, and in one case, amounted to $1,356.55, a not inconsiderable sum. In only one case (HY No. 11) did the value of subsistence production amount to less than 35 per cent of the food bill. It should be noted, of course, that the value of subsistence production for all households in the sample, but especially for HY, has been systematically undervalued. In one case, the value of subsistence production exceeded the food bill (AA No. 11), and for most of the households, it made up at least 50 per cent of the food bill. In other words, if it were not for subsistence production, most

93

The Sample Households

TABLE 6.9 Subsistence Production as Percentage of Food Bill and Total Expenditure of Sample Households Household

Sub. Prod. I

Food Bill II

% I(II

Total Expend:* IV

% If IV

Per Capita

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

IM AD MH AA HE

435.50 295.05 1,356.55 932.70 421.45

835.55 825.40 1,495.30 906.85 823.45

52.1 35.7 90.7 102.8 51.1

6,312.40 9,180.55 4,127.15 4,007.45 5,522.05

6.8 3.2 14.7 23.2 7.6

181.57 140.05 285.18 183.95 248.98

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

MY DD AO AY MH HY

240.35 316.55 243.45 451.65 184.40 197.15

620 1,015.50 381.05 563.70 503.40 1,018.55

38.7 31.1 63.8 80.1 36.6 19.3

1,204.55 7,964.15 3,739.35 1,808.60 948.90 2,250.10

19.9 16.1 6.5 24.9 19.4 8.7

215.08 222 312.25 203.07 137.56 243.14

12. SD 13.MY 14. MA 15. SA 16. YI

237 328.65 140.15 286.25 398.40

530.35 521.80 333.50 546.80 585.10

44.6 62.9 42 52.3 68

1,548.75

15.3

499.85 1,096.30 1,088.60

28 26.1 36.5

153.47 106.30 157.88 104.13 196.70

*Minus production costs.

of the households would have had to double their expenditure on food in order to be able to fulfil that most basic of needs ~ food. The significance of this can be gauged by a comparison with the composition of household expenditure in general for Malaysian households. According to the Household Expenditure Survey carried out in 1973, food plus beverages and tobacco (which are included in my questionnaire under food) make up 40 per cent of total household expenditure for all households in peninsular Malaysia, and for the Malay community in particular, 44.6 per cent. 14 This alone should alert us to the significance of direct consumption in the satisfaction of basic needs for the peasant household in a rural country like Malaysia. Returning to Table 6.9, it can be seen that for eleven of the sixteen households, subsistence production came up to more than 15 per cent of their total consumption expenditure. It should be noted, however, that although in terms of contribution to the total income and expenditure of the households, subsistence production was more important for the poor households, in absolute terms, the well-to-do households were more "productive" in subsistence production as well. If we look at Table 6.9, we see that not only are the total values higher for the well-to-do households, but the per capita values as well. The reasons for this will not be entered into here. One final point has perhaps to be made. Looking at Table 6.10 on the composition of subsistence production, the overriding importance of rice is very clear. Rather

TABLE 6.10 Compositional Breakdown and Estimated Cash Value of Subsistence Production of Sample Households Household 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

IM AD MH AA HE MY DD AO AY MH HY SD MY MA SA YI

Glut. Rice + Flour 38.80 17.25 75.30 136.60 31.50 14.50 27.30 7.20 32.40 6.95 n.a.

15.60 23.70 0.20 18.30 24.60

Rice

%

247 23 554 601 281.7 209.1 229.1 177.65 292.8 132.3 197.15 216 267.6 137.25 200.8 234.4

56.7 40.8 64.4 55.3 87 72.4 72.9 64.83 71.7 100 91.1 81.4 97.9 70.1 58.8

Garden Produce

Fish

Poultry +Eggs

82.80 39.10 554.10 95.60 53.90 4.20 8.75 37.10 51.50 24.75

46 45 167.95 87.30 36.70 6.60 15.70 21.50 22.40 4.00

3 12.25 2.90 1 86.90

2.40 25.10

5.40

44.90 6.40

11.25 33

20.90 3.70 121.25 12.20 18.35 5.95 22.10

Handicraft -

87.50

21.65 16.95

-

Total

Per Month

Per Capita

435.50 295.05 1356.66 932.70 508.95 240.35 316.55 243.45 451.65 184.40 197.15

72.5 49.1 226 155 84.8 40.05 52.75 40.57 75.27 30.73 32.85 39.50 54.77 23.35 47.70 66.40

10.3 6.1 22.6 15.5 16.9 10.01 8.79 20.28 15.05 6.14 6.57 7.9 6.84 11.67 5.96 13.28

237 328.65 140.15 286.25 398.40

The Sample Households

95

surprising actually is the relative absence of other subsistence products such as garden produce and handicrafts, which seem to play an important role in other peasant communities in other Southeast Asian countries, for example, Java. 15 The peasant households in Muda, especially the poor ones, are thus faced with a situation in which their own production, especially of padi, is of crucial importance to their survival, and yet, the commercialization of this same product is the major means by which their survival is assured.

The Significance of Cash The point to be stressed here is the predominance of cash in the household economy of all the households. Looking at Table 6.6 again, we see that three households had a total cash flow that exceeded $10,000 for one padi season, with a per capita cash flow per month of between $300 to $400. According to the Post-Enumeration Survey, in 1970, only 5 per cent of the households in the whole of peninsular Malaysia and 11.4 per cent of urban households earned more than $186 per member per month (see Table D). If we look at Table 6.6, we see that in five out of sixteen households (31 per cent), the per capita cash flow per month exceeded $186. The point to be made here is not that per capita incomes are high or have risen; for this, we shall have to look at Table 6.7 and not Table 6.6, which only records cash flow; the point is, that the money economy has penetrated deeply into the production and consumption cycle of the Muda peasantry. This access to cash has, of course, considerable influence on the dynamics of peasant production and reproduction and forces us to take a closer look at the role of subsistence production in such a "mixed" economy, as well as "traditional" features of the agrarian structure such as indebtedness and land tenure relationships.

THE NATURE OF DIFFERENTIATION In what ways, however, do these households differ from each other? In the case of the sixteen households in the sample, their categorization into well-to-do, middle, and poor households have been based entirely on the discretion of a village informant. What I shall now try to do is to see the extent to which this categorization corresponds to "objective" social structural features.

Farm and Income Size vs. Long-Term Resource Potential of Household The first indicator to be considered is the access to productive assets, as tabulated in Table 6.11 a and b. We note that although in general it can be said that well-to-do households not only own more land, but also operate larger farms, farm size, or landownership alone is not the critical criterion. For example, MY (No. 6) who is classified as a middle farmer, owns no land. His wife possesses 1 re and altogether, they operate 2.5 re of farm land. Shadli D (No. 12), on the other hand, who owns

96

THE ANATOMY OF THE VILLAGE

TABLED Distribution of Households, Rural and Urban, by Brackets of Household Income Per Member Household Income per Member per Month 0 to $15 $16 to $25 $26 to $33 $34 to $185 $186 to over

Pen. Mal. Urban Rural (percentages in each bracket) 15.5 21.0 12.8 45.7 5.0 100

5.0 10.8 9.7 63.1 __11j_ 100

19.5 25.0 14.0 38.8 2.6 100

Pen. Mal. Urban Rural (cumulative percentages) 15.5 36.5 49.3 95.0 100

5.0 15.8 25.5 88.6 100

19.6 44.6 58.6 97.4 100

Source: Post-Enumeration Survey (PES) of the 1970 Census, as analysed by Sudhir Anand, The Size Distribution of Income in Malaysia, World Bank, forthcoming. An income of

$25 per household member, underlined in the table, is used as the standard poverty line in this project. Cited in: "Survey of Rural Poverty", Economic Planning Unit, 1975.

3 re of padi land and operates 2 re is classified as a poor household. Ariffin 0 (No. 8), who does not own any land at all, and operates 3.5 re, is classified as a middle household, in the same category as Din D (No. 47), who owns 3 re ofland and operates 6 re altogether. The well-to-do households all operate larger landholdings than the other households, but nonetheless, this still ranges from the 9.25 re of AA (No. 4) to the 19.25 re of IM (No. 1). One reason for this discrepancy could be due to the fact that farm size is not a per capita criterion, and is thus inadequate for indicating or predicting differences in real income or real access to productive resources. On the other hand, if we look at the per capita incomes of these households, we see that there is still no one-to-one correlation between this factor and the categorization. For example, as tabulated in Table 6.12, we see that the per capita real income for the middle households varies from $69 to $249, and if we take the per capita cash income, the discrepancy is even greater, namely, ranging from $90 to $405. In fact, the $249 recorded for the middle household of Ariffin 0 (No. 8) is higher than the capita income of any of the well-to-do households. Four of the middle households had higher per capita incomes than the houshold of Mohammed H (No. 3), which was characterized as a well-to-do household. The per capital income of Mat Y (No. 6), categorized as a middle household, is lower than that of three of the poor households. We thus sec that neither farm size, nor income, is equated to what the villagers themselves consider as ranking within the village. The following hypothesis is submitted here: that what relativizcs the farm size or income criterion is the long-term resource potential of the household, which is intimately associated with other households within the context of the family development cycle (see Chapter 11). In other words, the household alone, as it is presently constituted, is not the sole unit of reproduction.

TABLE 6.11a Ownership of Productive Assets by Sample Households Type of Asset

1

2

3

4

5

13

11 3 1.5 1.5

1.5 3.75 3

11

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

2

2

2.75

3

13

14

15

16

Sawah Land

HH

Spouse Rubber Land Kampung Land Kubota Motorcycle Car

7 2.5 1.25 1 1

2

3

.75

2

TABLE 6.11b Access to Productive Assets by Sample Households Type of Asset

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

Sawah Land Rubber Land Illegal Land

19.25

18

10.5

9.25

14

2.25 1

6

3.5

1.25 4.5 4

6

3.5

2

2

.75

2.75

1.5

5

4

TABLE 6.12 Estimated Value of Cash and Net Income of Households per Month and per Capita per Month over a Six-Month Period

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Total

Per Month

Per Capita per Month

15178.95

3035.79

433.68

9394.50

1565.75

223.67

15595.10

2599.18

324.89

10153.65

1692.27

211.53

808.66

80.86

7204.75

1200.79

120.07

9284.40

1547.40

154.74

7727.05

1287.84

128.78

12371.10

2061.85

412.37

8854.35

1475.72

295.14

2165.15

360.85

90.21

1669.95

278.32

69.58

93.93

4852

2818.80

563.60

3523.35

587.22

97.87

8.

4861.99

810.33

405.16

2992.55

498.75

249.37

9.

4652.53

775.42

155.08

3985.15

664.19

132.83

4178.65

696.44

139.28

3786.60

631.10

126.22

6657.50

1109.58

221.91

3921.90

653.65

130.73

2297.20

382.86

76.57

2371.30

395.21

79.04

13.

902.45

150.40

18.80

14.

713.50

118.91

59.45

987.05

164.50

82.25

1587

264.50

33.06

2325.30

387.55

48.44

1636.90

272.81

54.56

2346

406

81.20

10. 11. 12.

15. 16.

Note: The figures in normal print refer to the cash income; the figures in italics refer to the net income.

The Sample Households

99

This point is worth stressing, since it has important bearing on the question of class vs. social differentiation. Nonetheless, the interesting point that emerges from these tables is that certain structural similarities and differences between the different categories can be identified. If we refer again to Table 6.3, we see that the pattern of household dependence on different economic activities varies considerably according to the three economic groupmgs.

The Income-Mix Firstly, whereas all the household heads of the well-to-do households were directly involved in padi cultivation, none of them engaged in wage labour, either within or without the village. For the "poor" households on the other hand, although all were involved in padi cultivation, in four of the five households, women took over the responsibility of "farming" as such. All the household heads were either engaged in wage labour within the village or had just given up due to age [SA (No. 15) and YI (No. 16)]. Furthermore, whereas there were three "well-to-do" households who owned rubber holdings, and two who had illegally-owned rubber holdings, as well as four who earned income from the rental of capital equipment, none of the "poor" households had access to these economic returns. It can be said in general that the "poor" households are characterized by less occupational multiplicity than either the "well-to-do" or "middle" households. This seems to me an important point, not only in respect of the level of income that can then be expected, but also insofar as it increases the dependence of the "poor" households on a limited range of economic activities, for example, wage labour within the village. The differences in the internal income structure of the households, that is, the significance of income accruing solely either to the spouse or to the children has also to be noted. As can be seen from Table 6.3, well-to-do households seem to have more children with independent incomes whereas for the poor households, the same holds not for the children but for the spouses. Any interpretation may be misleading given the limited number of cases in the sample but my hypothesis would run in this direction: Whereas "well-to-do" households can afford to maintain an "extended" form of family structure whereby the child works for the father but has at the same time the possibility of engaging in other income-earning activities in his "free" time, the children of "poor" households have to leave the household altogether (that is, involving the loss oflabour power to the household) and support the family through cash remittances gained through participation in an economic activity totally outside of household or village production, for example, in the army, as in the case of SA (No. 15) and YI (No. 16). It seems to me that at the same time, another process is at work in respect offemale children. Whereas in the "well-to-do" families, household production is taken care of entirely by the spouse, in the case of "poor" households, the female children perform the housewifely duties, "freeing" the mother to engage in cash-earning economic activities like agricultural work. 16

100

THE ANATOMY OF THE VILLAGE

Furthermore, "well-to-do" households distinguish themselves from the other two categories by their ownership of capital, namely, four out of five of these households draw income from the rental of capital equipment. It should be noted that in none of these cases was this capital equipment in the form of land. It is a frequent feature of the agrarian structure of many other societies that rent of surplus land characterizes the agricultural upper class, but this is not the case among the Muda peasantry, the reasons for which will be discussed in Chapter 8. This does not mean, however, that the peasantry is homogeneous and that capital plays no role in the agrarian structure at all. On the contrary, as can be seen from Tables 6.13 and 6.14, rental of capital equipment (meaning machinery) distinguishes the "well-to-do" households from the others. The one case of a "middle" household also drawing income from the rental of capital equipment refers to the son of one of the wealthiest peasants in the village, and the equipment which he rents out is a stereo set on the occasion of wedding "kenduris". His classification as a "middle" household is related more to the phenomenon of the domestic development cycle (see Chapter 11), and less to his current access to resources. An additional note should be made on the role of wage labour. As has already been noted above, none of the household heads of the "well-to-do" families engaged in wage labour whereas this was current among both the "poor" and "middle" households. The kind of wage labour, however, already tends to be differentially distributed. Firstly, the only household head who worked as an unskilled contract labourer outside of the village came from a "poor" household, SO (No. 12), whereas the only household heads drawing income from carpentry, a skilled activity, were from the "middle" households - DD (No. 7) and HY (No. 11). With regard to labour utilization then, the following ideal types may be drawn: "well-to-do" "middle" "poor"

no wage labour skilled wage labour unskilled, or skilled agricultural labour

Readers may be puzzled by the apparent unimportance of handicraft. The one entry refers to a "middle" household where the wife owns a sewing machine and does parttime tailoring. When I included the category "handicraft" in the questionnaire, I was thinking more of the traditional handicrafts like weaving mats and so forth, which I knew from the literature and from village observations, was an important source of income for the poor families in the village. Yet none of the poor households in this sample indicated this to be one of their sources of income. The reason lies not in the inadequate representativity of the sample, but in the fact that the survey was done during the shorter agricultural season, during which there is no time for weaving and so forth. This would have begun immediately after the end of the survey period, and reveals, of course, the problem with a survey that does not cover an entire annual agricultural cycle. We can push this analysis further by looking at Table 6.13 in which the cash income from the various economic activities tabulated in Table 6.3 are given.

101

The Sample Households

TABLE 6.13 Compositional Breakdown of Seasonal Cash Income of Sample Households (In percentages) Sale Hh

Padi

1.

77 92

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

of Goods

Land

14 1 2 12

86 67 75 63 58 77

26 94 76 24 23 12 73 36

Others

6 2 22

21 5 4 1 75 2 18

Rent

Wage Labour

Tranifers

3 1 2

0.3

6 6

24

10

3 0.9

11

15

40 8 20 20 49 2 68 8 24

18 20 11 1 26 20 17 37.2

Sale of Goods The significance of income from the sale ofpadi is clearly demonstrated in Table 6.14. Out of the sixteen households, the sale of padi accounted for more than 50 per cent of the cash income of eleven households. Interestingly, however, of the five households in which padi sales accounted for less than 50 per cent of total cash income, four were "poor" households. The remaining one household where padi sales did not play a predominant role was a "middle" household. It can thus be seen that padi cultivation is the major economic activity of "well-to-do" households. When the income from the sale of other goods is included, only three households remain below the 50 per cent line as far as this category is concerned, all of whom are "poor" households. In other words, poor households are also those with a low level of production that can be sold or commercialized. Only one household resorted to the sale of a productive resource, namely, land. This was a "middle" household, and this sale accounted for 22 per cent of his total cash income for the season - a high percentage especially if we were to measure it as a percentage of the net income, rather than of the cash income. The land was sold in order to clear debts incurred for the daughter's education (something a poor household would not have had to do at all) and paid off in the sense that towards the second half of the season, the daughter got a job with the government and began receiving a monthly salary which in turn was used partly to finance the family.

102

THE ANATOMY OF THE VILLAGE

TABLE 6.14

Compositional Breakdown of Estimated Net Income of Sample Households (In percentages) Sale of Goods Hh

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Padi Others

74 94 70 70 67 58 56 61 34 90 49 32

16.6 .1

Rent

4 1.6 1.1

13.5 27.3 8.29 1.2 16.8 24.47 4.9 5.7 10

Wage Labour Tran~fers S.P.

0.4 7 4.1 1.3 19 32 13.5 26

.9 2.1 0.5 0.1 1.8 0.3 3.4

40.6 47

1 2.9 18.8 12 4.7 13.4 8.9 8 11.3 4.8 5 9.9

n.a.

15 56 12

2

57 5.6 16.4

13 26.2 53

14.1 23.3 16.3

Rent As has been mentioned earlier, only five households received income from rent, four of whom are "well-to-do" households. As can be seen from the table, however, the value of the income in general is low - under 5 per cent of total cash income for three of the households. It ought to be noted of course, that the real value can only be seen from the next table, where the net income is considered, but nonetheless, the value does still seem to be low. In the case of the other two households where rental contributes significantly to cash income, the basis for this is less due to the rental of agricultural capital than that of "consumption" capital; in the case of HE (No. 5), a "well-to-do" household, it is the rental of a Volkswagen bus and a car, and in the case of AY (No. 9), a "middle" household, the rental of stereo equipment on the occasion of festivals. As far as rental of agricultural equipment is concerned, the only source of income comes from the rental of the kubota, the pedestrian tractor. As I have mentioned earlier, the fact that none of the poor households have access to this form of income indicates the existence and significance of surplus and capital in the peasant economy of the Muda area. Its insignificance in terms of absolute size however, speaks for the absence of an agrarian structure in which the mere ownership of capital, without its utilization yielding substantial returns in the form ofland rent, dominates the life of the peasantry. Capital yields high returns when invested in the farm, not in the land, and all the kubotas which yielded rent did so only after they had been utilized for production on the owners' own farms.

The Sample Households

103

Wage Labour Only two households do not earn any income from wage labour; on the other hand, only one household owes more than 50 per cent of its income to wage labour (compared to eleven households for the sale of padi). Two other households derive more than 40 per cent of their seasonal cash flow from wage labour. When comparing the relative contribution of wage labour to the total cash flow or income, however, it should be home in mind that for the season for which data was collected, opportunities for wage labour earnings were considerably reduced due to the introduction of the combine harvester (see Chapter 7). The table also clearly indicates that wage labour is much more important for the "poor" households than for the "well-to-do" ones although it is worth noting that even "well-to-do" households engage in wage labour. On the other hand, there is nothing in the figures to indicate the existence of a landless proletariat made up by a class of poor households. Only one of these households earn more than 50 per cent, namely, 68 per cent of its income from wage labour, and two of the "poor" households draw less than 10 per cent of their income from wage labour.

Tranifers This category, unfortunately, does not cover the entire range of income which falls under "transfers" because the table is concerned only with the cash flow for the season. But even then, a clear distinction can already be made between the "well-to-do" households and the "poor" ones. Of the "well-to-do" households, the transfers took essentially the form of savings or credit - that is, transfers from the last season or the coming one. For the poor households, on the other hand, transfers from children were significant for two of the households with adult children. The value of the transfers were also high for the "poor" households. Transfers were least important for the "middle" households. It should be noted that where transfers took the form ofloans or savings, differences between the three groupings can also be seen. For the three "well-to-do" households to whom income accrued by way of transfers, the loans were from Chinese towkays and the savings were realized savings from the bank. For the middle households, savings in the form of kut were signficant. For the "poor" households, kut was also significant but the loan was taken from a wealthier peasant in the village (see Chapter 9).

The Pattern of Labour Utilization The findings here should be discussed in the light of Goldman and Squire's finding that "this low intensity oflabour supply is strongly associated with size of family work force", and in particular, with the hypothesis that "the generally low level oflabour use 1s more a result of household preferences than labour market constraints" [my emphasis]. 17

104

THE ANATOMY

OF

THE VILLAGE

Characteristics of the Household Labour Force The first thing to note is the obvious connection between demography and the social classification. As can be seen from Table 6.15, poor and well-to-do households tend to include more economically active members whereas middle households tend to be dependent on less workers. 18 TABLE 6.15 Average Number of Available Labour and EconomicallyActive According to Sample Households

Category

Available Labour (I) M/ F

Well-to-do Middle Poor

5 3 4.2

2.6 1.5 1.6

2.4 1.5 2.6

Economically-Active (If) 4 2.3 3.4

% Ijll

80

77

61

Note: Available labo.ur refers to all household members above the age of 12. "Economically-active" refers to work outside the domestic sphere.

Whereas there is a slight tendency for male workers to predominate in the wealthier households, poor households are characterized by a clear predominance of female workers. Further, we note in this case, that the intensity of labour supply seems not to vary with the size of the family work force but rather, with the economic strength of the household. The better-off the household was, the higher the labour intensity. This will be discussed later in the chapter.

Characteristics of the Withdrawn Labour Of the sixty-one available household members, thirteen did not participate actively in "productive" activities. Of these thirteen, twelve were female (the one male was of schooling age) but with one exception, a middle household, none of these females were wives of the household head. With the above mentioned exception of one wife and one grandmother, all female labour devoted solely to domestic work came from unmarried daughters, and daughters or daughters-in-law who were nursing their babies. It is striking that while all available male labour did participate to a greater or lesser extent in padi cultivation, in every single household, at least one female was withdrawn from padi cultivation. In contrast to the agricultural labour expected of unmarried sons, unmarried daughters play a minor role in padi cultivation. This is again an indication of the cultural defmition oflabour availability for padi cultivation. The fact, however, that in the well-to-do households, all the wives participate in farm labour argues against the hypothesis that labour is withdrawn when the "structure of preference" has been satisfied with a certain level of income given sufficient farm size, as is suggested by the above mentioned study. What is more important apparently is the fact that well-to-do families tend to include daughters or daughters-in-law who are nursing their babies and thus unable to engage in agricultural labour. In other words, the withdrawal oflabour from "productive work" is not arbitrary

105

The Sample Households

but relates to a specific category oflabour, namely, females between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five who are either unmarried or nursing- and likely to be performing "productive" work of high economic value.

Intensity of Labour Input Turning to labour intensity, let us first examine this with respect to agricultural labour performed by the wives of the household heads. For this purpose, we have taken the months of November and February which are the months of transplanting and harvesting, the periods of most intensive female labour in padi cultivation (see Table 6.16). TABLE 6.16 Average Number o_(Hours Worked by Female Heads of Sample Households during November and February Category

Well-to-do Middle Poor

Number

Hours per Person

5 4 5

221.2 185 223.9

We see that there is no dramatic difference in labour intensity, on the average, between the different households except for the lower value achieved for the middle category. The hypothesized leisure preference of households with large farms and large family size resulting in a low average intensity of labour thus does not seem to hold for this particular sample of households. The withdrawal of labour from "productive" activities affects primarily female labour but not in the form of a reduction of average labour time; rather it seems to involve the total withdrawal of a specific type of female labour - unmarried daughters and nursing mothers - regardless of social status or size of the work force. The interesting difference which emerges between types of households from the above table is that middle households tend to be more dependent on hired labour for the important processes of transplanting and harvesting. Wives of middle household heads, despite the fact that these households have the smallest labour force, have a lower intensity of' labour. What about the male household heads? Here in Table 6.17 we get a far more striking difference in the pattern of labour utilization in the padi economy. Labour intensity is directly related to social status with the rich putting in two and a half times more labour than the poor and almost double that of the middle household. In order to complete the picture, however, we should add the full range of productive activities in which the household head engages, in which case, we get the following (Table 6.18):

106

THE ANATOMY OF THE VILLAGE

TABLE 6.17 Average Number of Hours Worked by Male Heads of Sample Households in Padi Cultivation in November and February Category

Well-to-do Middle Poor

Number

Hours per Person

5 6 4

240 169.6 98.2

TABLE 6.18 Average Number of Hours Worked by Male Heads of Sample Households over a Six-Month Period Category

Well-to-do Middle Poor

Number

Hours per Person

5 6 4

373.3 383.5 226.2

That the difference in labour intensity is to a large extent bridged in the Table 6.18 is due to participation in non-padi activities, in particular by the middle households. The range of non-padi activities open to them as compared to the poor is broader given their mobility (possession of motorcycle) and skill (for example, carpentry). For those households completely dependent on the village padi economy however, the finding seems to be that the rich work more than the middle and the middle more than the poor. The explanation is to be found not in the structure of household preference but in the socio-economic structures operative at the village level. It should perhaps be mentioned at this point however, that the above pattern of labour utilization is of recent origin and is indicative of the fact that the poor are being increasingly squeezed out of the labour market due to changes in the padi economy to be documented in the following chapters. Interestingly, we do not seem to fmd a compensation for low labour intensity in padi production through labour investment in non-cash generating productive activities like fishing, vegetable gardening and the like. (See Table 6.19.) Apparently, the resources over which the rich households have control also enable them to derive more value from subsistence production. Similarly, with respect to time spent on mutual aid (Table 6.20): Again, the rich head the list, with the poor households least integrated into a network of labour exchange with other households. No significant differences could be found in the type oflabour and labour intensity devoted to domestic labour.

107

The Sample Households

TABLE 6.19 Average Number of Hours Spent on Non-Cash Generating Productive Activities by Sample Households Category

Number of Hours

156 54.4

Well-to-do Middle Poor

93.4

TABLE 6.20 Average Number of Hours Spent on Mutual Aid by Sample Households Category

Hours

Well-to-do Middle Poor

224 175.6 87.8

CONCLUSION This analysis of the budget and time-allocation data of the sample households confirms that a pattern of unequal access to land and employment opportunities for the village households has already established itself. Interestingly, the larger padi farms of the well-to-do generate not merely more income but also more work for the household. By the same token, the resource base of the well-to-do also allows further accumulation both through the retention of family labour within the household, as well as increasingly, through the returns to capital. Nonetheless, the term "household" has to be used with great care. The examination of the life histories and the internal structures of the households suggests that individuals continue to be re-sorted into different households and different positions of access in the course of their life-cycle. Of particular significance in this respect is the finding that the long-term resource potential of the household seemed to be a more important yardstick for the ranking of households than the indicators of farm and income size. All this calls for a methodological re-orientation towards looking at differentiation as a process rather than in terms of indicators and at households as a network of changing relationships rather than as a bounded and static unit of production and/or consumption. Certainly the micro-economy of these households does not display an intact cycle of reproduction which renders it impermeable to changes occurring at the macro-level, as Chayanov would have had it for his Russian peasants. It is to these macro-level forces of change and their impact on households structures, that our attention will now turn.

108

THE ANATOMY

OF

THE VILLAGE

NOTES

1. The data was collected over a six-month period (October 1979 to March 1980) with a selfadministered questionnaire. All the names are fictitious. 2. For a theoretical statement on this issue, see Diana W ong, "The Limitations of the Household as a Unit of Analysis", in Smith, Wallerstein & Evers, eds., (1984); andJ.T. Purcall, Rice Economy, A Case of Four VillaJieS in West Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press 1971); Lorraine Corner, "Mobility in the Context of Traditional Family and Social Relationships: Linkages, Reciprocity and Flow of Remittances", mimeo., 1980. 3. For Malaysian examples, see World BankjFAO, The Muda Study: A First Report 2 vols. (Rome, 1975). 4. World Bank/FAO, p. 19. 5. The initials used throughout the paper arc based on the names spelled out in Table 6.1. 6. Corner, op. cit., p. 14. 7. See K. Friedman, "Pooling Incomes: Issues and Perspectives on Households in the World Economy", in Households and the World-Economy, ed. Joan Smith, Immanuel Wallerstein and HanDieter Evers (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1984). 8. Sec Arbeitsgruppc Bielcfelder Entwickiungssoziologen, "Forschungskonzcption: Unterentwicklung und Subsistenzproduktion", Working Paper no. 1 (Biclefeld: Sociology of Development Research Centre, Univcrsitat Bielefeld, 1981). 9. See Marshall Sahlins, Stone AJie Economics (Chicago: Aldine Press, 1972); Claude Meil!assoux, Maidens, Meal and Money (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); A.V. Chayanov, a.v., On The Theory of Peasant Economy (Homewood, Ill., 1966). 10. For a similar account of the complexity and fluidity of household structure in a Third World urban setting, see R. Sanjek, "The Organization of Houst'holds in Adabraka: Toward a Wider Comparative Perspective", Comparative Studies in History and Society 24, no. 1 (1982): 57-103. 11. See Evers (1981 ), op. cit. 12. R. Evenson, et al., "Nutrition, Work and Demographic Behaviour in Rural Philippine Households: A Synopsis of Several Laguna Household Studies", in Rural Household Studies in Asia, ed. Binswanger et al. (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1980). 13. Ibid., Table 11.20. 14. Department of Statistics, Household Expenditure Survey (Kuala Lumpur, 1973). 15. See Ann Staler, "Garden Use and Household Economy in Rural Java", Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 14, no. 2 (1978). 16. This will be further examined in the section on labour utilization. 17. R.H. Goldman and L. Squire, Technical Change, Labour Use and Income Distribution in the Muda Irrigation Project, Development Discussion Paper no. 35 (Harvard Institute for International Development, 1978), p. 16. 18. The following analysis of household labour utilization is based on a six-month survey done on fifteen households. Daily recordings were made by a member of the family according to categories given in the questionnaire, including farm, off-farm and domestic labour. Recorders were asked to note the labour inputs of all members of the household above the age of twelve (defined as available labour). Economically active refers to work outside the domestic sphere. Unfortunately, the data is not complete, since in one household, the survey began a month later, and in ten cases, fifteen days were missed in the month of December due to technical problems. Nonetheless, the data should be a fairly reliable guide not to the absolute amount oflabour expended, in terms of potential labour time for example, but to the pattern of labour utilization within and between households.

Part Ill The Transformation of the Village Economy

7 The Production Cycle and the Division of Labour

THE TRADITIONAL CONTEXT OF PADI PRODUCTION The extensive monoculture of padi in the Kedah Plains is directly dependent on the availability of water. 1 However, no traditional system of irrigation was developed to regulate the supply or access to water. Padi cultivation was entirely dependent on the rainfall brought regularly by the South-east Monsoon. During the dry season, the clay surface of the Plain dried up so completely that no crop whatsoever could be planted. Consequently, the onset of the rains is so important in rendering the surface workable that it fixes the time when cultivation of any sort can begin. Simultaneity is thus the tendency over the whole Plain for all fieldwork and no new plant can be introduced here if it requires setting earlier than the rains of May-June or unless it can tolerate standing water for long periods during the September-October season and need not be harvested until the fields begin to dry out in January. These narrow environmental limitations have led to monocultivation ofpadi of an eight-month term, operations which oaur simultaneously over the whole Plain [author's emphasis]. 2

The social organization of padi cultivation had thus to contend firstly, with individual household surplus management and/or consumption ties with other village households or sources of credit outside the village economy in order to tide over the lean and hungry months; secondly, inadequacy of household labour for harvesting in particular, due to the uniformity of the ripening process. Production ties thus had to be established with other households either in the form of exchange or hired labour. On the other hand, however, the absence of irrigation as an important factor of production made the development of communal forms of organization based on the village as a territorial unit unnecessary. 3

112

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE VILLAGE ECONOMY

The production ties made incumbent by the simultaneity of padi operations were of a flexible and largely dyadic nature, of which three major arrangements were found: 1. "Kontrek" (contract) arrangements between a farm operator and another

villager, who would "help" with the transplanting or harvesting every year. This approximates to a patron-client relationship. 4 2. "Derau" or labour exchange groups, based strictly on the principle of reciprocity of labour exchange during transplanting and/or harvesting. Their actual working will be discussed later. 3. "Upah" or the employment of seasonal hired labour for harvesting, recruited primarily from southern Thailand or Kelantan with the aid of relatives or other brokers.

THE CONTEXT OF DOUBLE CROPPING This total dependence of padi cultivation on the availability of water from rainfall was broken only with the inauguration of the Muda Irrigation Scheme, encompassing two dams capable ofholding altogether almost 1,000 million tons of water, and a network of canals amounting to almost 2,000 km. 5 Water was first released in 1970, the year double-cropping made its entry into the lives of the Muda peasantry. With the exception of24 re the padi land cultivated by the villagers has benefited from this new technology, being served by one main canal (the Tunjang Drain) and two subsidiary canals (ACRBD 3 and ACRBD 4). In place of the single-cropping eight-month cycle, there arc now two seasons, the first from April to September (musim pertama or musim timur tengah) dependent on irrigation water released from the canals and the second beginning in October and ending in March (musim kedua or musim timur tepi), following the rainfall regime. Two crops a year means of course planting twice, and this in turns means nothing less than double the amount of labour required. Before we turn our attention to the new problems and new solutions for labour management presented to the household economy, let us look at the various work processes within the padi production cycle which had now to be replicated (see Fig. 7.1 and Table E).

STEPS INVOLVED IN PADI CULTIVATION 1. Germination of Seeds Seeds, usually from the last harvest, are soaked in a tong (tub) for three days. A relong of padi land needs approximately three gantangs of seed from the previous harvest. Against the advice of MADA (Muda Agriculture Development Authority), virtually no selection is made. It is also interesting to note that very few people buy new seeds from MADA, preferring to use locally-known varieties of high-yielding grains, the most popular being "Anak Dara" and

FIGURE 7.1 Cropping Calendar in 1979 in Study Area

:

OFF SEASON _ _ _ ______.,.; t--r----

MAIN SEASON

1

I I I I

I

SOWING TRANSPLANTING

I

I

I

I

I

I

2

I

I

I

3

I

I

I

4

I

I

I

I

I

5

I

6

I

I

I

7

I

I

I

I

8

MONTH Source: Taken from Yamashita et al., op. cit., p. 60.

I

SOWING HARVESTING TRANSPLANTING I

I

9

I

I

I

10

I

I

I

11

I

I

I

12

I

HARVESTING I

I

I

I

I

2

I

I

I

3

I

114

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE VILLAGE ECONOMY

"Seribu Gantang". For the off-season of1980, I know of only two farmers who have bought a new MADA variety. Both of them belong to the category of "middle" farmers.

2. Preparation of the Nursery Bed Preparation of the Nursery Bed (tapak semai) involves weeding, and if necessary, ploughing of the land, but usually, only a hoe (tajak) is used. The seeds are then sown (menabur semai). Sometimes, a fence with plastic covering is erected, in order to protect the seedlings against the intrusions of chickens, ducks and rats. A few farmers treat the seeds with a fertilizer and pesticide mixture before sowing, the majority applies the mixture only after the seedlings have begun to sprout. Both the above processes are almost always done by family labour. Each household has it own nursery bed, although sons and daughters, who live separately from their parents, may share their parent's nursery bed. Excess seedlings are usually given free to fellow-villagers who may need seedlings due to losses on their own nursery beds. The sale of seedlings, increasingly reported in the last years, is a recent phenomenon. The time for sowing is not standardized, some villagers preferring to sow before, and some after, the time of ploughing. This means that transplanting does not occur simultaneously, and consequently, neither does harvesting. Since the release of irrigation water from the canals, which is a precondition for the possibility of ploughing in the following season, is done only after the entire harvest is in, the different work schedules of different farmers now tend to get into each other's way.

3. Preparation of the Field Stalks left over from the last harvest have to be burned or, where due to the wetness of the field (during the minor season), the stalks cannot be burned, they have to be evenly strewn over the fields (kecah ruman). The bunds have also to be weeded and put in order (tajak batas). All this is usually accomplished by family labour but occasionally, wage labour is also hired to do the job. 4. Ploughing When the land was first being claimed from the forest by ploughing (menggala) only a hoe (tajak) could be used to turn the soil because of the presence of big roots. The earliest draught animal (men in their sixties still remember this as a familiar sight) was the cow, or rather, two cows attached to the plough. By the 1930s, the water-buffalo had replaced the cows but by the late seventies, not a single water-buffalo could be seen in the village. The first pedestrian tractor (kubota) was introduced in the mid-sixties and they have now completely taken over the field. Replacement by mechanized ploughing has been absolutely necessary because of the shortening of the planting season due to the use of high-yielding, fast maturing varieties. With the use of the buffalo, 1 re of land took seven days to prepare; with

The Production Cycle and the Division of Labour

115

the pedestrian tractor, not more than three hours. At the present, more and more small four-wheeled tractors are being bought, known in the village as "anak tractor" (baby tractor). These are even more efficient than the pedestrian tractors. The land is usually tilled twice, occasionally three times. But whereas almost every farm-operator in the past had his own buffalo (exact figures are not available and the above often-repeated statement from informants is almost certainly an exaggeration), only twenty households in the village now have access to a kubota, either their own, or belonging to their parents. All the other households have to engage either the kubota or the anak tractor (four-wheeled tractor) to plough their fields. In 1979/80, this cost $35 a relong, payment being made after harvesting.

5. Transplanting This takes place when the seedlings are about 35 days old. Transplanting (menanam) involves the following work processes: a) pulling out the seedlings from the nursery bed (cabut semai) b) transporting the bundles of seedlings to the field and arranging them for the planting the next day c) planting proper ~ menanam d) distributing the bundles of seedlings to the planters ~ atur Whereas b) and d) are almost always done by the farm operator himself, a) and c) can be done by family labour alone but usually involves berderau or employment of wage labour. Transplanting is extremely hard, literally back-breaking work: the planter standing knee-deep for four-hour stretches in the water-soaked fields. Seven people are required for transplanting 1 re, and on the average, one person can transplant five or six re longs in a season. It is thus, apart from harvesting, the most labour-intensive stage in padi cultivation, requiring approximately fifty man-hours per acre. 6 Furthermore, it is an operation requiring rapid completion for reasons of uniform crop maturity.

6. Miscellaneous Work Then comes a period of relatively light work which may include: a) replacing dead seedlings ~ sulam b) application of fertilizer and pesticide c) weeding and clearing of bunds This is usually done by family labour. During this period, less conscientious farmers sometimes do not go to the field at all for two or three weeks.

7. Harvesting Two traditional methods of harvesting are found in the village: a) cutting the panicle with the ketam (or tuai as it is known elsewhere in Malaysia), similar to the ani-ani used in Java. The advantage of using a ketam is that every single panicle of grain is harvested, the disadvantage is that it is extremely time-consuming. It was thus practical in the old days when yields

116

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE VILLAGE ECONOMY

were low, and every grain counted. I am told by an informant that wage labour using the ketam, used to be on a crop-sharing (pawah) basis, in the ratio of 8:2. Today, the ketam is used only for the harvesting of glutinous rice (because it is difficult to thresh) and when there is widespread lodging of the stalks; b) cutting the stalk with a small sickle and then threshing the grains off from the stalk. This method involves two main tasks, reaping with the sickle (mengerat) and threshing (memukul). Harvesting used to be based on family, but primarily, exchange and hired labour. 7 However, labour exchange for the harvest has broken down completely, and family and hired labour has been almost totally replaced by mechanical harvesting. The harvesting operation is a major problem to the farmers since the crop should be harvested two or three days after maturity, failure of which will result in increased harvesting losses. 8 The off-season crop in particular is often threatened by the onset of the monsoon rains. The main problem here is the shortage of labour due to the uniformity of the cropping schedule. 8. Post-harvesting If the crop has been harvested by the combine harvester, the next step is for the padi to be filled into gunny sacks, usually with the help of child labour. The padi is then transported back home to be stored, or transported away immediately by lorries for sale. If taken home, the padi has to be dried (if it has been harvested during the wet season), then winnowed, after which it is stored.

9. Traniformation: Milling Milling used to be done with a foot-operated stamper (lesung kaki) with which four people took two days to complete one gunny sack. Nowadays, all milling for immediate consumption is done only by the Home Consumption Mill in the village or taken to other small mills in the nearby town of Tunjang. The milling of padi was the first major instance of mechanization in the padi economy and destroyed an important source of wage labour for the poor and marginal, mostly young girls and women. Interestingly, no ritual practices connected with the padi cultivation cycle in spite of its recorded importance in the past 9 were still to be found. According to an informant, such practices, involving the semangat padi, (the spirit of the padi) died out in the village about twenty years ago.

CHANGES IN THE PRODUCTION CONTEXT Labour demand for the process of transplanting and harvesting was more then doubled by double-cropping, since a higher labour input is required for the off-season crop (see Table E). The labour intensity of the other work processes, however, was low enough to allow easy absorption into the new work schedule. The problem posed

117

The Production Cycle and the Division of Labour

TABLE E Labour Input for Paddy Field Husbandry (Man-Hours per Relong) Pilot Project Area OffMain Season Season

Whole Year 1979

Whole Muda Area Off Main Season Season

Whole Year 1979

Seed Preparation

0.4

0.3

0.7

0.9

0.6

1.5

Nursery Bed Preparation

2.5

4.8

5.5

4.2

9.7

Care of Nursery

1.7

2.3 1.4

3.1

2.1

1.2

3.8

Preparation of Main Field

8.2

14.5

13.5

28.0

1.6

6.8 2.8

15.0

Re-transplanting

2.7 2.6

2.5

5.2 3.6

3.1

1.0

14.3

2.2 4.5

18.8

2.2 0.6 7.1

0.2 0.8 7.1

2.4 1.4 14.2

0.4

0.2

0.6

29.6

25.2

54.8

40.8

26.4

67.2

Application of Fertiliser Weeding Pest and Disease Control Water Control Other Care Total

4.4

5.3

Source: M.Yamashita, H.S.Wong and S.Jcgathecsan, Farm Management Studies Gapan:

MADA and Tropical Agricultural Research Centre, 1980), p. 25. Note that the "Pilot Project Area" or "Study Area" as referred to in other tables taken from Yamashita et al. is in locality D 2 in the Muda District 11 in which Kampung Gelung Rambai is also situated.

to transplanting was solved by the mechanization of ploughing, freeing male labour for participation in transplanting. Ploughing had previously been done by male labour with the aid of the water buffalo. The pedestrian tractor (kubota) had already been introduced in the sixties before double-cropping, but by the end of the seventies, mechanized ploughing was fully accepted by all the farmers. Owners of tractors either plough the land themselves or hire wage labour to operate the tractor. Non-tractor owners rent the tractor service from the owners, which means that the field is ploughed for the farmer. The vast majority of the farmers thus do not have to engage in ploughing themselves. Having prepared the nursery bed and the field for ploughing, the next major task is that of transplanting. Transplanting was traditionally reserved for female labour. The male farm operator or wage labourer is now however almost fully intergrated into the process. Cabut semai, the hard task of jerking the seedlings out of the nursery bed, is often done by

118

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE VILLAGE ECONOMY

male labour. The male farm operator then transports the bundled seedlings to the padi field on the day transplanting is to take place, and acts as the distributor of the seedlings to the work group usually composed of women. It is not unusual for him to engage in transplanting himself. In the case of harvesting, reaping is done by both sexes, one person being capable of reaping on average seven relongs in a season. Threshing, which involves heavier manual labour, is considered male labour, one person being capable of threshing the crop from nine to ten re longs in a season. Since most of the fields ripen at the same time, the demand for labour is great. Double-cropping however, has aggravated the problem of labour scarcity for havesting. Under the previous eight-month cycle, harvesting, though labour-intensive, did not have to be pressed within a restricted time period as it is today. Pressure exists to complete harvesting before the fields are flooded by the release of water for the second season. Furthermore, harvesting for the first season is particularly problematic because it has to take place during the rainy period. Heavy rain can dislodge the stalks, which makes reaping even more difficult; threshing the soaked grains also requires more effort. The high moisture content reduces the quality and price of the padi. Worse still, should no labour be available for early harvesting, the rain-soaked padi plants may begin to rot. Large losses to the farmer can thus occur should he not manage to solve the problem of labour for harvesting. 10 Unlike transplanting however, the solution was eventually offered not through the mechanization of a prior stage of cultivation but through the mechanization of the labour process itself. Two years ago (in the off-season of 1977), the combine harvester was introduced. It was a Malay-owned machine introduced through a village "broker" whose wife comes from a village in Pedis where the harvester had been introduced the season before. 220 re were harvested by the combine harvester in that first season and the broker earned almost $1000 in commission. By 1979/80, almost 80 per cent of the total operated land was harvested by the combine. The reason for its popularity is not difficult to fathom: Whereas it takes about seven days to harvest and thresh one relong by hand, the combine harvester does it in half an hour. The resources of the village pool of labour are far from sufficient to meet the peak demand of the harvesting period, especially when the crops all ripen simultaneously, as is now the case through the scheduling of water-supply. It has already been noted that a lot of family labour that is withheld from transplanting is thrown into harvesting on the family farm. Whereas the solution to the problem posed by transplanting was found with a minimum of social dislocation, the mechanization of the harvesting process has changed radically the character of the division oflabour in the village economy. We shall examine this by considering more closely the three forms oflabour in the village economy: household, exchange and wage labour, the relative importance of which is indicated in Table F below:

Household Labour Household labour, as has been established in Chapter 6, is limited essentially to the

119

The Production Cycle and the Division of Labour TABLE F Pattern of Labour Utilization (%)

Study Area (1979)

Off Season

39 59

0 100

100

100

45 44

Derau

11

Total

Whole Muda (1974)

46 29 24 0

Farmer and Family Labour Hired Labour Gotong Royong

Main Season

~}

Before 1970

34 32 34 100

Source: Yarnashita et al., op. cit., p. 33.

husband and wife, extending in the relevant cases, to the married or unmarried son. Control over the labour of the unmarried son seems to be especially weak. The "hanging out" of young Malay boys in gangs has been noted in other ethnographies as a cultural syndrome, 11 and was also a point of frequent comment in this village. Individually, or more often as a group, these young men occasionally engaged in daily-rate wage labour but retained full control over their earnings. In other words, they were a source of potential labour to the economy but not to the household economy. Control over the labour of unmarried daughters is rigidly exercised but this labour is applied almost exclusively to the domestic sphere and not made available for padi cultivation. The availability of unmarried daughters frees the mother for work on the family farm, particularly for transplanting and harvesting. Unmarried daughters are hardly ever thrown into the task of transplanting, although the pressing demands of harvesting do necessitate their recruitment for this task. The husband and wife team thus forms the operational axis of the "family farm" and it is interesting to note that all female spouses, regardless of social status, engaged in padi cultivation, with the exception of nursing mothers. The period of nursing in the village society extends possibly to the second or third year of the child's life. Since this forms part of the life-cycle of most families, it means that for a certain period of time, almost all households are strategically dependent on non-household labour for the completion of the tasks of farm operation. This pattern of the "male-operated farm", (in contrast to the "family farm"), most often found among the middle households for example, that of Haid Y, seems to be matched by a more recent phenomenon of the "female-operated farm", typical of the poor households. In this case, the fall-out of the partner is due not to the exigencies of demography but of poverty. As exemplified in the household of Shadli D, a division oflabour within the household itself has taken place in the form of the household head engaging in daily-rated wage labour outside of the village, while the wife takes over the management of the puny-sized family farm.12 Household labour, although the basis of padi farming, has thus never been sufficient

120

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE VILLAGE ECONOMY

for the adequate completion of the tasks of padi farming. 13 Lack of self-sufficiency, to some extent culturally defmed, has always been regulated by exchange, wage and increasingly, mechanized labour.

Exchange Labour Exhange labour takes place in the form of work groups known locally as kumpulan derau (to berderau is to engage in exchange labour) formed for the purposes of transplanting and harvesting. This phenomenon of co-operative labour has often been taken for an indication of mutual aid principles pervasive in the padi economy. Cooperation and aid is certainly involved but it has to be noted that derau operates on the principle of strict reciprocity, or as the villagers put it, "buat sepagi bayar sepagi" (work for one morning and pay for one morning). For transplanting, derau is kept separate for cabut semai Uerking seedlings out of the nursery bed) and transplanting. Derau for cabut semai takes place on a piece-rate basis, one bundle of seedlings in return for another, derau for transplanting (menanam) on a time-rate basis, one morning of work for another. This is due to the difference in productivity between cabut semai and transplanting. Thus, Zul, a young man of twenty-two, can do twenty bundles (ketul) in three hours, while his mother, a woman of 56, can only manage six bundles in three hours. In fact, most women who engage in transplanting now have somebody, usually their husband or son, to help with the cabut semai. Each operator calls the number of people he estimates necessary for the size of his field, and is then obliged to return the work rendered, when called upon. Each person contributes the share he wishes- the system is extremely flexible and tailored to the fact that fields may be of differing sizes. The relationship entered into is that between an individual and another engaged in the exchange of labour hours, not between berderau groups as such. If through illness or some other commitment, reciprocity cannot be achieved during the season, the labour debt is postponed to the next one. Large farm operators as well as landless villagers engage in derau. The large farm operator does so in order to get a sufficiently large work party on the day that he or she has to transplant; the landless "sell" the labour hours they have accumulated to a farm operator who may be in need of transplanting labour, with whom they have a kontrek (see the section under wage labour). There may be overlapping of membership among groups because of the varying amount oflabour time which the individual households require. The size of the work groups also vary. According to the villagers, the groups used to be bigger, with two main groups, one encompassing the women living in the older part of the village, the other including the women of Hilir and Hujung. Neighbourhood thus seems to have been the main basis for the constitution of the derau groups, whose raison d' etr~ was not so much derived from the dictate of time pressure or scale economies but that of relief from boredom. Rather than toiling day after day alone under the relentless heat of the blazing sun, participation in a large work group meant occasion for fun and gossip, especially during the work break when titbits were traditionally served by the owner of the field.

The Production Cycle and the Division of Labour

121

After the general elections of 1978 however, the pattern of exchange labour was rent apart by the social conflicts generated by party politics. For the season of 1979/80, labour exchange occurred on party lines, PAS women exchanging their labour only with other PAS women and vice versa. Work groups have become smaller and neighbourhood boundaries have been crossed since PAS women have had to call upon other PAS women in Kampung Hilir and Hujung to make up for their scarcity of personnel.

Wage Labour Extra-familial labour is usually employed for: 1. 2. 3. 4.

transplanting harvesting, threshing, transportation manning the kubota occasional work like weeding

Labour is offered on the market both as individual and group labour, in adaptation to the requirements of the labour needs of the production cycle. As we have seen earlier, at different stages of the production cycle, different quantities of labour time are required. To facilitate the employment of larger numbers of workers, work groups are formed and made available to the market. They take two forms: 1. To upah re long (pay wages for the re long) is a means of mobilizing the kumpulan derau as wage labour for transplanting and harvesting. The wage relationship is, however, not to the kumpulan derau but to the member to whom the others owe labour hours, which she now "sells" to the padi operator who employs her. Payment is made according to the relong, which is handed over as a "contract" to the wage labourer who then undertakes to find the additional labour necessary for the completion of the job. The poor women in the village who are dependent on wage labour for their livelihood tend to have longstanding "contracts" with the bigger land operators- a form of patron-client relationship which assures security of employment in return for security of labour. 2. Share refers to the arrangement by which a number of workers offer themselves to the market as a group. Payment is made according to the number of hours worked, and is then equally divided between the members of the group. This arrangement is thus shorn of the on-going nature of the social relationships which underpin the upah re long system.* It was employed for the recruitment of essentially foreign labour for harvesting and especially threshing but is becoming increasingly popular for transplanting as well. Many women, after • That it is of recent origin is indicated by the fact that an English word has been adopted to denote this arrangement.

122

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE VILLAGE ECONOMY

having completed the task of transplanting within the own village via participation in derau groups, then form share groups which offer their labour to the labour market outside the village. Individual labour is also offered on the market although to a far lesser extent. Again, two forms are to be found in the village: 1. the entire operation of the farm is handed over to a "bailiff" to handle, in return for payment of a fixed wage. The author found only one such case in the village involving land belonging to the Tok Guru or religious teacher. 2. makan kupang (to eat shillings): hiring individual workers on a daily or piecerate basis. Thus, in the last season, cabut semai of seedlings cost 30 cents. Before a description of the changes which have taken place in the pattern of wage labour employment in the village (which necessitates an account of the role of mechanization) the system of wage payment and trends in wages must be discussed.

Wage Payment Payment is made primarily in cash although payment in kind is accepted by the very poor who do not operate any land of their own. The payment in kind is thus to meet their own subsistence (consumption) needs. Transplanting and harvesting are the most important sources of employment. For female labourers, they are the only source of wage labour available within the village. Traditionally, the wage for harvesting has been higher than that for transplanting. In very early years, before wage labour became the norm, poorer women would tolong (help) with the harvest and get zakat in return. Later, the wage was regularized at one gunny (2 nallehs) per relong, higher than the then going rate for transplanting. Interestingly however, the wage level for transplanting has been increasing steadily since double-cropping was introduced whereas the rate for upah relong for harvesting has remained constant at one gunny per relong. In 1972, the wage for transplanting was $16 per relong but food had to be provided for the derau group. By 1976, the last season where food was still provided, it had risen to $24. In 1979, it was $35 per relong. 14 According to the ethics of the business, the farm operator has to approach the wage labourer- one does not go around asking for work. However, the latter course is increasingly being taken. The labour is still expressed in the idiom of tolong (help), that is, the labourer helping the farm operator. The wage is not stated in advance (although this is also changing), so that the wage rate does vary. The only defence a labourer has against below-average wages is his refusal to "help" the next time he is asked. The idea of negotiating for a better deal is considered embarrassing; only young boys (budak-budak) who are not yet considered adult members of village society do this and are, therefore, forgiven if they do not know yet the "feeling of shame". Village ethics also restrict farm operators from arbitrarily raising wages to attract labour in the event of a shortage oflabour. But one of the major sources for the "push" in wages comes from large-scale Chinese farm operators who can afford to pay more.

The Production Cycle and the Division of Labour

123

They hire labour on a share basis and for the main season 1979/80 for example, they offered $50 as opposed to the $40 of the season before. With the Chinese, it is an open price-market where ethical restrictions do not hold but the prices they offer then do serve as some kind of measure for the village. Wage levels rise, although not to the level of the outside market, for example, the village rate was $45. In fact, the issue ofhigh wages has become a thorny one within the village. Farm operators complain of the high wages they have to pay for transplanting while the labourers point out that they now get virtually nothing from harvesting because farm operators prefer to hand over the harvesting to the combine harvester. It thus seems that conflicts over labour, rather than land, have become the most articulated and visible forms of social conflict within the community. The problem, as seen from the eyes of the large farm operator and government planner, is cogently summarized by the Head of the Planning and Evaluation Division of the Muda Agricultural Development Authority: Seasonal labour shortages particularly during the land preparation, transplanting and harvesting operations, have as predicted, become more acute with the introduction of rigid crop scheduling required for successful double-cropping. Rural-urban migration, detected in Muda 1972 (sic), has led to the depletion of once abundant rural labour supplies. Inflows of migrant labour, once important in areas such as Muda, have for a variety of reasons been reduced to insignificant levels. Despite a generally small-farm (average farm size of four acres but with 64% of all farms below this), padi production in the Muda area has been characterized by heavy dependency on hired labour, which is partly a result of heavy seasonal demand for certain cultural operations, compounded by the relatively small size of the farm family workforce of less than 2 adults per household ... The fact of the high degree of hired labour dependency in the face of declining labour supplies has further been clearly reflected in rising agricultural wage rates. Taken together, the three farming operations involving significant amounts of labour inputs, namely transplanting, harvesting and in-field transportation, rose from an average of $62.10 per acre in the off-season crop of 1972 to $166.80 per acre in the 1975 off-season, and $190.45 in the off-season crop of 1979. With relatively static production levels and padi prices this has been directly reflected in significant reduction in farm incomes. Average annual net farm incomes (returns to farm family owned resources) declined from about $3,600 in 1975 to $2,430 in 1978/79 ... 15

His conclusion, evidently echoed by the farmers, is that "mechanization of rice production, at least in the major rice-growing areas of Malaysia, has become no longer an option but a necessity". 16

Effects of the Combine Harvester The mechanization of the harvesting process in the region came about in the form of an abrupt and rapid leap from completely manual reaping and threshing to the use oflarge western combine harvesters. In the village under study, the combine harvester was first introduced in 1977 and by the last season, already accounted for about 70 per cent of total amount harvested. It must be borne in mind that the combine

124

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE VILLAGE ECONOMY

harvester, as can be gathered from its name, replaces two processes which were formerly done manually: 1. harvesting, which is usually done by women 2. threshing, which is done by young boys and men Harvesting was frequently accomplished by labour contracts on the basis of upah re long whereas a shift had already taken place in the mode of payment for threshing- from being based on the area (re long) to being based on the actual number of sacks threshed. The going rate was $2 per sack. At the same time, the combine harvester has generated demand for two new kinds of wage labour: 1. the combine harvester spews out the grain in one big heap and this must now be entered into the gunny sacks as quickly as possible to prevent damage; 2. these gunny sacks all piled up within one day have to be transported back to the village as quickly as possible to prevent theft. The first has provided pocket money for young boys who do it when they are out of school or while on holiday, while the second has become an important source of income for the young boys and men in the village who possess motorcycles. ln one season, one can earn up to $300, at $2 per sack transported. To some extent therefore, the displacement of labour has been made up for by the creation of new jobs, but the people who have benefited arc not the same ones who have been displaced. 17 Possession of a motorcycle is already an indicator of relative well-being so that not all those who arc willing and able to thresh are able to transport. In the village today, there are four young men whose only source of cash income is derived from threshing since they do not operate farms of their own. Three of them are new to the village, having married in. The other suffers from asthmatic fits, which is probably why he has not yet left the village in search of work elsewhere. Apart from these four, there are almost ten other people who engage in wage labour for threshing, but who have other sources of income as well. The loss of employment opportunity in threshing is not such a threat to them. One important fact stands out- that the number of young men in the village has been substantially reduced by emigration. There does, therefore, seem to be a real shortage of young men in the village for threshing and the introduction of the combine harvester will not have such a disruptive effect on the threshers. Alternatively, it may be surmised that the introduction of the combine harvester already had this effect in forcing them to flee. It would seem, however, that the immediate cause of the wave of emigration was not the combine harvester as such, but this will be discussed later. The disruptive effect on the harvesters is another story. The pool of women available for wage labour has remained the same,1 8 and in fact, the number available for harvesting has increased because young girls who do not transplant do try their hand at harvesting. Thus, a potential labour force of over sixty have now been displaced.

The Production Cycle and the Division of Labour

125

During the main season 1979, as mentioned earlier, berderau broke down entirely. Everything was reduced to daily-rated labour (makan kupang). During a few hectic weeks, perhaps two, the women had to keep rejecting offers of work but thereafter, no further offers came, since in the meantime, the combine had already finished up the rest. Within a month, everything was over. 19 Total earnings dropped considerably. It would be useful to discuss here the much-vaunted principle of help between kin which would prevent a farm-operator from calling in the combine at the cost of depriving a fellow village of work. During the season mentioned, almost all contractual relationships (mentioned above), were broken by the farm operators; in the case of one particular informant, the farm operator who previously employed her was close kin of whom she had once said: "He would give me work because how else would I be able to cat?" This is not to deny the existence of this principle, which is often referred to by the villagers; it is merely to point out that it is breaking down. 20 A few people from the Barisan faction retained their contracts. This was attributed by one informant not to their need to retain political support but to the fact that they were fairly large farm-operators who wanted to ensure that they would have sufficient labour available for transplanting. The kinship tie was not given as the explanation, as the people involved were not related. The case mentioned in the previous paragraph involved a middle class farmer.

CONCLUSION The exigencies of rice monoculture in the Kedah Plains necessitated labour arrangements which transcended the boundaries of the household without coalescing in communal work patterns. Rather, cooperation or appropriation oflabour assumed essentially dyadic forms, whether as exchange or wage labour. The appropriation of surplus labour from other villagers in fact seems to have occurred more through the establishment of tenurial tics than through the exploitation of wage labour, which was provided on a regular basis by migrant workers. The initial impact of double-cropping was to greatly intensify the demand for labour, resulting in increased wage opportunities and high wage levels for surplus household labour. Nevertheless, prevailing forms of labour exchange remained, since their flexible and dyadic nature allow them also to be used as vehicles for the sale of wage labour. It was the mechanization of the harvesting process, introduced in the late seventies, which turned the stakes against labour and eliminated all necessity for labour cooperation. The story of those trampled under the heavy wheels of this new fate is yet to be told. Unfortunately, the poor and the old women, who are the ones hardest hit, have feeble voices. With the aid of the new technology, household labour can now manage the labour requirements of the farm. Two kinds of"family farms" seem to be assuming prominence: the larger farms of the middle and well-to-do households are male-operated with substantial inputs from other family members while the marginal farms of the poor tend to be female-operated, with little help from other family members, who tend to earn wage

126

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE VILLAGE ECONOMY

income outside of the family farm. A full circle thus seems to have been turned where labour relations are concerned: from labour scarcity to labour surplus and corresponding to this, from exchange to household labour. Interestingly, throughout all this, the wage labour relationship was not and has not become the dominant relation of production within the village.

NOTES 1. The following account of the ecology of padi cultivation in the North Kedah Plain, in which Kampung Gelung Rambai is situated, is taken from Dobby, op. cit. Useful information on the ecology of padi cultivation as such is to be found in the papers by H. Fukui, and Y. Takaya, in A Comparative Study of Paddy-GrowinR Communities in Southeast Asia and japan, ed. Kuchiba and Bauzon (Kyoto: Ryukoku University, 1979). 2. E.H.G. Dobby, "The North Kedah Plain: A Study in the Environment of Pioneering for Rice Cultivation", Economic Geography 27 (1951): 298. 3. This point has to be made because the dependence of traditional padi cultivation on communally or state organized irrigation works (in Japan, Bali, China and so forth) has been taken to be decisive for the development of the village as a strong, solidary unit. Sec for example, Takashi Tomosugi, "Some Discussions on a Frame of Reference for Comparison of Southeast Asian Rice-Growing Villages with Japanese Ones" in A Comparative Study il[ Paddy-Growing Communities in Southeast Asia and Japan, ed. M. Kuchiba and L. Bauzon (Kyoto: R yukoku University, 1979). "Japanese rice fields are good examples of this kind of accumulation ... The necessary water for the wet-paddy fields has been assured by irrigation systems. These systems were constructed and maintained by a strong territorial unity which was one cooperative body within the agricultural society. Moreover, the water so assured was distributed according to custom by the farm village society. The individual farmer could only be assured of water through the farm village society. Therefore, paddy growing was possible only on the premise of the territorial social relationship ... ". In Malaysia, on the other hand, "the traditional water control measures certainly existed in the narrow valleys but since the acreage covered by a single weir is very limited, the construction and maintenance of these weirs and connecting ditches are within the capacity of individual peasants or small groups of them", in H. Fukui and Y. Takaya, "Some Ecological Observations on Rice-Growing in Malaysia", Southeast Asian Studies 16, no. 2 (1978): 15. 4. Comparable to the phenomenon noted by Dewey for Java, see Alice Dewey, Peasant Marketing in Java (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962), p. 30. "The patron-client relationship, which is usually found among people who are kin andjor neighbours, also draws people together in a network of rights and obligations. Men who own more than average amounts of land get essential manpower from their clients, who in return receive access to land, for one of the major favours a patron gives is permission to rent or share-crop a portion of his holdings. Thus, large landowners, small farmers and share-croppers alike must depend on tics of kinship and neighbourhood to supply land and/or labour; the agricultural system strengthens these ties and gives them stability through time. Nevertheless, corporate groups do not emerge, even in rural villages." 5. Ouchi et al., Farmer and Village in West Ma/,Jysia (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1977), p. 60. 6. S. Jcgathcesan, "Progress and Problems of Rice Mechanization in Peninsular Malaysia" (Working Paper no. 17, presented at the Persidangan Padi Kebangsaan Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, 1980). 7. This holds for the region as well, where "harvesting of padi using labour is almost totally dependent on labour outside the farm. Only in S per cent of cases do farmers harvest the crop using their family labour solely and these would be small sized farms. 87 per cent of farmers use hired labour exclusively, and another 12 per cent use berderau, a form of exchange labour. Most of the labour is obtained locally (79 per cent), 13 per cent is obtained from Southern Thailand and the balance of 16 per cent from other areas in Kedah, Perlis, Perak and Penang", Wong Hin Soon, "Field Problems in Post-Production Handling of Padi" (Working Paper no. 19, presented at the Persidangan Padi Kebangsaan Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, 1980), p. 18. 8. Wong Hin Soon, ibid., p. 6. 9. For an account of the "many ritual practices, largely animistic in nature, which even six centuries

The Production Cycle and the Division of Labour

127

of adherence to Islam have been unable to eradicate", see LimJoo-Jock, "Tradition and Peasant Agriculture in Malaya", Malayan journal of Tropical Geography 3 (1954): 44 If. 10. According to Wong's 1979 study of Muda farmers, "the farmers estimate that the harvesting losses due to non-optimal harvesting was 20 per cent of the crop on average", Wong, op. cit., p. 6. And further, "much of the fault should go to the shortage of labour experienced during this period ... It is often not possible for farmers to obtain labour at the right time, even if efforts are made well in advance", p. 14. 11. Compare Lorraine Corner, "The Impact of Rural Outmigration on Labour Utilization ofPadi Households in Muda" (Paper presented to the Second International Conference of the Canadian Council for Southeast Asian Studies held at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1982), p. 31: " ... the Malay cultural norm that allows young men, prior to marriage and the obligations of parenthood, considerable freedom from economic and social responsibility in the household". 12. Cf. L. Corner's finding in her four study villages that "the lost labour of the outmigrants was largely being replaced by more intensive use of female family labour on the household farm", op. cit., p. 43. 13. For the important process of transplanting for example, it was estimated for the Muda region that "on the average farm in 1975 only 25 per cent of labour requirements were from family labour while 75 per cent constituted hired and derau" (exchange labour), Jegatheesan, op. cit., p. 8. 14. This steep rise in wage levels can be generalized for the Muda region as a whole. SeeJegatheesan, op. cit., p. 9: "Transplanting labour averaged $19.06 per acre in 1971. By the off-season of 1976 this had risen to $46.09 per acre and $49.65 in the main season 1978/1979". 15. Jegathcesan, op. cit., pp. 1-2. 16. Ibid. 17. This is not taken into account by general statements such as the following: "Also, as observed, some secondary employment opportunities associated with large-scale corn bining such as bagging grain and in-field handling appears to have been created", Jegatheesan, op. cit., p. 14. 18. This is an important qualifier to statements like the one already quoted above: "Rural-urban migration, detected in Muda 1972 (sic), has led to the depletion of once abundant rural labour supplies", Jegatheesan, op. cit., p. 2. 19. For the district, it was estimated that the total labour input for harvesting was reduced from 424 man-hours for the 1979 off-season, to 148 man-hours in the main season 1979. See Yamashita et al., op. cit., p. 52. 20. The same finding was made by Rosemary Barnard in her re-study of her Kedah village in 1978, Rosemary Barnard, "The Modernization of Agriculture in a Kedah Village, 1967-78" (Paper presented at the Second National Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, Sydney, 1978), p. 30: "In 1967 the accepted principle was that poor people should be compensated for their lack of land by being given a relatively larger share in the available employment opportunities. A rich farmer's wife who hired her labour out could be soundly criticised for taking what was not rightfully her share of the available wage employment. Nowadays such an unconcern for the needs of the poor occasions little comment as it has become common: each looks after his or her own interests first. These prevailing attitudes are reflected in many of the changes which have taken place in system (sic) of labour mobilization".

8 Landownership and Land Tenure

INTRODUCTION The picture of the village households painted in the preceding chapters shows them strongly anchored in the padi economy but by no means confmed to it. Forces external to the village padi economy impinge significantly on the access to income and thus on the process of differentiation within the village. Landed property by itself would therefore have been an inadequate indicator for the understanding of the social structure of the village. On the other hand, the quantitative as well as strategic importance of the padi economy cannot be denicd. 1 This leaves us with the question of the distribution of access to land, one of the most crucial factors of production in padi cultivation. When questioned, the most serious problem voiced by the villagers was "land scarcity". Data presented in Chapter 4 indicates however, that the problem for the village household is of an inadequate access to land rather than of absolute landlessness. Less than ten village households were wholly dependent on wage labour; the rest farmed padi, either on rented or owned land. Only one villager farmed slightly more than 20 re, the bulk of which was on rented land. A similar pattern in the distribution of farm size can be found in the Muda region as a whole. As can be seen from Fig. 8.1 the average farm size is 4 acres, with the bulk of the farmers operating less than 2. 7 acres. Those farming 14.2 acres and above accounted for a mere 2 per cent of the farmers. 37 per cent arc owner-operators, 28 per cent are owner-tenants and 35 per cent are tenants, including 8 per cent farm labourers. Furthermore, tenancy is largely between kin, with 71 per cent of tenancy agreements between close rclatives. 2 Drawing from the experience of other agrarian societies which have been subjected

FIGURE 8.1 Percentage Distributio11 of Muda Farmers by Farm Size Groups

% 40

LAND TENURE SYSTEM IN MUDA 37% OWNERS 35% TENANTS 28% ANTS OWNER-TEN

32%

·~,25%

30

20

\12% x---...._ ·--,, 2% 2:.: 0

10

9%

X

10%

0 I

-

%

7

~X -::j.t:====~==~~~~.~

_I

___ _LI _ _ -:·~~~ -~ ~----~·~--~-----8.5 7.0 -4.3 5.7 2.8 1.4 BELOW I

1.3

I

-2.7

-4.2

-5.6

I

-6.9

-8.4

-9.9

FARM SIZE GROUP (ACRES) * Average farm size per family is 4.0 acres. Source: P & E. Mada.

10.0 -11.3

11.4 -12.7

12.8 -14.1

14.2 AND ABOVE

130

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE VILLAGE ECONOMY

to similar pressures of intensive commercialization and land scarcity, one could have expected a much more skewed pattern of access to land: a high degree of land concentration with a resultant pool of available wage labour from landless families. 3 That this fate has yet to overtake the Muda peasantry is one of the most interesting, if theoretically disquieting, findings to have emerged from recent research into the area. Two related arguments, referring to the specificity oflocalland inheritance and land tenure practices, have been offered as explanations for this Muda puzzle. In this chapter, these arguments will be examined in the light of these practices as they operate in this particular village. Seen as complementing the land inheritance system is a tenurial system which is primarily kinship-based in the regulation of access to rented land. 4 Horii, the first to draw attention to the role of kinship in the tenurial system, saw "the clearest indication of the kinship land tenure system in its aspect of mutual aid or "reciprocity'." 5 The CPR reiterated this point with the finding that "if the latter (operator) is a kinsfolk of the farmer there is a one-in-two probability that he is operating the land rent free and he is five times as likely to be doing so than is a nonkin operator. " 6 These two different sets of practices ~ of land inheritance and land tenure ~ motivated by the principle of the sharing of poverty, 7 so the argument runs, account for the continued existence of small and marginal farms in the region. Note that these two sets of practices are seem as complementary in their effects but as unrelated in their actual operation. In the words of the CPR study, the high degree of association between kinship and access to land is not simply a prior reflection of the ultimate inheritance practice. This is to be seen from the fact that a sizable proportion of (44 per cent) of non-owning, kin-related operators are not those who under normal circumstances would inherit the land. 8

Concepts like shared poverty (or income-sharing) 9 and kinship touch on issues which go beyond a mere consideration of access to land and thus will be further discussed in later chapters. By focusing here on the mechanisms regulating access to land in this village, it is hoped that the suitability of the above concepts for the interpretation of data related to land will be clarified.

THE PATTERN OF ACCESS TO LAND IN THE PADI ECONOMY The forms of access to land found in this village have been classified into three categories~ property, usufruct and tenure~ and the relative importance of each mode of acquisition will be examined in the same order. In quantitative terms however, we see from Table 8.1 that property heads the list followed by tenure and then by usufruct. 10 In the following analysis, property has been further subdivided into inherited land, self-pioneered land and purchased land, usufruct into BS TS or family tenure, exchange usufruct and pesaka (ancestral land) and tenure into rent, lease and share-cropping.

131

Landownership and Land Tenure

TABLE 8.1 Distribution of Forms of Access to Operated Padi Land, Main Season 1979/80 Form of Access

Area (in re)

Property Usufruct Tenure

267.55 121 212.45

Property

Inherited Land Rather surprisingly, farming on personal property acquired through inheritance accounted for only 162.15 re out of the surveyed 601 re.l 1 This suggests that access to farm land for the majority of farmers is not determined solely by their actual accession to inherited property by virtue of the implementation of a system of inheritance laws. Of particular interest is the significance of inherited property for the household, as compared to the individual. Table 8.2 below indicates that the access to inherited property via marriage is clearly related to the kind of household formed.

TABLE 8.2 Access to Inherited Property According to Household Type 12 (in relong) Poor n = 37

Male household head Female spouse

Middle

n = 69

18

29

2

7

(69)

Well-to-do n = 15

3

(15)

8

Discussion of the system of land inheritance and marriage which have influenced the present pattern of distribution of inherited land will be entered into later, in conjunction with the pattern of access to usufruct, since it is the author's opinion that the two are closely related.

Clearing of New Land Although inheritance is the main basis of property in this long-settled kampung, land was still available for clearing till the late fifties. Acquisition was possible through the actual work of clearing itself, known locally as tangkap tanah (to catch the land) or by buying over the half-cleared land (with the trees already felled) from the original

132

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE VILLAGE ECONOMY

pioneer, beli usaha (buy the effort). The bulk of land that is being cultivated in the district in fact was opened in the post-World War II period but this was done primarily by outsiders. From the village itself, only ten people took the trouble to acquire new land in this fashion, amounting in all to 69 re. 13 In nearly all cases, they were people with virtually no property of their own but with usufructuary access to land of their parents or parents-in-law, which provided the subsistence base from which they could venture into investitive activity like the opening of new land. Many others, without any alternative subsistence base, opened up land only to have to sell it half-way as usaha (effort expended on land that is only half-cleared), frequently in order to pay off debts incurred.

Land Purchases The third source of property is via purchase. Fifteen households have bought land, involving a total acreage of 68 re. 14 This figure does not include the land bought in the past that has already been subjected to transmission. Interestingly, according to information gleaned from the genealogical records, land transactions seem to have taken place more extensively in the past than in the present double-cropping economy. Thus Tok Ahmad, the village koranic teacher, bought all of his 35 re of padi land and 16 re of rubber smallholdings. Another woman in the village bought 24 re of land, with money accumulated through her earnings as prostitute. Just these two individuals alone bought land amounting to 59 re. The amount of land available for sale was also considerable since many of those who had pioneered new land were forced to sell in order to clear the debts they had incurred in the process. Thus, it would seem that land sales were far more rampant in earlier days than in the recorded cases since the war. Of the 68 re since the war, only 11 were bought after the introduction of doublecropping. The introduction of double-cropping has thus led to a sharp reduction in the frequency of land transactions. Two reasons can be found for this. Firstly, the dramatic increase in the price of land. As land was acquired by the government to make way for the enlargement of the nearby river as part of the irrigation complex for the introduction of double-cropping, the market value of 1 re averaged $600 and compensation was given at $800 per re. In 1979, almost fifteen years later, 1 re of land had a market value of $5,000, which is far beyond the reach of most farmers. Even the larger farmers can only afford to buy 1 or 2 re at a time. Secondly, less land is being offered on the market because, with the onset of double-cropping, there have been fewer cases of sales forced upon by indebtedness. Earlier sales took place as a means of raising cash; with double-cropping, incomes have increased and pajak leasing ofland- has replaced jual janji- mortgaging ofland- as a means of raising capitaL It is interesting to note that in 1979, three cases ofland purchase were effected, an indication that land transactions are picking up again. The 1978 drought, which led to the loss of one crop, seems to have set in train again a process ofland dispossession which will be encouraged by the other trends in the padi economy as discussed in Chapter 7.

Landownership and Land Tenure

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Usufruct Usufruct as used here refers to access to land without legal ownership and without payment of any rent, in other words, corresponding fully to the concept of BSTS, bukan sendiri, tanpa sewa (not one's own, without rent) originally coined by the CPR Study Group. However, it should be noted that the use of the term here differs from that of the CPR study. In the present study, usufruct includes pes aka (claim to ancestral land pending lega'l settlement of the estate), which the CPR study assigns to ownership.15 On the other hand, BSTS tenure or usufruct does not overlap with that of the CPR study's use of the term "family tenure". 16 There is a distinction here between BSTS and what, provisionally, is termed "exchange usufruct". Any analysis of the agrarian structure in the Muda area has to pay attention to the role and nature of usufructuary access to means of subsistence in the land and labour economy. Any adequate analysis however, will have to be built upon a careful distinction of the different forms of usufructuary access, based on the different relations of production into which they are embedded. Collapsing various types of unrelated phenomena into one category of usufructuary access or BSTS and interpreting them all then as expressive of "sharing" practices, as has been done fairly extensively in the literature, can result in rather misleading conclusions about the nature of the padi economy in the area under study.

BSTS or Family Tenure This involves placing land at the disposal of other members of the family, usually in the descending generation, but also occasionally to siblings. It is the clear expression of the moral obligation to provide the economically dependent with a subsistence basis, within the context of the family development cycle. 17 In most cases, usufructuary access to parental land is granted to married children when, after a period of two or three years, the young couple moves out to set up a separate household. In that event, the parents try to provide the couple with a house and some land. The parents are duty-bound to do this, as the couple provided free labour in the parental household and farm during the preceding two to three years. In almost all cases, no rent is paid for the land and it is not considered sewa (rent) but bagi makan (susbsistence - give to eat). In some cases, it involves a reciprocal transaction, insofar as the child then takes it upon himself to feed the parents (for example, Kalifah Rejab) or returns the favour in the form of unpaid labour (for example, Ali Osman, who works the pedestrian tractor belonging to his father, in return for 3.5 re of land). Earlier studies identified this as a form of land tenure, sky-rocketting the rate of tenancy to over 60 per cent, a totally misleading figure due to a misunderstanding of traditional arrangements based on the development of the family life-cycle. Of particular interest here however, is the minor significance of this form of usufruct. Only 40.5 re of land was operated under BSTS, that is, 6.7 per cent of the total operated area. This agrees with Shadli's data from 1976/77, which revealed that 39 re, or 6 per cent of the then-operated area was under BSTS tenure, 18 but is far below the figure

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of 18.8 per cent of total operated area for the Muda Scheme area reported in the CPR study or the 29.5 per cent reported for the district. 19 It is submitted that the difference is due not to the local specificity of the village here under study but to distortions introduced into the data through too broad a use of the category "family tenure", including land owned by spouse as well as the kind of phenomenon discussed below. 20

Exchange Usujruct This includes a variety of arrangements entered into by villagers with the practical intention of facilitating the task of padi cultivation. For example, a co-heir to a piece of land in the village who has now become an urbanite may allow his share of the land to be tilled for free by a sibling in return for the fact that the cost of the parent's burial be borne by the sibling. 21 Or, in the course of jointly opening up new land, the title deed may be put in the name of one sibling or relative for reasons of convenience, but with the clear understanding that part of the land "belongs" to the other, who is to have full access to it. The practice of bergilir and tukar ganti are also to be included here. Bergilir (taking turns) refers to the rotation of access to joint property or pesaka by the co-heirs, usually because the plot is too small for effective subdivision. Tukar ganti involves the exchange of use rights to parcels which are situated more favourably to the residence of the respective farmers, without rent or prejudice to ownership rights. These various arrangements may involve family, kin or non-kin and although an element of goodwill is involved, it is to be distinguished from the moral obligation and asymmetrical reciprocity inherent in the first type of usufruct.

Pesaka It was decided to classify this under usufruct and not under ownership because data from the village suggests that there can be a wide discrepancy between the claims of claimants (and that of practicing "owners") and their actual legal rights. The following two examples may illustrate the significance of the point being made. In the first example, the Land Office Register records L. Darus as being one of the largest landowners in the village, with almost 20 re of padi land and at least another 4 re of rubber smallholdings. This is entirely misleading, since L. Darus must have died at least twenty years ago. However, although he is long since dead, his estate has not been divided. When his eldest son Yaacob left the family to form a new unit of his own, he was given 5 re to operate, although the land remained in L. Darus' name and could have been taken back at any time. In the meantime, Yaacob himself has died and the 5 re are being farmed by his two sons and one daughter. When Lang Cah, L. Darus' daughter married, the new couple stayed with her parents for some time, and upon fission, were granted 2 re for their own operation. Similarly with the other two daughters, who each received 2 re and the second son, who received 5 re. The youngest son, Hj. S., left with the rump of the estate with the premature death ofhis

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father, repossessed the parcels alloted to two of his sisters, and has been cultivating them since. Should the estate be settled, the shares will have to be re-allocated either according to adat or Islamic Law, in which case, the sisters will regain access to their rightful share of the parental estate. There are at least four such cases in the village. In the second example, Y. and S. Ariffin are brothers, both living in the village, yet Y. Ariffin is categorized as a middle peasant while S is one of the poorest peasants in the village. How is this to be explained? Their father had 3.5 re of padi land but upon his death, Y, the younger son, continued operating this land with his mother. With this as a base, he was able to open 7 re of land, which forms the basis of his present well-being. S opened 2.5 re of land while still living with his parents, but upon going to the Land Office to register the land in his name, it turned out that this land had already been claimed by the Penghulu, whereupon S continued to operate that parcel as tenant of the Penghulu. It was only upon the death of his mother many years late.r, and the subsequent division of the parental estate, that he regained his rightful share to the estate. These examples suggest that even where partible inheritance is ordained by law, unequal usufructuary access by the potential heirs is not proscribed in practice, and in fact, almost inevitably arises in the process of transmission. The point here is that the transmission of agricultural land, in contrast to transactions, occurs over an extended time-period and thus has a processual nature, whereas transactions involve a transfer of property at a given point in time. This implies that the role of the transmission of property in the padi economy cannot be derived merely from the legal model of the inheritance system, a point that will be developed later in this chapter. For the present, the extent of this phenomenon, and thus its significance, should be noted. In the village, 80.5 re of the land operated was in the form of tanah pesaka. For the Muda area as a whole, the CPR study estimates that "15.5 per cent of the legally registered owners of padi land ... are deceased''. 22 In conclusion to this discussion on usufruct, it should be noted that the distinction between the three forms of usufructuary access has been deemed necessary because the conditions for their acquisition are basically different and it is these conditions of acquisition which are of primary interest in the discussion on access to land.

Tenure Apart from BSTS, which is not considered here, three forms of land tenure can be found: rent, lease, and share-cropping (sewa, pajak and pawah). Normal rentals are paid either in cash or in kind on a seasonal basis, usually without any written contract and with a fair degree of security of tenure. Share-cropping is self-explanatory and leases are those rentals with a specified time-period, usually over a number of seasons, with the cash or at least part of it being paid before the season begins. The major trend in the economy has been away from share-cropping and rentin-kind to cash rentals as well as to leases. Of the 601 re operated by the farming households, only 2 re were in the form of share-cropping, 65.75 in leases and 144.7 in rent. 23 The trend away from share-cropping is clearly related to the increasing

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commercialization of the padi harvest with the introduction of double-cropping. Furthermore, with the increase in yields per acre as well as in the padi price, it has become much more profitable for the tenant to pay a fixed rent (of $150) than to give up half of the harvest. The usual arrangement is for the cost of production to be shared between the tenant and the landlord, usually with the tenant providing in toto labour services for part of the production process, for example, ploughing. Of all the forms of tenancy, share-cropping thus reflects the most unfavourable arrangement for the tenant. In the season following the one surveyed, two further instances of pawah were entered into. The number is too small to be significant but it may mark nonetheless a new trend which points to the acute land scarcity in the economy. Land is so difficult to come by that people arc being forced into a relatively poor bargain, just in order to be able to get land to operate. By far the most predominant form of land tenure is that of cash rentals and this had often been cited as one of the major reasons for increasing social differentiation in the present economy since cash rent has to be paid before the harvest, in contrast to share-cropping, where no prior capital is needed. In actual fact, cash rentals of this sort do not pose the main obstacle. The major problem to the poor farmer who wants to rent in land is that much of the land which is being made available for rental nowadays is done so in the form oflong-term leases (pajak), leased out by an owner who is short offunds. 24 The capital requirement is thus far greater than the $150 required for normal renting. Another advantage oflcases to the landowner is that he can claim the land back at the stipulated time whereas normal rentals, by virtue both of custom and law, are subject to security of tenure for the tenant. Increasingly, these long-term leases involving many relongs ofland are taken up by Chinese farmers who operate their farms in a capital-intensive manner. Another factor to be noted is the unequal distribution of information. Poor farmers have been heard to complain that even when land is made available for renting or leasing, they hear about it only after it has already been taken- usually by the richer farmer. Clearly we have a situation which does not correspond to that of a "free" land market. It is suggested that the lessor prefers to rent or lease his land to a wellto-do farmer because of other advantages which might come his way apart from the actual rent itself, for example, possibility of credit, employment, and so forth. All this speaks for an increasing concentration in the access to operated land in the peasant economy, regardless of the fact that in terms of landownership, no signs of land concentration can be detected at all (to be further discussed in the final sector of this chapter). In this respect however, the purported ameliorative role of kinship in the land tenure system should be considercd. 25 This was the specific focus ofShadli Abdullah's study, which came to the conclusion that "in this village, it appears that kinship by itself is generally not a determining factor in the arrangements between landlords and tcnants". 26 Taking the criteria of form of payment, formality of agreement, security of tenure and level of rent, he found that no major differences could be found in the arrangements made between kin and non-kin tcnants. 27 The import of this finding can be seen when compared to the conclusion arrived at by the CPR study:

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Kinship appeared to play a major role in determining who got access to padi land not operated by its owners and under what conditions; 71% of such parcels and 63% of the padi land under this category were operated by relatives of the owner. Moreover, they were five times as likely as non-related tenants to be paying no rent for the land. Among rent-paying tenants most (75%) paid in cash, but average rents were not high at around $113 per relong per season ... Since almost six out often rent-paying tenants also are related to their landlords, kinship ties may have set the general rent levels in the MADA area. 28

It is suggested that the role of kinship in regulating access to land in this area has been over-estimated in this CPR study due to an undifferentiated usage of the term "kinship" as well as "family tenure". "Family tenure" has less to do with tenurial access as with a form of usufructuary access limited to a small group of kin-related households. It centainly cannot be equated with "kinship" as such. Tenurial relations between kin who do not fall into this closcly-defmed network do not seem to differ from rental arrangements with non-kin although the kin tie does seem to be useful for determining who gets access to land that is available for rental, especially poor quality land. Its significance as a criterion of exclusion may be rather muted however, in villages like Gclung Rambai, where "more than two-thirds of the villagers ... are related by kinship to one or more of the others". 29 Having rejected to a large extent the argument that kinship and by implication, sharing practices, determine the nature of tenurial access to land, two other forms of access to land, namely, transaction and transmission have to be considered.

LAND TRANSACTION, DISPOSSESSION AND INDEBTEDNESS In an economy where land is the main means of subsistence, the sale of land seems to occur primarily as the final act in a spiralling cycle of indebtedness, triggered by a variety of unusually heavy expenses. The case ofPak Sof, who inherited 8 re ofland but is today one of the few landless villagers, is exemplary. The downward slide began in 1949 when he jual janji 2 re ofland for a credit of $120. Jual janji meant that rights of operation were handed over to the creditor until the debt was repaid. Five years later, Pak Sof jual janji a second piece ofland in order to finance the res possession of the first. Two years later, in 1956, he mortgaged another 3.5 re, this time under the condition that the land had to be redeemed within three years. In 1959, the first land sale was made, when Pak Sof sold the piece ofland he had mortgaged in 1954 in order to raise funds for the redemption of the 3.5 re mortgaged in 1956. Land transactions were thus usually preceded by mortgages, entered into in spite of high interest rates because of the need for credit that could not be met within the village economy. Land dispossession was thus to a large extent a function of "credit scarcity" in the padi economy, which resulted in the helpless dependence on the vicious usury of professional and non-professional moneylenders, in the form of padi kunca andjualjanji. Today, neither of these two forms of credit arc found in the village, indicating that other forms of credit are now available. A closer examination of the

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phenomenon of rural indebtedness is undertaken in Chapter 9. Suffice it to note here that with the chain of indebtedness now broken, the process of dispossession has also slowed down considerably. 30 Land offered on the market thus approximates its market value and under present market conditions is so prohibitively high that transactional movements on a massive scale are not possible.

LAND TRANSMISSION AND THE INHERITANCE SYSTEM The role of poverty-sharing has also been ascribed to land inheritance practices, whether they are seen to be determined by adat or Islamic law. A closer look at land transmission practices however, reveals a discrepancy with the injunctions and administrative provisions of a legal code and machinery. The transmission of property does not begin, as a rule, with the death of the property owners, but with the sequential 'coming of age" of his potential heirs. Adat (customary practice) prescribes that each child, regardless of sex, should be provided (with equal shares) with the means of securing the subsistence of the new family of procreation. The process of transmission is tied here to the family development cycle, a closer examination of which however, will·be postponed to Chapter 12. Superimposed on this practice of on-going transmission is the Islamic Law oflnheritance, applicable in particular to the legal division of the estate of the deceased. As far as the Islamic Law of Inheritance is concerned, the following injunctions should be noted: 1. Whereas all children have a right to the parental land, it is in the ratio of 2:1 for males and females; 2. if all the children are female, then half of the property cannot be inherited by them; 3. an orphan has no right to the property of his grandparents (patah titi- breaking of the bridge); 4. adopted children have no rights of inheritance. In other words, dispossession is possible in the Islamic system. U sufructuary access to subsistence is not guaranteed. The actual process of transmission does include in fact dispossession, in contravention of the spirit of adat, as well as a variety of practices which contravene the injunctions oflslamic Law. With respect to land transmission, the following points should be noted: 1. Phenomena such as BSTS and claimed ownership (pesaka) should be properly understood not as tenurial arrangements but as part and parcel of the process of transmission or property devolution. 2. Dispossession often resulted from the unfair practices of the co-heir or heirs, through manipulation oflegal procedures involved in the settlement of an estate. An estate is deemed divided by the court when two witnesses testify that all heirs are present. All that is required there are two witnesses who are willing to perjure

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themselves. Usually, they are potential buyers of the property in question, which is being settled by the heirs so that the sale can be made. Illiterate heirs, usually young or female, were also often cheated of their inheritance by putting their signature to what was ostensibly a deed of sale, but in reality a renunciation of the inheritance. Senile property owners could also be induced to put their signature onto a document of transfer, known as hebah, donating the entire property to just one heir, in effect disinheriting the others. The phenomenon of cheating is so widespread (although there are no figures ~ only some case studies) that it has become institutionalized as the explanation for ill-fortune: a fall in fortune is attributed to the fact that one has cheated someone else of his property, and is thus being punished by Allah. 3. Alternatively hebah could be used as an instrument to provide those with property who would otherwise be dispossessed or disadvantaged under Islamic Law, for example orphaned grandchildren, or adopted children, wives and daughters. There is a marked reluctance among the Malay landowners to legally transfer their property before their death since property is the only material means of enforcing filial piety from their heirs. 31 The high incidence of hebah is therefore all the more remarkable, and indicative of the importance of the considerations mentioned above. In a study of land transmissions and transactions registered in the district of Krian, Wilson found that "the land donated before death amounts to one third of that transmitted by distribution afterwards". 32 All this points to the inadequacy of reference to the "Islamic Law oflnheritance" or "Adat" as self-explanatory determinants of the process of transmission of property in the Kedah economy. (Lim et al. for example, estimates that the present number of 78,000 owners in the Muda region is "less than half the number of owners which would have obtained had the transmission process been operating alone by itself [my emphasis]" and attributes the discrepancy to the force of transaction. 33 It is submitted that the astounding size of the discrepancy is due not merely to the counter-vailing force of transaction but to the discrepancy between the actual process of transmission itself and the stated norms of adat or the Islamic Law of Inheritance, as analyzed above). One may certainly conclude that the force of property devolution works against that of market transactions in this village economy but it is not possible to equate the actual process of property transmission with the legal injunctions oflslam or adat and their purported norm and operation of the "sharing of poverty". In this respect it may be worth quoting at some length the verdict of a study into the inheritance systems in Europe between 1700-1900, which were to a large extent also characterized by partible inheritance: Inheritance systems and practices are examples of mechanisms which are often mentioned as explaining land fragmentation, changing social structure and population patterns. What our survey shows is not that inheritance is irrelevant, but that it cannot be assumed to always operate. The majority of today's legal profession is not primarily engaged in clarifying or enforcing the law. Rather, the function of a large number of lawyers consists in helping clients to bend,

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circumvent and otherwise use the law to their best economic advantage. The same must have been true of peasants and their notarians in the past. There arc circumstances where what looks like the effect of the inheritance system will in fact be the result of economic and demographic factors. To find out one has to know the local patterns of land tenure, the village economy, and of course one has to know the inheritance system actually operated in practice. 34

CHANGES IN THE PATTERN OF ACCESS TO LAND It was mentioned earlier in this chapter that access to operated land is becoming more difficult in spite of the fact that no trend towards a concentration of landownership can be detected. In the absence of comparative data over time on the village pattern ofland tenure 35 and the recorded fact of a high turnover in the operation of padi lands in the region (implying open access), 36 the indicators for a tightening of the tenurial market mentioned above can serve merely as suggestive of a trend towards increasing concentration. In this final section therefore, two other sets of" data" will be examined which confirm the above suspicion as a long-term trend and help illuminate the mechanisms involved.

Trends in Tenure of Farms in Muda, 1955-1975/76 The important census of landownership and tenure in the Muda region carried out by the Centre of Policy Research in 1975/76 led to the identiftcation of a long-term decline in tenancy, given the availability of comparative data from 1955 and 1966. 37 The situation in 1955 was characterized by an "extensive degree of tenancy" with the largest group of farmers belonging to the pure tenant class. The largest farmers were the owner-tenants, with tenancy appearing as an important mechanism for increasing the farm size of commercially oriented farmers. Between 1955 and 1966, a trend towards a decline in tenancy was already noticeable, which Lim et al. attribute to "steady increases in productivity in the Muda area ... as a result of the expansion in the irrigation system". 38 The main change found in the 1975/76 study was "the big drop in pure tenancy. At the same time, there was a corresponding increase in owners' share offarms and area, making them the main category of operators" [my emphasis]. 39 Lim et al. conclude that notwithstanding the factor of kin relationship which facilitates access to land for landless operators and which enabled many tenants to continue operating during this period despite the pressure exerted by population growth and the increasing attractiveness of owner-operation, tenants, in Muda as elsewhere, historically are a class of cultivators vulnerable to displacement, and the Green Revolution can be said to have accelerated its dissolution 40

The land withdrawn from tenancy has accrued to all size categories of owners but it has been the larger owners who have profited most, operating now 5 per cent more

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of the total area. Consequently, the gini index for the degree of concentration of farm operation has risen from .388 to .455. As the CPR study notes, whatever the mechanism, however, the overall result of commercialization of agriculture in the Muda region on the distribution of farm size has been polarization, with at one pole an increasing proportion of farmers operating large farms on an increasing proportion of the padi land and, at the other an increasing proportion of farmers operating small farms on a decreasing proportion of the padi land. 41 The example below, involving 60 re of village land, is designed to serve as an illustration of some of the mechanisms involved.

Trends in Tenure at the Village Level: The Example of One Estate One of the largest landowners in the village, with an estate of 60 re, was Penghulu Yaacob who had cleared the land, according to his grandson, with the aid of krah or corvce labour. As a matter of fact, several villagers had cleared contiguous strips ofland which made up these 60 re but upon going to the Land Office to register their claims, it was found that the land had already been registered in the Penghulu's name. Subsequently, they became tenants of the Penghulu, operating the land rent-free for a number of years, before rent-in-kind was imposed. Before the death of the Penghulu, the estate was passed on intact to his eldest son, the head of the secret society, Ariffin, via hebah, with his brother and sister being bypassed in the inheritance. Ariffin however was forced to sell the estate to a businessman in Alor Star after having got himself heavily into debt. The tenancy agreements continued, with rent converted to cash rent after the harvest. Altogether, five tenants were involved, one of whom, operating 30 re, lived in a nearby village. The other large plot of 16.5 re was further subrented by the tenant Tok Dut, the successor to Ariffin's position as head of the secret society, to various other villagers. T ok Dut was responsible for collecting the rents from all the tenants and for all contacts with the absentee landlord. Upon his death, the land was inherited by his two daughters, also living in Alor Star. The two sisters had borrowed money to invest in a business enterprise on Langkawi Island (in North Kedah) and obviously were in need of cash. In 1972, as Pak Lah, the tenant with 30 re, needed money for his mother and was unable to pay, he was evicted. The land that he had been renting was turned over to two Chinese shopkeepers, operating as share-croppers in the ratio of50:50. 42 (As has been mentioned above, sharecropping under present conditions of a secure and high return to padi provides the owner with higher returns than the present level of cash rent.) In 1980, the owners cancelled the tenancy agreement with all other tenants except for that with Tok Dut, who was allowed to retain the 5 re he had been operating himself. The land was to be handed over to the same two shopkeepers. One of the tenants, Pad Ad, who had cleared the land he had been operating on for the last twenty-five years with his own hands, and was now being evicted, saw no possibility of renting land from elsewhere, and was contemplating asking his daughter, who was operating 8 re of rented land, to sub-rent part of the land to him.

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CONCLUSION Access to padi land in this village is acquired through personal ownership, through usufruct and through tenure. In view of the acute land scarcity, as well as the frequency with which recourse is made in the literature to inheritance laws as an explanatory variable, it comes as somewhat of a surprise that personal ownership of property accounts for access to less than 50 per cent of farmed land in the village. The riddle is not solved however by appealing to the redistributive nature of the tenurial system, which can only be done by lumping together a variety of practices under the rubric of "family tenure" and identifying them as part of the tenurial system. This would be just as misleading as the earlier studies which saw in the same data, signs of severe agrarian distress because of the "high rate of tenancy". It has been argued in this chapter that BSTS or family tenure belongs to the category of usufruct and not to tenure, and that it should be rigorously delineated from other forms of usufruct which are not redistributive in nature. So defmed, BSTS accounted for an insignificant 6.7 per cent of the total operated area in this village. The fundamental changes currently at work in the economy of land in fact are taking place in the tenurial system, land scarcity making itself felt in the repossession as well as reallocation of tenanted land. NOTES 1. See particulars in Chapter 6. 2. Figures cited in Zakaria Ismail, "Economic and Social Aspects ofPadi Production: Some Recent Trends" (Paper presented at the Seminar on Economics, Development and the Consumer, CAP, Penang, Malaysia, 1980), p. 1. 3. See for example the literature on the Green Revolution cited in Chapter 1. 4. Gibbons et al., Land Tenure in the Muda Irrigation Area (Penang, Malaysia: Centre for Policy Research, 1981). 5. Kenzo Horii, "The Land Tenure System of Malay Padi Farmers: A Case Study of Kampong Sungei Bujor in the State of Kedah", The Developing Economies 10, no. 1 (March 1972): 60. 6. Gibbons et al., op. cit., p. 62. 7. With regard to land inheritance, Gibbons et al., op. cit., p. 20: "The actual result of such extreme subdivision of ownership, therefore, may be shared poverty". Horii uses the same term to qualify the practice of adjustable rents: "It should be noted that sewa hidup in the Malay rice-growing area is generally based on a principle of'shared poverty', ie. an effort to distribute more evenly among one's kin the poverty resulting from the smallness of the production scale rather than having the landowner himself bear the burden of the instability of rice production." Horii, op. cit., p. 60. 8. Gibbons et al., op. cit., p. 50. 9. Income-sharing is the term used by Fujimoto, and will be discussed in a later chapter. 10. This should be compared with Shadli's fmdings in 1976, where total operated area was found to be 645 re. See Mohd. Shadli Abdullah, "The Relationship of the Kinship System to Land Tenure: A Case Study ofKampung Gelung Rambai" (Master's thesis, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, 1978). The difference is due partly to loss of land by the villagers and perhaps to slight variation in planted acreage due to the different seasons in which the surveys were carried out. Between 1976 and 1979, 30 re of padi land owned by a non-resident owner had been sold, whereupon the tenants were displaced by a lease agreement by the new owner with a non-resident operator. This had serious implications which will be discussed in a later chapter. 11. Shadli's figure of 336 re in the form of inherited property is calculated not on the basis of the land operated by the individual farmer but on the basis of the village as a whole, thus including land acquired through inheritance which is being rented out to another farmer. Shadli's figure also seems to include the category "pesaka", subsumed in this chapter under "usufruct", land still registered in the name of a deceased although the estate has been inofficially divided between the heirs.

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12. No explanation can be offered here for the extraordinarily low number of female landowners, which seems to contradict the CPR finding that: "there is a large number of female owners of shares of padi land in the Muda Irrigation Scheme area, that they are represented in all size classes and age groups and that they constitute a significantly higher proportion than male owners only in the smallest area category, that below one relong", Gibbons, Lim, Elliston and Shukor Kassim, Land Tenure in the Muda Irrigaiion Area, Final Report, Part I! (Penang: Centre for Policy Research, 1981), p. 19. The figure above is based on nuclear family households and excludes female landowners not operating their own land. Nonetheless, the discrepancy remains puzzling. 13. Shadli cites the figure of 87 re, op. cit., p. 64. My source of information in this case, and with regard to land purchases, was derived from an informant, and not from a census of the village population. Shadli's figures in these respects can be taken to be more complete. 14. Shadli' s figure is 82 re. 15. "Some operators claim ownership on the grounds that they are the intended inheritors of the deceased landowner but legal transmission of the title has not yet occurred, we have treated land in this category (pesaka) as a form of ownership", Gibbons et al., op. cit., p. 45. 16. Gibbons et al., op. cit., p. 41 ff. 17. Note that of the 21 cases found of BSTS in this village in 1976 by Shadli, "all but four are between 'very close' relatives" and "the four cases in which 'near' and 'distant' relatives are involved are all exceptional in some respect". Shadli, op. cit., p. 135. 18. Shadli, op. cit., p. 109. 19. Gibbons et al., op. cit., p. 46, Table 17. See also Yamashita, Wong an,! Jegatheesan, Farm Management Studies (Japan: MADA and Tropical Agricultural Research Centre, 1980), p. 13, Table 6. 20. CPR's inclusion of land owned by the spouse under BSTS is not discussed here under usufruct but considered as property belonging to the household farm. See the discussion of this issue in CPR, op. cit., p. 1. 21. Wilson mentions this as well in his study ofland inheritance in Perak: "Land may be renounced in favour of the person who bore the expenses at the funeral", T.B. Wilson, "The Inheritance and Fragmentation of Malay Padi Lands in Krian, Perak", Malayan Agricultural journal 38, no. 2 (1955): 85. 22. Gibbons et al., op. cit., p. 5. 23. Compare the situation in 1976, where cash rentals accounted for 119 re, rent-in-kind for 27 re and leases for 83 re for the then 645 re of land under operation. No cases of share-cropping were recorded. Shadli, op. cit., p. 109. 24. Compare Shadli, op. cit., p. 112: "But an important aspect of the rental system in this kampung is that pajak lease, an agreement for more than a year, is almost as important as fixed rent in cash involving a season or a year. Even though Kampung Gelung Rambai is not representative of the whole Muda region, its situation demonstrates that such a situation is now more frequent than formerly. And as noted earlier, the need for immediate cash forces rice-growers to rent their land under pajak lease rather than for shorter-term cash arrangements or rather than to sell their land." 25. See for example: Lorraine Corner, "The Impact of Rural Outmigration on Labour Supply and Cultivation Techniques in a Double Cropped Padi Area, West Malaysia - Preliminary Report", mimeo., 1979, p. 24: " ... given rural Malay social norms and their generally non-commercial orientation preference will normally be given to tenants who are close kin and the rentals asked tend to be low and determined as much by social and moral as by economic considerations". 26. Shadli, op. cit., p. 149. 27. Ibid., p. 144 ff. Interestingly, Corner detects a different finding in Shadli's analysis. "As Mohd. Shadli Abdullah implied in his study of kinship and land tenure ... the padi economy of the present time, even in the relatively more developed and modernised area remains in many respects an economy where non-economic relationships dominate the agricultural organisation". Corner, op. cit., p. 21. 28. Gibbons et al., op. cit., p. xvi. 29. Shadli, op. cit., p. 144. 30. A similar argument is offered by T.G. Lim, D.S. Gibbons and Shukor Kassim: Production increases have expanded substantially the surplus available to all farming households, including poor ones; more important, the stability in production, increased frequency of income in the 70s and access to alternative sources of credit have resulted in the virtual elimination of the padi kunca system and reduced the number of qadai and jual janji, thereby making it less easy for poor peasants to be dispossessed of their land", T.G. Lim, D.S. Gibbons, Shukor Kassim, "Accumulation ofPadi Land in the Muda Region: Some Findings and Thoughts on their Implications for the Peasantry and Development", in Peasantry

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THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE VILLAGE ECONOMY

and Modernization, ed. Hairi Abdullah and H.M. Dahlan, Special Issue of Akademika 20 & 21 (January-July 1982): 276. 31. This points to the fact that the devolution of property here cannot be seen merely from the perspective of production constraints for the heir; rather, the transmission of property involves a network of inter-gencrational exchanges, whose nature can only be understood when the constraints of the entire "family development cycle" are taken into account. 32. Wilson, op. cit., p. 79. 33. T.G. Lim, D.S. Gibbons, Shukor Kassim, op. cit., p. 10. 34. L. Berkner, and F. Mendels, "Inheritance Systems, Family Structure and Demographic Patterns in Western Europe", in Historical Swdies of Changing Fertility, cd. C. Tilly (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977). 35. Shadli's data from 1976/77 are of too recent origin to act as a baseline for the data presented here, collected in 1978/79. 36. See M. Yamashita, H.S. Wong and S. Jegatheesan, Farm Management Studies, Oapan: MADA and Tropical Agricultural Research Centre, 1980), p. 20. "From 1978 to the off-season 1979,35% of farmers changed the cultivating area; 23% of the sampled farmers also changed their cultivating area from the off-season 1979 to the main season 1979." 37. See T.G. Lim, D.S. Gibbons, Shukor Kassim., op. cit., p. 31-43. All references made in this section are taken from this paper. 38. Ibid. p. 35. 39. Ibid., p. 38. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., p. 44. 42. Shadli, op. cit., p. 119.

9 Rural Indebtedness and the Marketing of Padi

INTRODUCTION Quite in contrast to the view that "in a traditional Malay rice-producing village the role of capital and credit in the agricultural economy is very limited", 1 the close relationship between indebtedness and marketing was already established in the early stage of commercialization of the padi economy. As noted by Sharom Ahmat, the farming out of tax revenues by the Kedah sultanate to Chinese revenue farmers at the turn of the century was the first step in this direction. One way in which the Chinese revenue farmers ensured that a large and regular supply of padi was available for the export market, was to get Malay peasants into debt ... What normally happened of course, was that the rakyat was unable to honour the loan on time, and this meant that he had either to hand over a more than proportionate share of the harvest or lose the land. 2

By the mid-fifties, four-fifths of all the padi farmers in the Kedah region were reported to have handed over part of their crop to the buyer, who had provided them with credit under the padi kunca arrangement. 3 The padi buyer was usually the village shopkeeper or a shopkeeper in the nearest town, from whom groceries and other consumer items were also obtained on credit. Each shopkeeper would be associated with a miller, from whom he acquired credit to finance the padi kunca deals and similarly, each mill would be financed by one of the large Chinese banks. Thomson mentioned that in one year, one bank alone lent out more than $12 million to mills in the Kedah area. Thomson also estimated that through the system of padi kunca, farmers lost out on half the value of the crop. 4 The pervasive and pernicious character of rural

146

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE VILLAGE ECONOMY

indebtedness, with its interlocking into the marketing system, has become almost legendary. 5 What were however the characteristics of the peasant economy which made this an endemic feature of peasant life? The desperate need for cash which the padi kunca arrangement exploited was often, in the context of a single-cropping padi economy, not a problem of absolute shortage or deficit but of liquidity. 6 Two main features of the "traditional" economy account for this. The first is the fact of seasonal cash flow based on the padi cycle. Peasants try to accommodate to this by selling off only part of the stock upon harvesting and then selling off the rest as and when cash is needed. But of course, this does not always ~ork out given the second feature of the peasant economy, namely, the frequency and unpredictability of crisis situations and the attendant need for unforeseen expenditures. Accidents, illness, death - all require extra cash outlays which will first eat into the padi stocks, and then result in indebtedness before the next harvest comes in. The following case, taken from a report on another village, is illustrative: Abdul Razak was born in the 1920s in southern Kedah. His parent were padi cultivators but owned no land. So he moved to this region in 1950 and was able to obtain a license to clear some land. He was able to clear only four relongs because most of the land was already alloted. It took nearly three years before he could grow enough padi to feed himself. In the meantime, he worked for neighbouring peasants and was paid mostly in kind. In the mid-fifties, he married a woman from a neighbouring village. She gave birth to a girl in 1955, then to a son and in 1957 to another son. Abdul Razak was quite ill at that time, not having recovered from the hard times of land clearance. He was too weak to really till his bendang properly, his wife also fell sick and he had to borrow $2500, giving his land as collateral. After a series of bad harvests he was unable to pay his debt and his land was taken away from him. Then his wife died along with the daughter she was giving birth to ... 7

The regularity however, with which peasants were confronted with these cns1s situations led to the development of that social relationship which became institutionalized as the bertowkay relationship. A towkay is a term generally used to refer to a wealthy Chinese businessman. To have a towkay tetap, a fixed towkay, meant that a farmer gets ac~ess to credit, both consumption and production, from that one man, in return for which he sells all his padi to him. Duk makan towkay itu (living off that towkay) is used frequently to express this relationship. It is this bertowkay relationship which has earned the polemical wrath of those who see the "middlemen" as the true exploiters of the peasants through their monopsony control of the marketing. 8 The marketing of padi and the pattern of indebtedness in the village in the late seventies presented a totally different picture. In the rest of the chapter, the system of marketing will first be examined, and then an analysis of its relationship to the new pattern of indebtedness and credit which has arisen within the context of a double-cropping padi economy.

Rural Indebtedness and the Marketing of Padi

147

CHANGES IN THE MARKETING SYSTEM The Seller's Level For the minor season of1979/80, there were 136 households in the village, operating 581.5 re of padi land, with a total yield of 9,713.5 guni sacks of padi. This gave an average yield of 16.7 guni sacks per relong, but it must be borne in mind that about 30 re is land that cannot be reached by the irrigation canals of the MADA network. This land is, however, also cultivated twice a year, depending on natural rainfall and the aid of small water pumps. The yield is low and in a few cases this season, the crop failed entirely. The average yield has thus been brought down by these unirrigated fields. Otherwise, the average yield for the irrigated lands for this season, which was a good one, would, at a rough estimate, be about 18 guni sacks per relong. The home consumption needs per household are about 5 guni sacks for one season of six months, amounting to 690 sacks. This leaves a marketable surplus of9,000 guni sacks of padi. The marketable surplus is thus much higher now than the 45 per cent to 55 per cent estimated by Thomson for Kedah in the mid-fifties. 9 The harvesting took place in January and February. By mid-March, that is, while the price of padi was still reeling from a seller's market, 5,021 guni sacks, or slightly more than half of the marketable surplus, had been sold. At the beginning of April, the price began to rise again. To be exact, the moisture content deduction was decreased from an average of 25 katis per pikul to four katis per pikul. (Since there is a Guaranteed Minimum Price, price fluctuations are reflected in the amount that the dealer deducts for the "moisture content" of the padi.) The normal pattern is for a farmer to sell part of his crop to cover consumption debts accumulated in the course of the season and to pay for the large cash outlay that has now become necessary for harvesting. The rest of the crop is kept until prices rise again, and also as a form of savings to finance expenditure during the next six months until the next harvest. Some larger middle and well-to-do farmers, especially those with other sources of current income, keep their entire stock of padi until prices rise again. Nine farmers in the village still had reserves of 100 gunis and more by the end of March. Actually, for this season, the number of farmers who had sold more than they would otherwise have done was fairly high because of confusion engendered by a new marketing scheme generally known as the "subsidy scheme", the details of which will not be discussed here. A second consequence of the "subsidy scheme" was a remarkable increase in the percentage of the crop that was sold to the LPN (Lembaga Padi Nasional), the national marketing authority.

Farm-Gate Price for Farmers The actual farm-gate price received depends primarily on when the padi is soldduring the peak season, when deductions are high, or thereafter. For example, for the minor season of 1980, by April, the deduction had come down to four katis although for that particular season, due to the above mentioned "subsidy scheme", the offered price of padi did not go up.

148

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE VILLAGE EcoNOMY

According to the mills interviewed, about 60 per cent of their padi comes in during the peak season, and this is confirmed by the data on sales in Kampung Gelung Rambai. The level of deduction at this period has been estimated by one lorry operator at 16 katis, which seems to be a fair estimation. From a big mill, during the dry season, it varies from 10-15 katis, but it is likely that this figure is slightly underestimated. At the Guaranteed Minimum Price of$28 per pikul, the farmer who sells during the peak season is thus likely to get per sack (130 katis) $30.10, after the following deductions. 16 katis to mill 2 katis to dealer (cheating) 2 katis shortweight transport labour cost

4.48 .56 (the margin can sometimes be higher or lower) .56 .50 .20 6.30

Farm-gate price: $36.40 - $6.30

= $30.10

This means that the farmer would get 23}' per kati (25}' with the $2 per pikul subsidy) for his padi. The consumer pays a retail price of64}' per kati. Given the long marketing and processing chain between the buyers and the consumers it can be concluded that the returns to the farmer relative to that of the middlemen is no longer as disadvantageous as it was in the fifties.

The Buyer's Level At the buyer's level, the system has changed considerably. First of all, the number and kinds of immediate buyers has increased. In some villages, for example, Pulau Pisang, the village shopkeepers still buy padi, though it is not certain whether they do so as independent dealers or as a fixed dealer for a specific mill. Otherwise, as in Gelung Rambai, all the four former shopkeepers who used to buy padi have given up doing so; the villagers now deal directly with the dealer in the small town, namely, Tunjang. Alternatively, they may sell their padi to small mills close to the village. Of course, they may now decide to sell their padi directly to LPN. There is no data pertaining to the marketing of crops in the other seasons but village estimates put the percentage of the crop which was normally sold to the LPN at less than 20 per cent. The national figure is 19 per cent. For this season, of the 5,021 sacks which were sold, 2,144 went to the LPN. The nature of the bertowkay relationship has also changed with the disappearance ofpadi kunca (to be discussed later): The farmers who now have a towkay tetap to whom they are often indebted and to whom their padi is normally "tied" are often not the poor farmers but the middle and especially the well-to-do farmers. The problem for the poor farmers is essentially that of credit worthiness. If they do not have a substantial surplus for sale to the towkay, credit is not likely to be advanced to them. Alternatively, it may be a farmer who may be operating little land but has left with

Rural Indebtedness and the Marketing of Padi

149

the towkay his land title deed or some other form of security. He then gets access to credit but has to pay interest. For many of the cases, however, the surprising fact that emerges is that officially, no interest is charged on the credit taken, both in the form of monetary loans, and of goods from the grocery store. Two reasons can be advanced for this. The first one is that the relationship creditordebtor is often reversed. Especially in the early days, a farmer sometimes collected the money from the proceeds of his padi only after a few months had elapsed. He simply left the money with the towkay until he needed i t - this in an economy before banks and the national postal savings network had established themselves. When therefore he needed to borrow money from the towkay to cover harvesting costs or finance some particular investment, and the loan could be repaid by the next season, the towkay charged no interest on the loan either. There is even one informant who lent money to his towkay and refused to accept interest on it, since he explained, "this is against Islam". Recently, when he took a loan from the towkay to fmance a land purchase, the towkay did not charge any interest on it either. A second reason is that hidden interest may be charged insofar as cheating may take place in the calculation of sales value, both of the padi sold by the farm as well as the consumption goods bought by him. This was often mentioned by farmers as one reason why they stopped their towkay relationship with somebody. However, many others mentioned that occasionally they double-check and find that they have not been cheated. These remarks come from the bigger farmers. In Gelung Rambai, there are altogether thirty-nine farmers who have a fixed towkay, which means 22 per cent of the village households. Of the eleven towkays mentioned, four are the most important: Ok with nine farmers, Hooi with eight and Joo and Chat with six each. Between them and their clients they already account for 1,552 guni sacks of padi, that is, 30 per cent of the total amount sold. As mentioned earlier, the amount sold to the private sector was less that year due to the "subsidy scheme". As we can see from the Table9.1, a general trend away from this towkay-client structure can also be noted over the years. This seems to have affected mainly the middle farmers. Thus Ok, who now has nine clients in the village, used to have nineteen more. TABLE 9.1 Comparison of Villagers with Towkay, 1980 and before Double-croppinJ? Number of Fixed Clients Name of Towkay Ok

1980

Before Double-croppir1g

Hooi Joo Chat others

9

28

8 6 6 10

n.a. n.a. n.a.

Total

39

14

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THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE VILLAGE ECONOMY

Hooi, who has eight now, used to have six others. The reasons usually given by those who no longer have any more fixed towkay range from: cheating, stopped farming on a large scale, no further necessity because of alternative source of current income to finance consumption, desire to support Malays. The loosening of the towkay-client bond in Gelung Rambai is testified to not only by the villagers themselves (the above information was derived from a census of all village households taken after the 1980 padi season) but the padi dealers as well. Thus, in an interview with a padi dealer in Tunjang, it was discovered that the number of his teng ka (Hokkien for fixed clients) has dropped considerably and that the value of the loans he now advances has halved since double-cropping days. He attributed this to the fact that the farmers are now wealthier, and that government sources of credit are also available. It would seem, therefore, that at the buyer's level, the monopsony structure of the market characteristic of the fifties is in the process of disintegrating. 10 With regard to the big farmers, however, as one of them put it, "nak sokong Melayu (LPN) pun susah, Cina muda duit'' (even though we want to support the Malays, it's difficult because it's easy to get money from the Chinese). Because of the seasonal nature of padi income, large farmers are in constant need of credit, both consumption and investment. Rather than sell their padi early, they will take goods on credit from the towkay until the price of padi rises. They also need a lot of money to fmance harvesting operations since a large part of that is done either by wage labour or mechanically. Sometimes, they need money to fl.nance new investments. The second major change to the system, as far as the marketing of padi is concerned, is that all transactions arc now done in the medium of weights, that is, katis and the pikul, rather than in measures. This means probably that less cheating is now possible although it is widely assumed that the weights in the mills are adjusted to register two katis less. But certainly, measurement in volume was far more open to abuse. Thirdly, now that padi is also harvested during the rainy season, the phenomenon of moisture content deduction has come to assume a far more important role in the determination of the actual farm-gate price which the farmer receives. Moisture content deduction is done in a fairly arbitrary manner and mills now prefer to stick to the Guaranteed Minimum Price and regulate their purchases of padi by varying the level of the deduction. It is in fact the extent of the moisture content deduction which now is the primary determinant of whether much profit is made at the level of purchase of padi and it is not uncommon to hear of deductions of up to 60 per cent, especially during the wet season. Since the large mills have driers, their profit margin can be considerable during the wet season, whereas for the farmers it almost invariably means that real income for the wet season is lower than for the dry one because of lower farm-gate prices.

The Miller's Level The small mills often offer a higher price for padi, as well as lower deductions for

Rural Indebtedness and the Marketing of Padi

151

moisture content. All small mills still hold the license for service milling (milling for domestic consumption) which the government began issuing in the thirties but many of them started illegal commercial milling especially in the seventies. Most of them now combine commercial milling with service milling. For most of them, half of the padi comes from the farmers themselves and half through dealers. Especially during the latter half of the season, when farmers are selling off one or two sacks at a time to meet immediate cash needs, they prefer to sell to the small mills than to the large ones. Some of the small mills are also operated jointly with a grocery store so that like a padi dealer, the small miller also gives credit to certain farmers whom he knows well, who would then sell all their padi to him. In 1979, it was estimated that 30 per cent of all padi in Kedah was milled by the small mills. Although there are about 360 licensed small mills in the state (the number has not changed in the past few years because the government has not been issuing any new licenses), only about 120 are doing commercial milling. The large mills - forty-six of them in Kedah alone - get all their padi through dealers or agents. Each mill seems to have roughly about twenty such dealers but I am not sure whether these are always fixed dealers, or whether they are free to sell to whomever they wish. Facilities offered to the dealers also seem to vary: some offering credit, some not, some offering free transportation, some not, some offering a commission on every sack brought in by the dealer, others conniving in cheating with the weight of the padi. The mills continue to be financed by the urban banks. They account for 25 per cent the padi milled. LPN has been making great efforts at penetrating the market and has now seventeen mills in the region. They are obliged to buy at the Guaranteed Minimum Price of $26, $28, and $30 per pikul and before the "subsidy scheme", were accounting for 20 per cent of total purchases made in the region. Problems associated with LPN mills are the lack of transport facilities and the fact that payment is made in cheque. At this point, it should be remembered that Thomson's study in 1954 recorded twenty-nine "self-contained automatic mills" in Kedah, where there was also one government mill and more than 200 "small horizontal type hullers". 11 However, he noted, "all the small mills operate on a hire service basis. None seemed to function as principals buying padi on their own account and marketing in milled product". 12 Unfortunately, the data for milling capacity in terms of tons of rice per year is not available but even from the table (Table 9.2) it should be clear that there has been a TABLE 9.2 Number of Mills in Kedah, 1954 and 1980 Types of Mills Large commercial mill Government mill Small hire-service mill Licensed for hire service Illegal commercial milling

1954

1980

29

46

1

200

17

360 120

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THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE VILLAGE ECONOMY

tremendous increase, not only in the milling capacity now available in the region, but also of the form of milling capacity now available. 13 Of particular note is the tremendous increase in the number of small mills which now engage illegally in commercial milling, as well as the tremendous increase in the number of governmentowned mills. This development testifies first of all to the tremendous increase in production in Kedah since double-cropping was introduced in 1970. "Padi production which was 268,000 tons in 1965 increased to 678,000 tons in 1974 and is expected to reach 718,000 tons by 1980". 14 Since 1970, the number oflicensed small mills, that is, licensed for hire-service milling, has remained static, since the government has not been issuing any new licenses. It seems that as production in the region increased, especially with the favourable returns to rice production and milling in the early seventies (in 1973, the price of rice rose dramatically from $1.60 a gantang to $2.20 a gantang due to shortages in the international market), small mills stepped in to fill the gap more efficiently than could the big mills or the government mills. 15 Due to lower costs of production, and proximity to the padi producers, small mills could expand their milling operations to cover commercial milling as well, although this was forbidden by the terms of their license. The tremendous expansion in the last ten years has also led to a surplus in milling capacity in the region, a factor which has to be taken into account when analysing some of the recent developments in the marketing system in the last year. This excess capacity has benefited the farmers to the extent that mills have to compete with each other to get access to padi during the off-season, when the bulk of padi has already been sold. At this time, the moisture content deduction charged by the mills is considerably lower. Furthermore, the small mills then usually offer lower moisture content deductions than the large mills.

RURAL INDEBTEDNESS AND THE MARKETING OF PADI The marketing system today is thus characterized by a multiplicity of buyers and sellers, no longer tied to each other via a network of indebtedness which forces the seller to deliver his crop at absurdly low prices to his buyer and creditor. It was a pattern of indebtedness symptomatic of a vicious cycle of deepening debt that was a major mechanism for the increasing pauperization of the peasantry. Underlying the changes in the marketing system are the changes in the conditions of production which have done away with the desperate need for consumption credit upon which the former pattern of indebtedness was based. 16 Padi kunca, the borrowing of padi in kind at usurious interest rates before the new harvest was in, is no longer found in the village. Today, some poor families do run out of padi, usually about a month or two before the new harvest, and have to borrow (pinjam) from a friend or relative, but this loan in kind is returned without interest when the new harvest comes in.

Rural Indebtedness and the Marketing of Padi

153

Characteristic of the new pattern of indebtedness is therifore its disconnection with the marketing of padi. 17 Those whose credit needs are still met by their padi dealers in

Tunjang are the middle and wealthy farmers with fairly substantial surpluses of marketable padi. Altogether, twenty-two such households had standing accounts with a grocery store in Tunjang. This form of consumption credit however, works almost on the same principle as a supermarket credit card. They pick up whatever goods they wish from the grocery store- and pay at the end of the season with padi. Partly for the convenience, as with users of credit cards, partly because they would rather keep their money for investment purposes, or wait for the padi price to rise. Of more importance to them is the production credit which is made available to them by their towkay. The costs of production, especially for harvesting, requires a considerable cash outlay. The harvesting and threshing of the padi which may be done with hired labour or with the combine harvester has to be paid for, as well as the transportation of the padi and so forth. For the big farmers especially, over a $1,000 is necessary. They take a production loan from the towkay to whom they will be handing over the padi as soon as it is threshed, that is, almost immediately. In fact, most of the farmers do not even consider this as hutang (loan) and do not mention it when asked whether they have become indebted for the season. This loan is given interest-free. Production loans are also given from MADA. Seventeen people admitted to having taken cash loans, ranging in value from $200 to $2,800. The bulk of the loans seems also to have been for production purposes - to pay for a lease on land, to help pay for purchase of land, and so forth. There was also a farmer who borrowed to finance the construction of his house. These essentially investment loans come either from the towkay or increasingly from banks. Investment loans are usually to finance land purchase or purchase of agricultural machinery, like a tractor. A farmer normally tries to arrange it in such a way that part of the cost will be borne from the savings of the past few years, and the rest is made up with the loan - straddling harvests of the past and the future. Consumption credit on the other hand, is no longer raised on the basis of the standing crop or the cultivable land. A number of poor households had accounts with the village stores but in no case did the value exceed $100. The pawning of jewellery seems to have become the major means of raising consumption credit. Thirty-seven villagers admitted to having pawned their jewellery - ranging from $50 to $1,000. Pawning was done for a variety of reasons - to finance current consumption (belanja dapor), for special expenses like paying of examination fees, and also for production expenses like renting in ofland. It is common to see necklaces and bangles reappear on the womenfolk after the harvest, when money is available for redemption of the pawned articles. The whole question of the role of jewellery as savings should be looked into more closely. The acquisition of consumer items like motocycles, cars, and television sets on the basis of hire-purchase is also becoming more and more common in the countryside. The very poor with an absolute deficit in their household budget either had to borrow from close relatives (whereby the sum asked for did not exceed $50) or more frequently, from the farm operator with whom they have a labour contract.

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The survey revealed that in absolute terms, the rich are more "indebted" than the poor. As someone said to me, "Debts? I'm poor~ who would want to lend to me?" The debt burden for the village is clearly funnel-shaped ~ broad at the top for the well-to-do, tapering off below for the poor. The problem with getting credit in a peasant economy is the problem of collateral ~ of convincing the creditor that he has a fair chance of getting his money back. Unlike the wage-earner, however low the wages are, the creditor knows that there is a monthly pay-day, and will arrive on that day to get his money back. For the peasant, his collateral is essentially his standing crop, his labour, and his land. The amelioration of the peasant's livelihood is already to be seen in the fact that the standing crop has no longer to be resorted to as a means of raising credit. What remains for the poor peasant is his labour, the middle peasant his jewellery, and the well-to-do his land. We can thus speak of a segmented market for loans and credit in the peasant economy.1 8 Of particular interest is that this "market" seems to be structured around the principle that "everyone needs someone to whom he can go to", a tempat orang bergantungan. The over-riding concern is not merely with the availability of credit but with the security of credit, leading to the institutionalization of specific relationships like the one of bertowkay or kontrek. It belongs also to the village storehouse of wisdom that these relationships have to be tended to, looked after ~ mesti jaga ~. This helps explain in part the entire network of exchanges within the kinship circuit~ the hospital visits, attendances at funerals and so forth ~ to live up to the standard of a good relative whom one cannot refuse should help be asked for. With the patron, it is generally an exchange oflabour for goods (tolong usaha untuk kebendaan) ~should any favour be asked by the patron, involving labour services of all kinds, then one should try one's best to oblige. With the Chinese towkay, the relationship assumes a different dimension, although it is still considered a relationship one should try to maintain. One way of doing this for example, is never to wipe out your debt completely ~ so that he has a vested interest in you and will therefore continue to grant you loans. It is clear that the credit-worthiness of the landowning peasant is much higher than that of the landless peasant whose only collateral is that of his labour. It should thus come as no surprise that the wealthy are more deeply "indebted" than the poor. This segmented "market" structure assumes a new significance today however, in the light of the changes in the production structure described in the previous chapters. Doublecropping and its attendant increased dependence on cash inputs favours the farmer who has access to capital. This is the large farmer who not only has his towkay but also has easier access to the loans now being made available by official credit institutions like banks. The amount of credit available on the formal market has increased considerably with four banks now supplying credit in Muda: the Agricultural Bank of Malaysia via Farmers' Associations, Bank Rakyat via the rural cooperatives as well as two private banks, the Chartered Bank and the United Asian Bank. That it is again the larger farmers who will have easier access to such institutionalized loans will come as no surprise. Membership figures in the Farmers' Associations are revealing in this

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respect. For Jitra for example, only 28 per cent of the members operated less than 1 hectare whereas over 70 per cent operated more than 1.5 hectare. 19 "Market" conditions for production loans have thus improved for the landed farmer in a context in which double-cropping has encouraged a capitalization of the production process. This capitalization process on the other hand, has deprived the landless worker of his employment contract with his employer and thus his source of credit (see the discussion in the previous chapters). Mechanization thus implies not merely the loss of income but also the loss of credit for the poor. This is, however, a problem for the future. The first ten years of double-cropping, by relieving the poor of the necessity of selling his standing crop, led to the elimination of the fateful padi kunca-jual janji chain of indebtedness and therewith an improvement in his economic well-being. One of the poor families in the sample studied noted with satisfaction that he had been freed from debt for the second consecutive season. Before that, for as long as he could remember, he had been in debt. This is but one case, but it does seem indicative of the general situation. It should be noted that the trend in the substitution of debt with credit is indicative of a highly significant development in the padi economy, namely, that the peasant is no longer integrated into the market economy via his consumption needs but rather by a direct integration of the circuit of production into that of marketing.

THE ROLE OF CREDIT IN A PEASANT ECONOMY To conclude this chapter, the role generally attributed to the phenomenon of credit and indebtedness in the peasant economy will be considered. The "traditional" padi farmer, under "strong social pressure ... to channel any savings into various forms of consumption expenditure" in particular ceremonial expenses like weddings, has to resort to the informal money market to satisfy his credit needs. This informal credit market is said to be characterized by exorbitant and exploitative interest rates and other malpractices which not only impoverish the peasant but render their usefulness as a source of production credit impossible. 20 The increased availability of institutional credit is thus seen to be indispensable to a programme of "agricultural modernization" involving the adoption of highly productive but expensive chemical and mechanical inputs. 21 Peasant Inclemency and Peasant Saving The Mte noir, the socio-economic attitude which has to be re-oriented if agricultural modernization is to succeed, is seen to be the acceptance of the "strong social pressure ... exerted to channel any savings into various forms of consumption expenditure". 22 In particular, "non-recurrent expenditure on social and ceremonial activities" is said to be another form of status investment which diverts savings away from production. 23 As Wells notes,

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it is the latter (ceremonial expenditures) which is more commonly regarded as an element of consumption which, if foregone, would result in an improvement in the economic position of the farm household,

whereas the other constituents of non-production credit are largely necessary for the maintenance of the farm family's labour force in between harvest". 24 The ceremonial expenditure usually singled out for critical attention is the kenduri (feast) for the wedding ceremony. How much does a kenduri actually cost and how is it usually financed? The reader is referred here to the discussion in Chapter 6 where the budget for a large kenduri was presentcd. 25 Of particular interest was the form of finance so that the actual cost of $3,768 was reduced to a total cash outlay of $388 for the household involved! The financial "trick" involved the utilization of two "traditional" economic institutions indicative of innovative adaptation to social needs, namely, gift and collective savings. As far as gifts are concerned, apart from the cash contributions made by the invited guests, attention should be drawn to the contribution made by quiqah, understood as an Islamic injunction to redistribution. Its incorporation into this "socially necessary" form of expenditure simultaneously creates a bond of reciprocity between the giftgiver and the household head, thus adding a dimension of future savings to this economic transaction. The institutionalization of a savings fund based on the principle of balanced reciprocity built up entirely on dyadic relationships- known here as derau, the same word for labour exchange- is particularly interesting. This suggests that the savings strategy is not merely confined to the accumulation of property (in the form of jewellery, or draught animal or cash, and so forth) by the individual household but of "credit", so to speak, or obligations on the part of other households. The propensity to save therefore, especially for foreseeable expenditure like the wedding kenduri, should not be underestimated. As has been mentioned earlier however, the savings strategy takes a different form and therefore tends to be disregarded. In the literature, peasant savings is seen as confined to jewellery (which can be pawned), draught animals, and cash savings. 26 In this context, mention should be made of two further forms taken by the peasant propensity to save which arc generally neglected in the literature. Apart from the savings fund accumulated through personal obligations for the specific purpose of a foreseeable ceremonial expenditure, 27 there is the institution of kut, an all-purpose collective savings group, found not only in Malay peasant society but widely reported for other peasant societies as well. Each member of the kut group contributes a fixed sum at a specified time interval (per harvest or month for example) with each member taking turns in being the recipient of the total sum collected at each time period. The advantage of kut is that the individual farmer gains access to a fairly large sum of money which can then be utilized for investment purposes. The same reasoning lies behind the budgeting strategy followed by farmers intent on saving for investment purposes namely, confining the financing of recurrent consumption expenditure as far as possible to current and regular income from wage labour or rubber tapping, leaving the padi harvest intact for the financing of non-

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recurrent expenditure. It was by this means, for example, that AD financed his land acquisitions in the sixties and as can be seen from the discussion on budgeting strategy in Chapter 6 it is still an important component of the budgeting strategy of those farmers in the process of "expansion". The Informal Credit Market Rather than attributing peasant dependence on the informal credit market to the persistence of foreseeable, socially prescribed ceremonial expenditures, for which, as I have tried to show above, social means of financing exist, I would stress the exigencies of crisis situations which engender unforeseeable expenditure (see also Chapter 3). The mechanisms by which the hapless farmer then found himself in a vicious cycle of increasing indebtedness have already been discussed. What should be stressed here is the changes in the structure of this informal credit market which have occurred, also discussed earlier in the chapter, which challenges the view firstly, that the middleman dominates the marketing of padi by virtue of his hold over an indebted peasantry, and secondly, that this informal market is incapable of facilitating the process of agricultural modernization through the financing of production inputs. As has been seen in the preceding discussion, the bertowkay relationship is maintained primarily by middle and well-to-do villagers whose credit requirements are less to cover consumption needs than production ones. Although production credit is also acquired from institutional sources like the Farmers' Association, the bulk of the credit seems to come from the informal market. Recent research into the informal credit market in the Muda region as a whole seems to confirm the above village analysis. 28 The preliminary findings are worth quoting at length: ... the informal rural credit market is overwhelmingly more important in quantitative terms as it is responsible for about 70 per cent of total credit disbursed compared to only 30 per cent for the formal credit institutions. By far shopkeepers-cum-dealers and pawnshops are the largest purveyor of rural credit, being responsible for about 50 per cent of total loans provided. Although prevailing interest rates on the average is higher for informal credit than those charged by formal credit institutions, they appear to be much less than what are commonly believed. However, actual rates charged by informal lenders range from 0~140 per cent ... The usual notion ofloan concentration in favour oflarge borrowers appear to be validated by the Muda study. It is clearly evident ... that on the whole large farm operators receive the lion's share of credit disbursed regardless of the source29

All this throws new light not merely on the role of the traditional sources of credit but also on the role of institutionalized credit programmes which were generally conceived as a precondition for the successful implementation of the Green Revolution. The Muda experience with institutional padi production credit is in keeping with similar programmes in other Third World countries regarding the high

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cost of credit operation, the constraints in credit scrutinization, the increasing rate of delinquency and the excessive paperwork involved. 30 The failure of these programmes in Muda confirms the argument that the lack of formal capital and credit is not crucial to the acceptance of double-cropping. 31 Wells' point that "the more critical input as far as the adoption of double-cropping is concerned is the availability of water" 32 hints at a review of the role of the state visa-vis the peasantry, just as the fmdings with regard to the informal credit suggests a review of the role of the middleman, from his location in the sphere of consumption to that as purveyor of production inputs. NOTES

1. Rosemary Barnard, "The Role of Capital and Credit in a Malay Rice-Producing Village", Pacific Viewpoint 14, no. 2 (1973): 113. 2. Sharom Ahmat, "The Kedah Sultanate in the Nineteenth Century: Some Economic Aspects", in Asmah Hj. Omar, cd, op. cit., pp. 2-3. 3. A.M. Thomson, "Report to the Government of the Federation of Malaya on the Marketing of Rice" (Rome: FAO, 1954), p. 26. 4. Ibid., p. 27. 5. A contrary view is found in Barnard, op. cit., p. 116: "For single-cropping the capital and credit needs were not great among Kg. Asam Riang farmers as there was not very much scope for the introduction of new capital-intensive techniques ... If a farmer was temporarily short of cash before the harvest, these items might sometimes be obtained on credit." Compare however the finding from Narkswasdi and Selvadurai that in 1967, 64 per cent of paid farmers in the Muda river area were indebed. Quoted in Ho Nai Kin, Implementation and Supervision Problem of Institutional Padi Production Credit in MADA's Farmers Association (MADA Monograph no. 35, 1978), p. 2. 6. Compare Swift's finding: "Also noticeable is the absence of peasant indebtedness and of the exploitation of the peasantry through credit relations." The "peasantry" he refers to, however, are rubber-tappers, with regular income and therefore no problems ofliquidity. Michael G. Swift, "Capital, Saving and Credit in a Malay Peasant Economy", in Capital, Saving and Credit in Peasant Societies, ed. R. Firth and B.S. Yamey (London: Alien and Unwin, 1964), p. 155. 7. Taken from Rodolphe de Koninck, "Our Work, Our Problems, Your Solutions. Murmurings from the Muda Scheme, Kedah, Malaysia" (Paper presented at the Second International Conference of the Canadian Council for Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1982), p. 4. 8. See for example C.R. Wharton, "Marketing, Merchandising and Moneylending: A note on Middleman Monopsony in Malaya", Malayan Economic Review VII, no. 2 (1962). 9. Thomson, op. cit., p. 13. 10. It has to be noted here, however, that a recent study done in the Krian area comes to the opposite conclusion namely, that existing credit tics between the farmers and the padi buyers "have resulted in the confinement of choice of buyers to one". See M.A. Fatimah, "The Effectiveness of the Government Policy Measures Relating to Padi and Rice Industry" (Ph. D. dissertation, University of Newcastleupon-Tyne, 1980). "Based on the survey about 57°/., of the farmers were indebted to their padi buyers and about 44% of the farmers reported that they preferred to sell to one particular buyer because he provided credit and provisional goods to them." According to Dr. Fatimah, there is no evidence whatsoever that this credit tie has been loosened (private communication). It may be pertinent, however, to report an interview I carried out with a miller in the Krian district, who reported that his padi dealers now bring in much less padi (halved) than they used to in years past. He attributed this to more competition among the padi dealers. 11. Thomson, op. cit., p. 32. 12. Ibid., p. 36. 13. For Malaysia as a whole, a recent study came to the conclusion that "a major policy problem facing the rice processing industry is that of excess capacity". L.j. Fredericks and R.J.G. Wells, Rice Processing in Peninsular Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 135. 14. Ismail Zakaria, "Economic and Social Aspects of Padi Production: Some Recent Trends" (Paper presented at the Seminar on Economics, Development and the Consumer, CAP Penang, 1980).

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15. See Fredericks & Wells, op. cit., pp. 138 ff. 16. Compare the 1972 finding by Wells: "On the average, about 88.4% of total borrowings per farmer of M$224 were for non-agricultural purposes", R.J .G. Wells, "Utilization and Sources of Credit for Paddy Farming in Mukim Langgar, Malaysia", Asian Economies 25(1978): 32. 17. The following data on indebtedness is based on a survey carried out during the minor season of 1979/80. Unfortunately, the results cannot be more than merely suggestive. To begin with, the interviews were of a short duration and it is highly unlikely that everyone would have been totally open about their debts. The small loans made from relatives and other people within the kampung, in particular, are apt to escape mention. For example, no one would mention under such circumstances, and no one did, about running out of rice and having to borrow. It must be remembered that admitting to indebtedness is something to be ashamed of- malu. Secondly, because of lack of clarity in the way the questionnaire was phrased, it was unclear whether loans which were cleared up within the season were to be included; thus the column on cash loans cannot claim to be comprehensive. Thirdly, the amount pawned could refer also to items which were pawned during the previous seasons, as it often happens that the farmers do not redeem their jewellery after the six-month period is up, but continue paying the interest in order not to lose the item. 18. Compare Barnard's finding: "As well as being restricted in the amount of credit they might obtain, poorer households had a smaller range of sources of credit from which to choose. Indeed, the very poor, the landless and the minute-scale tenant cultivators, might have no choice at all, since no supplier would risk his capital on them." Barnard, op. cit., p. 127. 19. L.J. Fredericks, G. Kalshoven,J.R.V. Daane, "The Role of Farmers' Organisations in 2 Paddy Farming Areas in West Malaysia" Bulletin Nr. 40 (Wageningen; Afdelingen voor Sociale Wetenschappen aan de Landbou Whoge school, 1980), p. 62. 20. See Mochtar Tamin, "Rural Credit: Past Record, Present and Future" (Paper presented at Seminar on Economics, Development and the Consumer, Consumers' Association ofPenang, Penang, 1980), p. 9. 21. For a review of this position, see Wells, op. cit. See also Barnard, op. cit., p. 113: "The introduction of new inputs demands a radical re-organisation of the people's socio-economic attitudes. To some extent the village people must themselves bring about the necessary reorganisation and adaptation, but because their resources are generally inadequate and their experience is limited, especially in the initial phases of such changes, it is also essential to introduce from outside institutions capable of providing the inputs as and when required." 22. Barnard, op. cit., p. 116. 23. Ibid., p. 122. 24. Wells, op. cit., p. 32. 25. It should be noted here that I do not consider the dowry or duit belanja offered by the groom's family to the bride's family as belonging to this category of ceremonial expenditure. I would suggest that it is a necessary expenditure not for the maintenance but for the reproduction of the farm family's labour force. See Chapter 1. 26. See, for example, Barnard, op. cit., p. 121 and M.G. Swift, op. cit. Swift mentions "the temporary loan association known as kutu" but dismisses it as "socially interesting but not of great economic importance" (p. 140). In Gelung Rambai, women often use kut to buy jewellery; one of the sample households (middle) used kut money ($1000 from 20 people) to lease 4 re of land for 3 years. 27. Jim Scott has suggested that one way oflooking at this is to see the person who gives feasts and so forth, as the owner of a debt which is a claim on future goods aud services so that one can regard him as an investor (personal communication). 28. A study on Rural Financial Markets funded by IDRC Canada undertaken by Mochtar Tamin, R.J.G. Wells and Abdul Ghani Othman whose results unfortunately are not available at present. The preliminary information is reported in Mochtar Tamin, "Rural Credit: Past Record, Present and Future" (Paper presented at the Seminar on Economics, Development and the Consumer, Consumers' Association of Penang, Penang, 1980). 29. Mochtar Tamin, op. cit., p. 10. 30. For Muda, see Ho Nai Kin, Implementation and Supervision Problem of Institutional Padi Production Credit in MADA's Farmers' Associations (MADA Monograph no. 35, 1978). 31. Wells, op. cit., p. 35. 32. Ibid., p. 35.

10 Patterns of Change in the Non-Padi Economy

INTRODUCTION The discussion has been confined so far to the padi economy of the village, which has been and remains the major source oflivelihood for the village households. Apart from padi, 90 re of village land is under rubber cultivation and provides income for twenty-five households, either as owner-operator, rentier or tapper on a sharecropping basis. Other than padi and rubber however, there are limited employment opportunities within the village economy since neither animal husbandry nor handicrafts are carried out on a large scale. Nevertheless, it should be borne in mind that the boundaries of the village economy have seldom, perhaps never, corresponded to the economic horizon of the villagers. To begin with, the nature of the marriage, residence and inheritance patterns (see Chapter 12) provide many villagers with access and for claims to resources outside of the village. Shadli's data on marriage patterns, quoted below, indicate the potential significance of marriage in transcending village economic boundaries: In this kampung there are 35 households with intra-village marriage and 92 with inter-village marriage. The remaining six arc households of marriages between persons who did not stay in this kampung, but had come to live where their grandparents had some land. 1

Another "traditional" means of gaining access to resources outside of the village was to "pioneer" new land. As the surrounding jungle swamps were completely cleared by the early sixties, a group of about eighteen villagers went to open up uninhabited government land in Merbok, about forty miles away from the village, in 1965. This land was later repossessed by the government. Since then, the attempts of the villagers

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to stake claims to new land have been confmed to the remaining state-owned jungles of the north, which they buy in the form of beli usaha for rubber cultivation. Fourteen village households, belonging to the well-to-do and middle categories, have acquired land in this way, in the full knowledge that this acquisition has no legal basis. This land however, is much cheaper than padi land in the Muda area, and villagers hope that the government, presented with a fait accompli, will eventually concede legal rights to them. Eventually, should the legal situation be clarified, migration or "resettlement" might occur, and, given the context of pioneering in the earlier years, massive migratory movements must have taken place, into and within the region. In a more profound sense then, the "traditional" mono-cultural padi economy of the village could not have been a subsistence one. Given the relative insignificance of animal husbandry and handicrafts, villagers have always had to look outwards towards new land and labour frontiers to supplement their income during the lean and hungry n1.onths of the musim mati (literally translated as the "dead season", that is, the months preceding the planting of the new crop). Now that the land frontier has been closed, migratory movement in search of labour opportunities have assumed new prominence and dimensions. In this chapter, the pattern of change in the articulation of village labour resources into the regional and/or national economy will be traced and discussed.

MIGRATION AT THE VILLAGE LEVEL It should be borne in mind that even before the introduction of double-cropping, the availability of non-padi employment, given the ecological preconditions, was low. The pronounced dry season rendered the cultivation of any other food crop, not merely a second padi crop, impossible for four months in the year. No significant cottage industries developed or had time to develop since settlement often went hand in hand with commercialization and consumer items like clothing were already available from a well established market. The rubber smallholdings owned by some villagers provided the major source of income during the slack season but were not sufficient to provide work for all. The seasonal slack had nonetheless to be bridged; one of the means already described above (see Chapter 9) was via indebtedness. Another was migration. In the past twenty years, the Muda region has been characterized by a net outflow of population, indicatmg a high rate of migration. 2 In the village under study, over ten young men have left the village in recent years in search of wage labour in Pahang, Kuala Lumpur and Penang. Seasonal migration by poor households seems to have been fairly frequent before the introduction of double-cropping.- Work was sought primarily in the rubber estates, both to the north and to the south, and was engaged in by individual young men, young couples as well as older family members. The main common denominator seems to have been poverty. In order to retain employment opportunities in the village during the period of padi cultivation, the family was often split, part living in the village,

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another in the other place of work. We see this pattern in the life-cycle ofYunus I, one of the poor households in the sample: In 1961, after most of his land had been sold, and his sons had left school, they went north to tap rubber, returning once a week with rice and firewood, as well as during the padi season, during which they engaged in wage labour. In 1967, Yunus and his wife, then in their forties, went to Cangloon to work as rubber tappers for nine months, leaving their three younger children in the hands of the two older daughters in the village. The period of migration sometimes lasted longer and was also undertaken by nuclear families as can be seen from the life-cycle of the wife of Mat Y, also a poor family in the sample: The first child was born when she was 15 and within ten months of the birth, she, her husband and the child went to Sungei Patani to work as rubber tappers. After two years there, they returned to live in the village with Mat's parents. Poor nuclear families were thus likely to migrate as a single unit. This was possible in respect to rubber tapping since both male and female labour could be employed on the rubber estates. Apart from the "push" factor therefore, which in these cases was poverty (none of the well-to-do or middle households had similar migratory histories in their biographies), another determinant of the form which migration took was the kind of outside employment available. In other words, the nature of the migratory process is not merely a function of changes in the padi economy but also of changes in the regional and national economy. Thus, in pre-double-cropping days, the articulation of the village padi economy with capitalist-organized rubber plantations encouraged a form of migration which often involved the commuting of members of or entire families between the village and the new place of work or farm until an eventual decision to stay or to move was ,made. This labour demand was also in part met by gangs of young men employed for the heavy work of land pioneering 3 or in the rubber plantations. 4 By the sixties, the legal land frontier, which had earlier allowed the private clearance of land via the application of household and labour, closed. Migration in search of new land is now restricted to either official acceptance in governmentsponsored land resettlement schemes (two villagers have already left) or to the purchase of half-cleared tanah haram (illegal land) in the form of beli usaha. In both cases, migrant households arc no longer the poorest in the village but more likely, those who, according to village standards, would be characterized as middle households. Altogether fourteen households have bought illegal land for rubber cultivation since 1969. The majority are middle households; two are well-to-do ones. The following two cases should illustrate the processes involved. (a) The Unsuccessful Migrant Ahmad T aged 35 is one of the poorest peasants in the village. With his inheritance of0.5 re ofland he has to support his wife and three pre-schooling children (a nuclear family). In 1978, he leased his 0.5 re ofland for $100 in order to go to Pahang to look into the possibility of acquiring tanah haram there. He returned empty-handed to the village and had to decide against migration because the land acquisition would be too

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expensive- $150 for the felling and clearing of each acre. Back in the village without any land, he managed luckily to fmd a job as a labourer transporting sacks of padi in a nearby padi mill. (b) The FELDA Migrant Lah lives with his wife and baby in her parents' household, a well-to-do family. Lah himself used to operate 6 re of padi land which belonged to his grandfather but upon the grandfather's death, his father, who had divorced his mother and founded another family, exercised his right to the land as heir under the Islamic Law of Inheritance. Lah, now landless, moved to his in-laws and helped to cultivate the father-in-law's farm together with his father- and brother-in-law. The brother-in-law has been granted 3.5 re from the father as his "establishment fund". Lah himself has applied to become a FELDA (Federal Land Development Authority) migrant in a Pahang scheme to which his uncle already belongs. To this end, he has already made two trips to Pahang and one to Kuala Lumpur.

These two examples indicate that migrants in search of land are primarily those in the nuclear phase of their development. Should migration occur, the entire household will resettle as a single unit. The cause behind the drive to resettlement is land shortage and the motive is clearly that of providing an expanding family with sufficient resources. Nonetheless, not all poor nuclear families can move at will. A certain amount of starting capital is required, either to finance the application process to become the legal owner of FELDA land, or to purchase illegal claims to government-owned land. The very small peasant, feeding his family from hand to mouth without any surplus, cannot afford to seek new pastures. Discussions about the displacement of the small peasant should take this into account. Considerable changes in the kind of wage employment available outside of the village padi economy have also occurred since the sixties. One of the most significant new employers is the Armed Forces. The first recruits from this village joined up in 1967. By 1979, fourteen young men were serving with the Armed Forces. In 1980, the year in which the field research was conducted, another six young men signed up. In addition, in the course of the years, another six entered the Police Force. In 1977, the first village youth left for wage labour in a Pahang factory. The drought in the following year resulted in several villagers going to Penang in search of wage labour. Although they all returned, the example was set, and by 1980, eleven men, between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, were working as wage labourers in the private sector, primarily in Pahang, Penang and Kuala Lumpur. In addition to these individually motivated cases of outmigration, young men from the village, organized as work groups, also left for short-term spells of wage labour outside of the village. In 1979, a group of fifteen young men went to Pedis to work on a government-owned sugar plantation for a month. In 1980, another group went to work on another government-owned sugar plantation in Negri Sembilan for two months. The rapidity as well as the extent of the "brawn-drain" was astounding. By 1980,

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thirty-seven young men had left the village. Only twenty-two unmarried young men (under the age of twenty-five) remained. Another four young men, under the age of twenty-five, were married and living in the village. This new pattern of wage employment, in contrast to that offered by the rubber plantations, is highly specific as to the kind oflabour demanded, namely, young male labour. Young men are drawn as individuals out of their households, rather than the household as such out of the village. Young female labour does not seem to be as responsive to the market demand. Some years ago, four girls from the village went to work in an electronic factory in Penang but returned after a year, In 1980, not a single girl from the village was to be found as a wage-labourer outside of the village. The vast majority of the young men are unmarried migrants. In other words, it is the freedom from familial responsibilities which has allowed them to leave. The only two exceptions are those which prove the rule.

Case 1 Musa, aged 35, left in 1979 for Kuantan after the transplanting season was over. His wife had left him recently and he and the three children were staying with his mother, unmarried sister and brother. He found work in a plywood factory and sent money home to his sister, who looks after the children.

Case 2 Fazil was left by his wife last year, who took their three children with her. He sold his house in the village, which was physically removed to the plot of the new owner, and was last seen as a trishaw rider in Penang. Interestingly, however, the households from which these male migrants (both to the government as well as to the private sector) stem are not confmed to one social class. Poor, middle and well-to-do households are all fairly well represented among these "outmigrant households". The specific nature of this particular demand for labour is thus not matched by a specific supply structure at the village level. The propensity towards this form of migration does not seem therefore to be a response merely to the dictates of absolute poverty. An additional constraint, accounting for the "chain" effect of migratory movement, could well be derived, not from the economic structure of the household but from the social structure of village relations. A frequent comment heard in the village from the younger people was that "it was no fun any longer" now that so many had already left. Given the strong integration of individuals into their generational age-groups at specific phases of the life-cycle, and the relative weakness of the household as an integral social and economic unit (as discussed in Chapter 6), this complaint has also to be taken seriously. No common social denominator of social status either can be discerned in the households with "academic" migrants. The "brawn-drain" for service as foot-soldiers or in the industrial army has considerably overshadowed the "brain-drain" away from the village, which has remained nothing more than a trickle. Less than ten village youths have found non-manual employment in the civil service, and there are but a few meagre exceptions in the private sector. A necessary precondition for entry into

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this highly coveted but competitive source of employment is academic qualification, the lowest of which is the Lower Certificate of Education, and it is a tribute to the redistributive nature of government investment in education that no discernible discrimination of the poor and middle households in the acquisition of academic qualification is to be found. The high degree of female participation in "higher" schooling is also worthy of note. This is a reflection not merely of government policy but also of the nature of the Malay family, since village families with academic ambitions do not seem to make any distinctions between their male and female offsprings. The pride of the village is a girl from a poor family who is currently studying computer science in England with the aid of a federal scholarship. The general insignificance of bureaucratic employment for the village 5 is due to the relative backwardness of transport and educational infrastructure in the region. There is no primary school in the village; the nearest primary school is to be found in Tunjang, the secondary school in Jitra, the district capital, and those aiming for the Higher School Certificate have to be prepared for the sixteen mile ride to Alor Star, the state capital. This does entail considerable cost to the family 6 although sacrifice and aid from other family members can be counted upon for a promising child. The returns are so high in village terms that education has become a major form of investment for village households. Within the village itself, there has been one instance ofland sale, and several cases of pawning in order to finance a child's education. Given the parents' and the child's unfamiliarity with an essentially urban-based educational system however, and the corresponding inability to make a realistic appraisal of the chances of possible success, this investment in education bears an uncomfortable similarity to a game of roulette with the high price that most players have to pay.

NON-VILLAGE EMPLOYMENT We have discussed the intrusion of the non-padi economy so far in terms of the phenomenon of migration, that is, a physical movement of villagers to a non-village centred labour market. Non-village-centred labour markets however may be established close enough to the village that participation in them does not necessitate migration or a change of residence. In terms of the household economy, this is usually registered as "non-farm income". The significance of non-farm income for single-cropping farms has been well documented by Purcall. 7 In Gclung Rambai, the main source of non-farm income was the surrounding rubber estates which provided poorly-paid (lower per-hour returns than in the padi labour market) daily-rated tapping jobs or occasional manual tasks like the clearing of undergrowth. During the early years of double-cropping, with its increased demand for labour, non-farm income from this source may have dropped in value since returns from padi were higher. Nonetheless, there is no indication of a consistent and long-term decline in non-padi employment in the village since the introduction of double-cropping, as is said to be the case for the Muda region. 8 On the contrary, the development of the regional economy in the past few

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THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE VILLAGE ECONOMY

years has led to an increasing demand for contractual labour, be it in the padi mills, on construction sites and so forth, all of which are located mainly in the nearby small towns. Although there is still rubber tapping for the surrounding estates, this other form of participation in a labour market outside of the village has come to assume greater significance for the village households. In 1979, members of seventeen poor households and five middle households were engaged in kerja buruh, or contractual manual labour. In addition, several members of middle households, who had acquired skills in carpentry and masonry, were also engaged in building sites in Tunjang and Jitra (see Chapter 6). 9 It is interesting to note the unmistakable correlation between the propensity to such labour, and the social status of the households. None of the well-to-do household heads in the village earned extra income as buruh (labourer) or tukang (skilled labourer). Labourers came largely from poor households while skilled labourers were to be found entirely among the middle households. Access to these new labour markets from the village has been made possible by the expansion of the local economy attendant upon the enormous investments channeled into the padi economy 10 as well as the "shortening" of travel distances via the increased acquisition of bicycles and motorcycles by villagers, also facilitated by the returns to investment in the padi economy. It should be noted however, that these new labour markets are in the main open only to males. Whereas women could also engage in rubber tapping on the surrounding rubber estates, there is no place for them on construction sites. 11 Furthermore, the cultural limitation on the freedom of movement for unmarried women and young girls further hinders their participation in labour markets in the surrounding towns. We thus see that recent developments, both in the padi and non-padi labour market, have led to a disproportionate demand for male labour and a disproportionate displacement of female labour. The implications of this for the restructuring of the household economy will be discussed in Chapter 15. The other issue which non-village employment and migration raises for the household economy concerns the household budget: to what extent do these non-village activities contribute to the household budget? There can be no doubt as to the contributory value of the wages earned from offfarm income in the towns. 12 The contribution which migrants make to their areas and households of origin however, is less clear. Corner's study suggests that "remittances and the savings effected in not supporting the outmigrants are generally insufficient to replace lost labour and wages". 13 The data does not allow a definite pronouncement on this issue but the budgets of the sample households (see Chapter 6) indicate that transfers from migrants in government service were significant contributors to household incomes. Two poor households received a regular cash remittance from the son in the army; one middle household with a daughter in Alor Star holding a clerical position received $50 monthly from her. It should be noted that the cash remittance from those in military service is a fixed sum regulated by the Armed Forces, but givt:n the number involved,

Patterns of Change in the Non-Padi Economy

167

this contribution should not be underestimated. Apart from regular remittances, which may or may not be the case for others in bureaucratic employment, households, including wealthier ones, profit from gifts made by returning or visiting sons and daughters. Rather than cash payments, much of the transfer takes the form of consumer durables. 14 An example from the budget survey done in the village was the installation of electricity in a poor household, paid for by the son who was in the army. On the other hand, remittances and gifts from those migrants to the industrial or service sectors were not recorded in the two migrant households covered by the sample budget survey. This low level of transfers would hold for all eleven migrants in this category, and has to do partly with the irregularity of their own earnings. This form of migration is of too recent origin, however, to generate defmite findings as to its role and consequences for the village economy.

CONCLUSION The picture suggested here is not merely that of a remarkable rate of change in the padi economy, as documented in the previous chapters, but also in the non-padi economy. Not only arc village households integrated into the regional, national and international economy via the sale of their agricultural produce and the purchase of agricultural inputs, but also through the sale of their labour power. The "village economy", as it has developed in the past number of years, and as it is used occasionally in the text, thus refers not to an analytical unit but to a descriptive whole which encompasses a number of disparate elements.

NOTES

1. Mohd. Shadli Abdullah, "The Relationship of the Kinship System to Land Tenure: A Case Study ofKampung Gelung Rambai" (Master's thesis, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, 1978), p. 55. 2. Compare T.G. Lim, D.S. Gibbons, Shukor Kassim, "Accumulation of Padi Land in the Muda Region: Some Findings and Thoughts on their Implications for the Peasantry and Development", in Peasantry and Modernization, ed. Hairi Abdullah and H.M. Dahlan. Special Issue of Akademika 20 & 21 (January-July 1982): 24. "Evidence from an analysis of census data between 1957 and 1970 for Muda's non-urban census enumeration districts indicates an average annual rate of increase of 1.54% in the resident rural population which is less than half of the national rate of 3.1% indicating an out-migration of part of the rural population." 3. See E.H.G. Dobby, "The North Kedah Plain: A Study in the Environment of Pioneering for Rice Cultivation", Economic Geography 27, p. 301 "Work of this sort is done by groups of20-30 men who work communally at the reclamation in return for a share of the new tields ... " 4. Cheah's account of the "social bandit" Nayan suggests that he and his gang worked for the rapidly expanding rubber estates of that time, see Cheah Boon Kheng, "Social Banditry and Rural Crime in North Kedah 1909-22",JMBRAS 54, Part I! (1981): 120, 126. 5. Compare the village in Negri Sembilan studied by K. Elwert-Kretschmer, where thirty-two households either had government employment or were retired civil servants; "Zur sozialen und okonomischen Organisation von Haushalten im landlichen West-Malaysia" (Diplom thesis, Universitat Bielefeld, 1983). 6. The out-of-pocket costs for a secondary student has been estimated to account for 13 per cent

168

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE VILLAGE EcoNOMY

of the income of low-income households. See Jacob Meerman, Public Expenditure in Malaysia: Who Benefits and Why (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 115. 7. See J.T. Purcall, Rice Economy: A Case Study of Four Villages in West Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1971). 8. See Lorraine Corner, "The Impact of Rural Out-Migration on Labour Supply and Cultivation Techniques in a Double-Cropped Padi Area", mimeo., (1979), p. 32. "Several observers have noted the decline in non-padi employment in the Muda region since the introduction of double cropping." 9. This pattern of increasing occupational diversification is also noted for the village studied by R. Barnard, where "the diverse range of occupations, already pronounced in 1967, has become even more so in the space of eleven years". Rosemary Barnard, "The Modernization of Agriculture in a Kedah Village, 1967-1978" (Paper presented at the Second National Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, Sydney, 1978), p. 7. 10. "Recent studies in Muda have shown that between 1970-1975 the local economy has grown at a rate of about 15% a year, attributable particularly to enhanced padi production and farm income"; Jegatheesan, "Aspek-Aspek Ekonomi Rancangan Muda n:'quoted in Zakaria, op. cit., p. 13. 11. Compare Purcall's finding that "the role of women in the single-cropping area was much greater both in the household and in off-farm work" and "non-farm income was higher in the single-cropping area because of the supplementary income earned by women working on the near-by estates", Purcall, op. cit., pp. 126 and 128. 12. Barnard in fact claims that in the village she studied, "with so many people, including women in recent years, bringing cash into the village on a regular basis, pressure on land is cased, though not to the point that the demand for labour now exceeds the supply", Barnard, op. cit., p. 7. 13. Corner, op. cit., p. 45. 14. Compare Elwert-Kretschmer, op. cit., p. 26.

Part IV The Transformation of Village Society: The Unfolding of Social Differentiation

11 Kinship and the Family Development Cycle

INTRODUCTION The discussion in the preceding chapters has drawn attention to the fact that access to resources available within the padi economy, both land and labour, is not entirely mediated by market forces, as indicated by the significance of inheritance and usufruct as well as household labour. 1 Furthermore, the analysis of the characteristics of the poor, middle and well-to-do households revealed significant differences in their demographic structure. Although the nuclear family structure was the norm for all three groups, it was most marked among the middle households while the well-todo households were characterized by a relatively high percentage of stem families (where at least one married member of the succeeding generation remains in the household) and the poor by denuded families (where one or both parents are missing).

TABLE 11.1 Distribution of Family Structure by Household Type Family Structure Household Type

Nuclear

Stem

Denuded

Well-to-do Middle Poor

64.3% 85.2% 64.4%

35.7% 12.9% 6.7%

0 1.9% 28.9%

Total Avg. Number Fam. Size 14 55 45

6.43 4.59 4.24

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THE TRANSFORMATION OF VILLAGE SOCIETY

Similar evidence in other peasant societies for the significance of the social organization of peasant production have been related to the "traditional village economy" in which "social and moral arrangements ... typically operated to assure a minimum income to inhabitants". 2 This "moral economy of the peasant" 3 is seen to rest either in the moral quality of kinship (sec the arguments in another chapter) or of the pre-capitalist village. 4 In the previous chapter, income-sharing practices within the village were examined; this chapter will examine the other much-vaunted principle of kinship. 5

KINSHIP AND THE FAMILY DEVELOPMENT CYCLE For Malaysia, reference is often made to the "bilateral kin organization in Malay society" 6 which is seen as maintaining the principle of sharing between kin against the economic rationality of market exchange. 7 Cognatic reckoning allows the extension of kin ties which can be mobilized by the "axiom of amity" 8 and bilateral devolution leads to the dispersal rather than the concentration of property. 9 Since cognatic reckoning in this case does not lead to the constitution of descent groups, there is a pervasive notion of the conjugal, nuclear family as the only structurally significant unit in the society. 10 Instead of resorting to the "kinship system" as incorporating the set of social principles accounting for "sharing practices", a distinction will be made between two networks of sharing, that involving current exchange justified by "kinship" and that involving inter-generational transfers of resources made apparent in the domestic development cycle of kin-related households. In particular, attention will be paid to the way in which the transfer of land and labour resources across generations is actually regulated. Of particular interest is the process of the formation of household units and the principles underlying the forms it may take. The thrust of the argument is that: 1. The significance of the village as a unit of analysis is overshadowed, in the case of this Malay village, by the groups ofhouseholds encompassed by the operation of the family development cycle. The village does not function as a corporate group which distributes access to land and work for the individual village households. The pattern of sharing and access to production between this group of related households is to be distinguished from village-level levelling mechanisms, which in fact, are much weaker than they are generally taken to be. 2. The actual process of resource transfers within this kin grouping indicates that the jural forms of inheritance governing the equitable division of the estate upon the death of the property owner are often undermined by patterns of usufructuary access to land and labour less subject to prescribed formulas of sharing than to the exigencies of peasant production and reproduction. In other words, that the way in which households are formed and provided with means to subsistence and production by the parental unit in this Malay village does not

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173

necessarily allow for the adequate or egalitarian provlSlon of productive resources to all, but rather, allows for individual accumulation and differentiation between kin-related households.

THE FAMILY DEVELOPMENT CYCLE AS AN ANALYTICAL TOOL The concept of the developmental cycle entered the anthropological discussion with the appearance of a collection of papers dedicated to the study of "the development cycle in domestic groups" edited by Goody. 11 The phenomenon it was meant to encompass was formulated by Fortes in the following terms: The domestic group goes through a cycle of development analogous to the growth cycle of a living organism. The group as a unit retains the same form, but its members, and the activities which unite them, go through a regular sequence of changes during the cycle which culminates in the dissolution of the original unit and its replacement by one or more units of the same kind. 12

What this concept was meant to illuminate was the process of social reproduction [which J, in broad terms, includes all those institutional mechanisms and customary activities and norms which serve to maintain, replenish and transmit social capital from generation to generation. 13

Although less systematically treated in the Goody reader, the concept of the family development cycle, that is, the conceptualization of the household structure as changing over time, becomes a particularly useful conceptual tool when narrowed down to the analysis of economic processes where the unit of production is also the family. The family development cycle and the constraints it imposes on peasant production, where the household is the basic unit of production and consumption, was first thematized by Chayanov. 14 Seizing upon the demographic variable, he attempted to show how the growth and decline of peasant farm sizes were dictated by internally-generated labour supply and self-defined consumption needs specific to each particular stage of the cycle. Inherent to Chayanov's conccptualization of the family development cycle, however, is a biological model of growth, expressed in demographic phenomena, impinging on production decisions regarding the satisfaction of current consumption requirements. As the anthropological studies in the Goody reader reveal, however, the actual development of the cycle cannot be reduced to the autonomous free-play of demographic forces: a couple marry, have children, who will also eventually marry and so on. Marriage, divorce, inheritance patterns, to name a few, are not biological but social phenomena, to which peasants have differential access. They also draw attention to the fact that in the course of the development of the family cycle, economic transactions are effected which arc by no means limited to the satisfaction of the current consumption need~ of the individual household.

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THE TRANSFORMATION OF VILLAGE SOCIETY

female-headed) have been married before and have children who now form nuclear units of their own, within or without the village, into which however, they are not integrated.

THE NETWORK OF INTERGENERATIONAL EXCHANGE The two patterns identified above are indicative of processes of social differentiation expressed in, impinging upon and generated by the form which the family structure takes. Of crucial significance seems to be the concentration and dispersal of resources around the parental unit. The parental unit however, has not only to provide new units with access to means of production, but has first to be in a position to create the new unit, that is, to provide their children with marriage partners. In Malay society, the most important single, material role that parents played in the lives of their children was in arranging their marriages, and establishing them in viable households of their own. This occurred in two ways. First, parents gave their male children the combined payments of belanja kahwin and the mahr or mas kahwin ... Second, parents established their children upon an economically viable base from which to pursue their adult lives. 20

In the context of a dowry system, this presupposes the necessity of savings and accumulation beyond the consumption needs of the individual household. Thus, inherent to the reproduction cycle of the peasant household, seen in a temporal dimension, is the need for expansion in production beyond that required for the satisfaction of consumption needs expressed in the worker-consumer ratio. The marriage of the child may also mean the creation of additional labour power for the parental household unit. It has been mentioned earlier (sec Chapter 7) that although labour was a scarce commodity in the padi economy, there is a marked absence of sanctions which would compel young bachelors to expend productive labour on the family farm. Marriage, with its attendant formation of a family of procreation, is the rite de passage from economic irresponsibility to full participation in the household economy. The parental unit that can afford to approvision its offspring with a spouse and means of subsistence thus gains control over two adult workers. In other words, expansion facilitates further expansion. What is most striking is that those households characterized as wealthy or middle ones today are those in which expansion has taken place in every generation, whereas the poor are those who have not expanded on the family inheritance. The other type of poor household is that characterized as denuded above. There arc altogether thirteen such households in the village, of which seven are female-headed, six originated from the village itself and twelve arc classified as poor. All thirteen have been married before and have children who now form nuclear units of their own, within or without the village. As has been mentioned above, this indicates the prevalence of a poverty which is related to the domestic development cycle, or rather, to a breakdown in the domestic

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Kinship and the Family Development Cycle

TABLE 11.2 Demographic Characteristics of Denuded Families

Male

Female

Single With grandchild With child+ With other kin

1 0 1

1 3 3 0

Total

6

7

4

Family Size 1

2.3 4.4

3 3

life cycle as it would have traditionally proceeded. But why are these old people not integrated into a stem family structure? Case 1

Biyah bt. L. Yaacob, aged sixty-seven, lives with a granddaughter, aged thirtyfive and a grandson, aged thirteen. Biyah does not originate from Gclung Rambai itselfbut came to the village when she married Hj. Hassan, with whom she had one son, Yaacob. She was subsequently divorced by Hj. Hassan. Yaacob is one of the middle peasants in the village operating altogether 8 re of padi land. Of this, 2.5 re belongs to his mother, but he has been operating this since he was thirty years old, and in return, he supports the mother financially. The question arises as to why Tok Biyah does not live with her son Yaacob, especially as he has not divested himself of the responsibility of old-age support for her. One thing it might point to is the weak position of an elder person who has not provided a significant amount of material goods to the younger generation. Although Tok Biyah left the son with 2.5 re the bulk of his land comes from ancestral property from his father's side of the family. Another clue comes, it seems, from the fact that the granddaughter who is staying with her is the daughter of Yaacob from a previous marriage, that is, from his deceased first wife. She is a widow. It is suggested that the formation and internal organization of the household is regulated not merely by the demands of agricultural but also of domestic production. One can almost see these households as serving to mop up the residue ~ to provide common residence and domestic services to marginalized children (though death or remarriage of parents) and widows. This suggests however one dimension which many notions of the household neglect: namely, that agricultural subsistence production is not to be seen merely as the productive side of the coin to consumption which then takes place within the household unit but that the household is also the space where production takes place as well, namely, what one would term domestic production or household subsistence reproduction 21 ~ of habitat, transformation of food, child-rearing and so forth. In this context, I think we can also talk of one kind of poverty as the lack of access to this particular form of domestic production. As has been noted elsewhere, the

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elderly rich and the elderly poor can be distinguished sharply according to whether they live in a stem family structure or in a denuded family, or in other words, in the specific pattern of the domestic life cycle. It seems to me that the crucial issue here is access to domestic family labour and consumption. The elderly rich who live within an "extended" system profit from the domestic labour of the in-law (subsistence production in form of services) as well as any higher consumption which may directly result from higher production, while the elderly poor are dependent on themselves or on younger children for consumption services as well. The old who are poor are those who are not in a position, due to the fact that they possess little land, to control the labour (both agricultural and domestic) of their children. Thus, in contrast to the well-to-do, although their sons and daughters may continue to be living in the same village, or elsewhere, and they may be supported to some extent by them, they form separate residential units, usually with a single child or grandchild. The problem to be regulated in the course of the development cycle is thus the approvisionment of younger units in return for old-age security for the older ones. The significance of this is to be seen from the explanation for the widespread phenomenon of land kept under parental name and control until death intervenes: apparently, parents are not enthusiastic about giving their land away to their children because they are afraid that once they do so, their children will not take care of them. In any case, it is clear that the crucial institutions, accounting for the degree of security the old manage to obtain, are certainly those governing the provision of the offspring with means of production (the system ofinheritance) and marriage partners (the system of marriage) and it is to these that we shall now turn our attention. The Transmission of Property The ideology of adat as well as the Islamic Law oflnheritance specify the equal division of property between siblings, in the case of adat, and division in the ratio of 2:1 according to gender, in the case oflslamic Law. Theoretically, therefore, the process of property devolution should not lead to social differentiation between kin. This, however, disregards the significance of usufructuary access to means of production, maintained in defiance of the above jural norms.

Case 1 Jusuh Ariffin and Saad Ariffin are brothers, both living in the village, yet Jusuh is categorized as a middle peasant and has married into the established Tok Idris family, while Saad is one of the poorest peasants in the village. How is this to be explained? Their parents operated 3.5 re of padi land. Jusuh is the youngest son, Saad the eldest. Before his marriage at twenty-five years of age, Saad opened 2.5 re ofland while still living with his parents, but upon going to the Land Office to register the land in his name, it turned out that this land had already been claimed by the Penghulu. Officially then, Saad became a tenant of the Penghulu, operating the 2.5 re for free for some years before having to pay rent, first in kind, subsequently

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179

in cash. But before this land became fully productive, Saad had to supplement his income by engaging in agricultural and other forms of wage labour, especially after this marriage and the birth of the children, when there were more mouths to feed. Jusuh, on the other hand, continued to live with his parents in a stem-structure and cultivated all the family's land in the mother's old age. With this as a base, he was able to open 7 re of land, which forms his present secure productive base.

Case 2 The estate of Lebai Darus, long deceased, is still not divided. 5 re were given (not officially transferred) to his eldest son, and 2 re or more to each of the succeeding three daughters, and one son. The youngest son remained in the household of L. Darus until his father's death, managing the remaining property in his name, investing the surplus in, among other things, a rice-huller which is the only one in the village. He is today one of the wealthiest villagers. Upon the death of the father, he re-possessed the fields which his sisters, Lang Cah and Timah, had been operating for decades. According to the Islamic Law oflnheritance, the daughters have a right to part of the estate as well, but since the estate has not yet been divided, the youngest son has managed to enjoyed usufructuary access to the bulk of the estate, and has emerged as a consequence, as wealthier than his siblings. These two examples suggest not merely the significance of the stem structure in organizing usufructuary access to means of production and thereby to a secure subsistence base from which one can accumulate, they also point to the difficulty of interpreting the extensiveness of tenurial arrangements (operation of land not registered in one's own name) between kin as indicative of the "sharing of poverty", without a deeper analysis of the structural conditions in which these arrangements are embedded. Access to a marriage partner, and the possibility of procreation this implies, is another juncture where "breakdowns" can occur. There does not seem to be any fixed pattern of preference for specific types of marriage partners but there seem to be two forms of marriage preferences which are particularly striking. There is first the preference for parallel cousin marriage which is given ideological recognition and as such, also frequently recorded in the literature. The rationale for these marriages, as formulated by a village informant, was that "this way, the property could be kept in the family". But it is interesting to note that there is also a striking tendency for the wealthy to marry complete outsiders, moreover, poor outsiders. The procedure seems to be the following: a daughter of a wealthy family is married early, often at fifteen, to a cousin or perhaps to a wealthy family from another village. Many of these marriages end in failure because the daughter returns within the first month or months of her stay with the in-laws. Sitting now as a divorcee at home, the dowry expected for her will have fallen considerably and the family will welcome the offer of a poor young man who has managed to scrape together a modest sum for the dowry, to marry their daughter and to stay with them and contribute his labour to the family farm.

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THE TRANSFORMATION OF VILLAGE SOCIETY

An heiress who is divorced therefore remarries early but for a woman without property, divorce or widowhood could imply a breakdown in the most concrete sense. She may return to live with the family of origin where she will be assured of subsistence consumption but where she is unlikely to be ever able to accumulate sufficiently to provide her children with access to agricultural production. Alternatively, she remarries, and it is then often the case that the children are left with their grandparents. In either case, upon the children's marriage, the new couple will be integrated into the parental unit of the in-law, and feel little obligation to provide for the old-age needs of the mother. The case of Biyah Y aacob, presented above, is an example of this. "Breakdowns" in the successful completion of the family development cycle can thus occur within the context of the traditional social organization, especially in conjunction with divorce or widowhood. The significance of this should not be underestimated when it is remembered that in Kedah, the rate of divorce per 100 marriages between 1951-55 was 61.4 per cent. 22 This affects not only the further course of the woman's development cycle but also the "starting conditions" of her children. Children of divorced parents, or orphans, are often brought up by the grandparents, but according to Islamic Law, they have no rights to the estate of the deceased, although often exercising usufructuary access to the property as "tenant" in the grandparents' lifetime. Mat, in his mid-twenties, lives with his wife and young daughter in his fatherin-law's household, a well-to-do peasant, and helps him cultivate his farm. Mat himself has no property and has applied to FELDA, the government land resettlement agency, for a place in one of their schemes. This rather precarious phase in his development cycle however, was not entirely foreseen. Upon the divorce of his parents, he was brought up by his grandfather, who was a wealthy peasant. It was his grandfather who provided him with the dowry for his marriage and whose lands he was operating. Upon the grandfather's death, however, his father, who had remarried, repossessed the land, leaving him with no access to any resources whatever.

The constant possibility of death in the earlier days, and the high rate of divorce, thus made the grandparent-grandchild tie a highly significant one in Malay rural society. Since this tie, however, is accorded no recognition by Islamic Law, which on the other hand facilitates the high divorce rate, dispossession as well as unequal distribution of resources often occurred in the process of inter-generational transfers.

THE NETWORK OF CURRENT EXCHANGE So far, the pattern of inter-generational exchange between kin has been dealt with. There is however, another widespread set of Malay practices of exchange which tend to be lumped under the rubric of "income-sharing" or "mutual aid", enjoined by "kinship". These include tenurial and labour arrangements (share-cropping, berderau and so forth), sedekah (alms), tolong-menolong (mutual help) and so forth.

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181

Elsewhere, (Chapter 8), it has been argued that tenurial and labour arrangements between kin which lie outside the scope of inter-generational trasfers are characterized by a principle of strict reciprocity, in which the behaviour expected of kin (for example, the level of rent), was not to be distinguished from that of non-kin. In addition, there are relations of asymmetrical reciprocity - wage employment or patron-client relations - which are expressed in terms of kinship norms of mutual aid. What kinship does do, however, is to determine the priority list for the network of exchanges in which one engages. Should land be available for renting for example, it is more likely to be rented to a kinsman than to an "outsider". Should there be shortage of labour during the harvesting period, one should accept the employment offer made by the kinsman rather than by another villager. Massard's analysis of the pattern of exchange in social and ritual production in a Pahang village confirms that even in these spheres, balanced reciprocity is the practice, if not the norm. 23 Thus, she shows that for the circulation of cooked food during the fasting month, the need to reciprocate is a rule that applies among kin and non-kin and is "in discordance with villagers' statements according to which real brothers and sisters do not keep 'accounts'- tidak kira". 24 Interestingly, she notes that one-way gifts from a younger or better-off villager to an older/poorer one, are accounted for as alms.- "we depart from kinship ideology to enter the realm of religion". 25 In ceremonial production on the other hand, which involves the mobilization of a large labour force and consumption expenditure, reciprocity again appears to be the major operative principle. Elsewhere, (Chapter 7) it has been shown that the principle of derau is employed for the exchange of consumption goods necessary for a wedding feast, and that this could be considered a form of savings. Massard's analysis of the work team mobilized for a wedding feast comes to a similar conclusion. The argument would thus be similar to that which Nagata employs in her study of Malay kinship in the urban context, namely, that despite the fact that "ideally, Malay custom, reinforced by Islam, enjoins certain obligations on kin, and these are constantly referred to verbally", 26 (1) in fact, similar kinds of behaviour and assistance are enjoined for kin and nonkin alike. This is reinforced by the use of a single system of terminology of reference and address for both kin and non-kin; (2) the ideals are reality of kinship behaviour are often widely discrepant and are popularly recognized to be so. This is exacerbated in situations of differential social mobility between kin. 27 Nagata shows how the injunctions in the language of sharing can be neutralized by the manipulations of terminological usages to deny or create kin relationships, involving generally, a subtle shift from a kin to a patronage relationship. It is not appropriate to see kinship and patronage as mutually opposed categories ... patronage becomes more pronounced, however, once a real or perceived change of socio-economic status produces feelings of status incongruence and the different roles cannot readily be reconcilcd. 2 8

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In this respect, I would like to stress the significance of control over labour as an expression of social differentiation, especially in the rural economy. The poor "lose" their children, the wealthy can "bind" them by means of property resources. Property thus seems not only to have been valued for its own sake but in an economy apparently still characterized by labour scarcity (both agricultural as well as domestic labour), of its possible exchange against labour services. This relationship between land and labour provides certainly at least one of the dimensions of the patron-client relationship. On the other hand, as Massard stresses, this wealth of evidence pointing to the fact that kinship tics can be manipulated, should not lead us to disregard its role altogether. It acts as a social code which establishes and maintains reciprocal patterns of exchange among people who may not exchange at all or who might, in other circumstances, be exchanging according to asymmetrical terms. 29

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have argued that the language of sharing frequently blurs the distinction which ought to be made between the system ofland and labour exchanges which bind together kin-related households developed in the course of the family development cycle, and the network of labour and land exchanges between households who may also happen to be kin at the village level. In the one, exchanges are structured by a long-term, temporally-spaced transfer of resources between generations, designed specifically to balance out the asymmetry between productive capacity and consumption needs in the course of an individual's life cycle. In the other, exchanges ofland, labour, and other gifts, are primarily influenced by the exigencies of current production and reproduction needs. To use Sahlin's tcrminology 30 then, the second network of sharing, with its moral continuum from kin to patron-client is -characterized by the principle of balanced or asymmetrical reciprocity. Generalized reciprocity, with its specifically moral emphasis, would be applicable to the first network mentioned above, namely, that of inter-generational exchanges. Nonetheless, its actual operation does not necessarily lead either to the generation of homogeneous units with differences in consumption and production patterns accountable solely to differences in family size, as assumed by Chayanov. The need for expansion and the possibility of breakdowns provide the structural basis for processes of social differentiation to occur. In particular, this first network of kin-related households is as important for the understanding of socio-economic processes at the village level as the village or the household per se. It is in this context that the fact that over four-fifths of the total operated land in the M uda area is in the form of joint ownership of property that to a large extent has not been divided, has to be seen. 31 While the waris (heirs) certainly do not constitute a corporate group, the material context that ties them together is of crucial significance for the regulation of access to land and labour in the village.

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NOTES

1. See Chapters 7 and 8. 2. James Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 5. 3. This concept was introduced by Scott in the above cited book. 4. In particular emphasized by Scott. 5. This concept was introduced by Akimi Fujimoto, Income Sharing Among Malay Peasants: A Study of Land Tenure and Rice Production (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1983). 6. Masuo Kuchiba, "Kin Groupings in a Kedah Malay Village" (Paper presented to the Third National Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, Brisbane, 1980), p. 5. 7. David Banks, "Changing Kinship in North Malaya", American Anthropologist 74, no. 2 (1972): 1254. 8. This concept was introduced by Meyer Fortes as the basis of kinship morality. Sec M. Fortes, Kinship and the Social Order (Chicago: Aldine Press, 1969). 9. See, for example, the arguments of the CPR Study discussed in Chapter 8 of this book. 10. Compare Judith Nagata, "Kinship and Social Mobility Among the Malays", Man 11 (1976) p. 401: "The ideal, and statistically most common form of domestic unit is the nuclear family, although in practice, a variety of extended forms are also found, for economic, inheritance and other reasons." 11. Jack Goody, ed., The Developmental Cycle in Domestic Groups (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). 12. Fortes, "Introduction" in ibid., p. 2. 13. Ibid., p. 2. 14. A.V. Chayanov, On the Theory of Peasant Economy (Homewood, Ill., American Economic Association Translation Series (1966). 15. D. Freeman, "The Family System of the !ban of Borneo", in Goody, op. cit., pp. 15-52. 16. B. Foster, "Socio-Economic Consequences of Stem Family Composition in a Thai Village", Ethnology 17, no. 8 (1978). 17. Kuchiba, op. cit. 18. Ibid., p. 5. Kuchiba's text provides an exemplary account of the linkage between households formed in the course of the developmental process, see p. 16. 19. Banks, op. cit., p. 1260. 20. Ibid., p. 1260. 21. Hans-Dieter Evers, Urban and Rural Subsistence Reproduction: a Theoretical Outline, Working Paper no. 2 (Bielefeld: Sociology of Development Research Centre, University of Bielefeld, 1981). 22. Yoshiro Tsubouchi, "Islam and Divorce Among Malay Peasants", in Southeast Asia; Nature, Society and Development, ed. S. Ichimura (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1976), p. 31. 23. SeeJ.L. Massard, "Kinship and Exchange Practices in a Malay Village" (Paper presented at the Seminar on Cognatic Forms of Social Organization in Southeast Asia, Amsterdam, 1983). 24. Ibid., p. 4. 25. Ibid., p. 5. 26. Nagata, op. cit., p. 402. 27. Ibid. p. 403. 28. Ibid., p. 406. 29. Massard, op. cit., p. 11. 30. See M. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (New York: Aldine Press, 1972). 31. See Gibbons et al., Land Tenure in the Muda Irrigation Area (Penang: Final Report, Centre for Policy Research, 1981), p. 13.

12 The Village as a Community

INTRODUCTION Common to all models of peasant society and economy or the "peasant mode of production" is the notion of the peasant household, as the basic unit of production and consumption embedded in a larger unit of distribution or better still, redistribution, be it the village or the kin group. The significance of the village (as opposed to kinship) as a unit of distribution where household production is governed according to the "safety-first principle" of subsistence assurance has been stressed for Southeast Asian societies in particular by Scott. It is above all within the village- in the patterns of social control and reciprocity that structure daily conduct- where the subsistence ethic finds social expression. The principle which appears to unify a wide array ofbehaviour is this: 'All village families will be guaranteed a minimal subsistence niche insofar as the resources controlled by villagers make this possible'. 1

Scotts warns against romanticizing this 'subsistence insurance" provided by the village since it was a product of the exigencies of peasant agricultural production with its shortage of labour rather than of altruism. 2 Notwithstanding this, the paradigm of the moral economy with its unbreachable injunction to share has been widely invoked in studies of the Malaysian peasantry. Following the lead taken in Chapters 5 and 6, where the concept of the household and its value as a unit of analysis was subjected to a closer examination, this and the following chapter will be devoted to an analysis of the village and kinship as units of distribution. The argument will be the limited utility of this paradigm both for describing the empirical reality as well as explaining the specificities of the Malaysian peasantry.

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INCOME-SHARING WITHIN THE VILLAGE? Corner, for example, alludes to this in her study of villages in the Muda region: A second, less obvious factor that also tends to disguise the higher preference for income in many households is to be found in the value system of village society [my emphasis]. Wage employment is regarded by the village as a limited good- a not inaccurate assessment. Income-sharing norms are persistent, within certain limits, in rural rice-growing villages, as shown by Fujimoto and others. Village ethics decree that households that are not in great need of wage income, that is, households owning or renting sufficient land to provide a reasonable standard of living, should not seek additional income through wage employment (except during puk seasons when it was both necessary and proper for all, except the most affluent, to labour in their own tl.elds and those of their neighbours) because this would deprive less fortunate households largely dependent on wage income, of their livelihood. This social restriction applied to wage employment within the village but did not extend to wage employment elsewhere. 3

It has been Fujimoto above all who has employed the notion of the "Malay village structure" as the basic unit within which "poor villagers are assured of a subsistence level of 1iving" 4 and since this work is likely to exert considerable influence on Malaysian studies 5 , it will be reviewed at some length here. For the "wide array of social arrangements" mentioned by Scott, 6 Fujimoto introduces the concept of "income-sharing" on the basis of rice production behind which lies the principle of reciprocity. According to him, The Malay concept corresponding to reciprocity is probably that of tolonJ?menolong, which literally means mutual assistance, but also refers to informal help or favour. Although any assistance may be reciprocated in the long run, it may appear to be one-sided help a.t any one point of time ... [our] concept of incomesharing extends reciprocity to include the aspect of redistribution or transfer of income and wealth. 7

Within the context of rice-producing villages, Fujimoto identifies "four modes of income-sharing: the transfer of resource ownership, the transfer of realized income, the provision of income opportunities, and the determination of factor prices". 8 Fujimoto's theoretical framework, with its inter-related concepts of modes of incomesharing, reciprocity and village structure belie a basic misunderstanding of the social processes at work in "Malay village society". Before proceeding to a discussion of the social structure of the village as a unit, it would be appropriate to first clarify the nature of some of the "modes of income-sharing" identified by Fujimoto, as well as the structure of reciprocity in these various modes of exchange (rather than incomesharing). As far as the transfer of resource ownership is concerned, this is clearly the product of the workings of the family development cycle, as was discussed in the preceding chapter, and has nothing to do with the nature of the village community as such. Fujimoto suggests that "there is another way of income-sharing through the sale of

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land, which may also be practised between non-relatives. That is, payment in instalments over a period of time at zero interest rate or at a rate below the market level". 9 In a footnote, he makes the reminder that the payment of and charging of interest on loan is prohibited by Islam. 10 Those familiar with the workings of padi kunca and jual janji (as discussed in Chapter 9) will note that this has never been an obstacle to the charging of horrendous "interest rates" in the event of enforced land sales in the padi economy. Fujimoto's own data on land transactions indicate that lower or higher than market rate transactions took place primarily in cases of intergenerationally related kin, as can be expected from the discussion in Chapter 11. 11 As for the determination of factor prices as a mode of income-sharing, Fujimoto suggests that in order to assist the poor, rental can be significantly lower than the value of the marginal product ofland, while the wage rate may be higher than the marginal product oflabour in rice farming. 12 No evidence was found for this in Gelung Rambai. Rentals below as well as above the market rates were found for close kin tied to each other via the family development cycle. Otherwise, no differences in level of rent were found even between kin and non-kin, that is, there was no evidence that any reduction of rent took place on the consideration of poverty alone (see Chapter 8). The wage rate within the village was generally lower than that offered by non-village padi operators and was determined by the acute labour shortage during the peak seasons of the padi cultivation cycle (sec Chapter 7). Fujimoto's own data on this found evidence of a wage rate higher than that of the marginal product of labour only in Kelantan, for which he adds that there "the use of hired labour was in fact marginal in rice cultivation"_1 3 Fujimoto's main theme however is that income-sharing takes place primarily via the provision of income opportunities, that is, in the form of tenancy and labour arrangements, which may also incorporate elements of the above mode, namely, nonmarket factor prices. His hypothetical case of how this may work is worth discussing in some detail. 1 4 The model of the village structure is a three-tiered one: Group A, B and C, who all participate in the production of rice. Group A owns land more than necessary for subsistence and rents out part or all of the excess holding to Group B who may own a small area of land or no land at all. Group C consists of landless labourers who do not have access to land to cultivate. 15

The mechanism of income-sharing is illustrated by considering the position of Group B farmers, whom Fujimoto terms "tenant-managers" . 16 First, tenant-managers are provided with an opportunity to engage in the economic activity of rice production through the renting ofland, which may take place at the expense of under-utilization of family labour of the landowners, Group A. In addition, the rental level agreed to may be lower than the value of marginal product ofland in order to assist the tenant-managers who, without the rented land, may possibly be poorer than the landowners ... Second, if the tenant-managers can rent sufficient land for their family needs, they may provide other landless villagers with wage opportunities at the expense of

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under-utilization of family labour. Wage rates could be higher than the value of marginal return of labour in order to further assist poor fellow villagers ... This means that the explicit transfer of part of the value ofland' s marginal product can theoretically be extended to include the landless villagers, whose wage earnings therefore are obtained originally from the landowners via the operation of the tenant-managers." 1 7

In this way, Fujimoto notes, "the systems ofland tenure and labour arrangements may bear the role oflevellers of the income gap brought about through uneven distribution of land resources in a rather egalitarian society where land is the largest source of income". 18

Let us first consider the hypothesis that labour is employed, at the expense of the under-utilization of family labour, in order to provide income opportunities to poor and needy villagers. The discussion and data presented in Chapter 7 firmly suggests that this cannot be said to be operative in Gelung Rambai. Fujimoto, comes to the conclusion that in the villages he studied, this hypothesis is supported by the data collected. The data he refers to however, is the following: Our data seem to support this. Of the larger farmers who responded to our question, 79 per cent and 83 per cent clearly indicated a sense of social obligation to provide jobs to poor villagers, in Province Wellesley and Kelantan respectively ... An important indication of this practice was observed in Kampung Guar Tok Said, which was adjacent to the Chinese settlements of rice farmers. The Chinese farmers owned three large-scale combine harvesters which were also available for Malay farmers on a contract basis ... The villagers were of course aware of the economic advantage of the combine harvesters of manual harvesting, but not a single farmer in the village had used the machine to date. Their argument was that although the mechanical harvesting (sic) would have cost them less individually,jobs would not have been given to those poor villagers who needed a wage income. 19

The breath-taking rate at which combines have conquered the Muda countryside in the past few years (see the discussion and documentation in Chapter 7) renders any further comment on the value and significance of such assurances superfluous. An examination of the hypothesis that the tenancy system is a disguised form of provision of income opportunities for landless or small peasants is now in order. In Chapter 8 it was argued that in Gelung Rambai, this role is strictly confined to family tenure. Otherwise, it is precisely in the tenurial system that the process of increasing concentration can be detected, both in the village and in the region. Fujimoto's own data revealed that "there did not exist convincing economic evidence to support the argument that the landlords in Kelantan rented out land at the expense of a lower income in order to assist poorer villagers". 20 Nonetheless, he adds that this does not deny that "income-sharing probably existed on an ad hoc rather than institutionalized basis". 21 The hypothesis was confirmed with regard to Province Wellesley however on the basis offarm management data which indicated "that the landlord could obtain more income from his own cultivation rather than the renting out of land". 22 It is

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however, precisely because changing conditions of production have brought about this new state of affairs in the Muda region that the marked trend towards a decline in tenancy has taken place (see Chapter 10). In fact the plight of those poor Muda farmers whose life-histories were movingly retold in a recent publication can in almost all cases be traced to the loss of previously tenanted land or job opportunities now that farming has become a feasible and profitable proposition. So much for systems ofland tenure and labour arrangements bearing "the role of levellers of the income gap". 23 In fact, the generally low level of market rents, lower than the marginal product ofland, is a phenomenon recorded by Fujimoto for Province W ellesley and by other observers for the Muda region as a whole. The land market - both for transactions as well as for tenancies --does seem to be subject to "institutional factors" which have reduced the expected (market) rate of return to land as a factor of production. 24 However, the "basic hypothesis ... that land tenure systems are one means of income redistribution among the villagers under the given socio-economic structure of the village" 25 should be dismissed; apart from the role of kinship, that of the state far outweighs the "levelling tendencies" of the village community. Before turning to the fourth mode of income-sharing which Fujimoto identifies, namely, the transfer of realized income, let us reconsider those forms of labour arrangements generally known as gotong-royong or tolong-menolong: Gotong-royong is actually a term foreign to Kedah Malay and is now used there to refer to voluntary, cooperative work for the village, especially in connection with governmentsponsored projects. The Kedah term for gotong-royong in its more general sense of the word, that of mutual aid, is tolong-menolong (tolong means help). Tolong-menolong covers any instance of aid where labour is called upon, for example, when harvesting takes place and help is needed to keep an eye on the newlyharvested padi on the fields. Where it approximates most what we usually associate with gotong-royong, that is, a group of men volunteering free labour, is when help is needed to physically remove a house from one spot to another. Apart from this, I never saw any instance of communal labour in the village. 26 It is interesting to note that even where wage labour is concerned, for example, for harvesting or for transplanting, the labourer expresses this in terms of to long. In fact, help in the form oflabour is most often offered by the poor to the well-to-do. Poorer women to long at kenduris, men do odd jobs. By far the most common form of"mutual aid" however, is mutual exchange oflabour or derau. This has been devised essentially for the purpose of transplanting and harvesting, where a group will take turns working on the field of its members. The principle here is one of strict reciprocity and both large and small farm operators may be found in the same group. Thus, as far as labour is concerned, no evidence was found in the village either of extensive cooperative or communal labour in the name of the village or of labour being offered to poorer households with a higher dependency ratio or of labour arrangements of mutual aid developed by the poor themselves. We now come to the major mechanism which (in agreement with Fujimoto) allows for genuine redistribution above and beyond narrowly-defined kin ties. This is that of zakat and fitrah, the Islamic injunction to the giving of alms. Zakat refers

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to padi amounting to one-tenth of the harvest which has to be given away to eight possible categories of people. Fitrah refers to one gantang of rice to be given to the poor by every single member of the family. Since Islam is the official religion and there is a bureaucracy to handle Islamic matters, zakat is officially to be handed over to the State, which redistributes this further to the needy and the other possible claimants as laid down by the Koran. There is an officially designated amir in the village whose task it is to collect the zakat, for which he receives a commission. According to him, he collects in one season only about 80-90 sacks of padi from the entire village. Altogether, the total village production comes to around 8000 sacks of padi per season. Zakat collected by the amir thus amount to only about one-hundreth of the production, although officially, it should be a tenth. Where does the rest of the zakat go? Apparently, the government once made efforts to increase the amount of zakat collected, but withdrew the plans because of resistance from the villagers. The bulk of the zakat is distributed informally by the villagers themselves. Among the major recipients, it seems to me, arc the religious teachers or tok guru. It is estimated that the present tok guru in the village receives at least 20 sacks in one season. In addition, Hj. Ali, who also used to give koranic lessons, receives zakat as well as Abdul A, the son of the former koranic teacher in the village. None of these three people are poor. In fact, Hj. Ali is one of the wealthiest in the village. Zakat is also given to those about to leave for Mecca to fulfil their pilgrimage, and to those studying in Arabic schools. Again, none of these would be the poorest. Interestingly, Fujimoto's data confirms this. Of the four villages he studied, the average amount of zakat received per household was highest for "mosque officials" and "Islamic associates" in three out of the four villages. 27 Zakat is, however, also given to the poor~ in particular, to those poor who are also old. For example, all those in the study who have been identified as being poor and of a denuded family structure, receive zakat. Tok Sum, who is seventy and lives with her grandson, received four sacks of padi. Yunus I receives six or seven sacks on average per season. Saad A received five sacks, and so on. This is again confirmed by Fujimoto's data, which noted that of the "very poor villagers" who received zakat, "all of them, in both study areas, were households headed by single, divorced or widowed women with no particular child or relative being financially responsible for them". 28 The poor on the other hand, who arc still fairly young and have to engage in wage labour to supplement their meagre returns from agricultural production, do not receive zakat in this form at all. They may do so only if they have "helped" someone with the threshing or harvesting but especially threshing. Then, it is the custom to give some of the padi away as zakat. In a sense, this could be seen as part of the wages. Fitrah however does really go to the poor although there again, it is given mostly to the elderly poor. Thus Tok Som, who received four sacks of padi, also received thirty gantangs of rice, as did Yunus I. These thirty gantangs have a monetary value ofM$84 and for a fairly large family like Yunus' would last for two months. Hardly any .fitrah is given to the non-elderly poor.

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Thus zakat and .fitrah seem to be used at the most to assure subsistence survival for the elderly, that is, more as a form of old-age support than of the sharing of poverty as such. Besides, the use of zakat for cementing ties of obligation between figures of authority in the village, like the religious teacher, and the other peasants, should not be forgotten. It was in fact the accumulation of surplus through this means which allowed Tok Ahmad, the earlier koranic teacher, to buy 34 re of padi land and 16 re of rubber smallholdings. It would appear that at the village level, mechanisms do exist to ensure that the old do not die of starvation. The poor on the other hand, have to fend for themselves -by borrowing padi on a padi kunca basis (from Tok Ahmad for example), by mortgaging their lands, by borrowing from their towkays or close kin, or eventually, by leaving the village altogether to look for work elsewhere, 29 or even by stealing. During the author's stay in the village incidents involving the theft of bicycles, fish and padi occurred. One other mechanism of redistribution is the major feasts which are held with some regularity in the village, in particular those relating to marriage and death. A death can be an expensive affair for the family concerned, since the funerary articles as well as food and drinks for the guests (at least one representative of almost all village households comes to pay his last respects) have to be paid for, as well as sedekah to the person who washes the corpse and the religious elders who have been invited to perform the prayers. When a member of a poor family dies, the other villagers bring rice or money contributions, little or no food is served and the sedekah is returned to the family. When a rich man dies, no contributions are expected from the vistors; food, including beef, is served by the family, and a large number of people are invited to perform the prayers.

THE VILLAGE AS A UNIT OF ANALYSIS The thrust of the argument in the rest of the chapter is that "Malay village society" does not and cannot serve as the "income-distributing unit" since the institutional or organizational basis for corporation or even intensive cooperation is missing. In fact, once our attention is turned to this issue, the verdict of the Malaysian literature seems to be almost unanimous as to the "invalidity of the village as an autonomous sociopolitical entity for consideration both as a unit of analysis as well as a unit of development change". 30 For Afifuddin for example, The intermittent nature of village level organization is highly characteristic of Malay peasant communities in Malaysia, especially in the economic aspects of life ... The traditional concept of a village which stresses a common geographical area, common ties, and social ties providing centripetal forces to form a structured community with district system boundaries may no longer hold in Malaysian peasant society. 31

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Narifuma Maeda, aJapanese anthropologist, confirms this view based on field research in a Malacca village: A Malay community, traditionally and to a certain extent today, is a rather amorphous gathering of people and houses. One community merges with another at the edges, and it is very difficult to discern the boundaries of each, geographically and socially, unless the natural environment comes into play ... To sum up, a Malay community can be seen as amorphous in that it does not have any definite, fixed boundary and its membership is fluid. 32

The same finding is reported by another anthropologist, Masuo Kuchiba, who did field research in a Kedah village: In the Malay village, strong dyadic relationships centred on the individual prevail; the villagers feel little solidarity as a community, and exclusive community organizations oflong standing which could foster feelings of solidarity arc few. 33

Banks files a similar report: "Informants argue that spiritual kinship is dyadic. They arc distrustful of such general concepts of solidarity as "brotherhood", "village interest groups", and other wider groupings in which there should be a common solidarity shared by all."34

This view however, is not fully uncontested. Syed Husin Ali, in his study of Malay peasant society and leadership in three villages asserts that the Malay village appears to be a community or a coherent social unit within which all kinds of ties and interactions occur; and although its territorial basis may not be very clearly defined, nonetheless it is quite often defmable. 35

Phrased in this way, it does not necessarily contradict the views expressed above. What has to be rejected however, is the definition of the Javanese village by Boeke, quoted by Husin Ali, as "more than just a corporate body; it is a natural community". 36 An analysis of the M a/ay village social structure in Gelung Rambai would confirm the first view. There are only two kinds of "traditional" cooperative associations to be found at the village level, one a crockery association (syarikat pinggan mangkuk) and the other a funerary association (syarikat mati). In addition, there are the Farmers' Association (Persatuan Peladang) and the Cooperative Society (syarikat kerjasama) introduced by the government. Members of the syarikat pinggan mangkok pay dues with which the crockery and other utensils used at weddings, funerals and other ceremonies are purchased, and help each other with the preparations for these feasts. A committee runs the association and allots tasks to the various members on the occasion of a feast. A split has taken place along the lines of political party conflict so that there are now two such associations in the village. The syarikat mati is organized on similar lines for the cooperative performance of funeral rites as well as for help in shouldering the financial costs involved. It is the one association in which almost all village households are members (but includes members from other villages as well, altogether a membership of almost 300) since, as one informant said, "everybody has to die once".

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As hinted at in this statement, the basis for participation in these associations is that of strict reciprocity arising out of individual needs rather than village-level functional needs. Massard's female informant, who explained that she stopped participating in large ritual celebrations once all ofher three daughters were married because her work (and probably financial) contributions could not be repaid is instructive. 37 The point is that, apart from the distributional sphere, wet rice production in Malaysia is organized

such that communal activities at the village level is unnecessary. As has already been mentioned in Chapter 10, the crucial factor here is the absence of any locally-organized irrigation system or village-administered communal land which would have constituted the village as a unit of production. The social organization of wet-rice production found in Japan for example, is just not pertinent for Malaysia. As Maeda notes for Japan: Group conformity within the rural community perhaps originated in the lifestyle of the traditional padi-growing village, which necessitated continuous cooperation among the villagers. For instance, they depended on the same river or pond for irrigation of their fields and on the same common land for the collection of firewood and fertilizer material. 38 The discussion in Chapter 7 has shown that the crucial factor in padi production in the Malay context was the scarcity of labour. This leads us to the second feature of the "traditional" society and economy which has affected the nature of the village as a sociological unit, namely, the geographical mobility of the villagers (see the previous chapters). In the context of land pioneering and a state system that did not impose excessive and systematic control over the peasantry, physical withdrawal from the "village community" frequently occurred, either in search of new economic opportunities, or in order to avoid domestic or other conflict. In the one year during which this study was carried out, three families had simply left the village. Between 1977 and 1980, another ten had left the village. Symptomatic in fact of the absence of communal solidarity in the face of common agricultural tasks is the inability of the village leadership structure to come to terms with the new conflicts which have arisen in the context of double-cropping. Conflicts arise due to the demands of the new irrigation system. As well as enforcing an even more rigorous uniformity of crop scheduling, "flaws in the structural design of the irrigation system which cannot distribute water at the right time and at the right locations equally between them" 39 have led to serious conflicts between villagers from the same village as well as from different villages. The problem arises because the present system of irrigation supplies water for an irrigation unit of approximately one square mile, with water reaching the most distant fields by plot to plot gravitation. 40 Villagers with padi fields close to the irrigation outlet have to contend with over-flooding of their fields, while those with distant fields may not receive their water in time. In Gelung Rambai, one of the most violent conflicts erupted when a villager with a plot close to over-flooding closed the irrigation outlet, whereupon the other affected farmers "came with parangs (long knives)". This problem has been noted by Barnard as well, who studied a village where

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"water rights have become one of the most contentious issues in the adoption of the new farming technology, with tensions often erupting into outright conflict." 41 Afifuddin confirms that "instances of fatal violence arising from quarrels over irrigation water are common cases in irrigated regions in Malaysia". 42 The problem of course is exacerbated by the fact that the farmers encompassed by an irrigation unit may not be living in the same village and may not therefore be subject to the same authority, for example, the ketua kampung (village head) but the more fundamental problem seems to be that even within the village, no institutionalized structures have developed to handle conflict at the village level. The issue of conflict and village leadership will be dealt with in greater detail in the following chapter; the point to note here perhaps is that the kind of conflict which in the past could be managed by the exercise of influence on the part of the village elders have now been overtaken by conflicts arising from the sphere of production from which no one now can withdraw. A villager in his late twenties in Gelung Rambai mentioned that the only occasion of serious conflict which he could recall in the village concerned the theft of fish from a villager's fish-pond. Nonetheless, the point is not, as Afifuddin would have it, that "the village is no more than a eo-residential unit without much overall functional unity except in some socio-rcligious activitics". 43 The considerable potential for conflict arising from areas mentioned above - marriage, inheritance, child rearing and so forth- could be resolved by physical withdrawal or more importantly, by the cultivation of those socio-rcligious activities and their explicit social values, namely, the importance of inter-personal harmony. It is in this light that statements referring to the village community as one large family - "kampung ini boleh kata satu keluarga, kalau tidak bersangkut belah pak, bersangkut belah mak" (this village can be said to be one family- if not related on the father's side, then on the mother's) -arc to be evaluated. The reference to the family is not to a bounded corporate social unit that acts in solidarity vis-a-vis commonly-defmed tasks or commonly-defined outsiders; 44 rather, what is invoked are the standards of behaviour, modelled on that of kinship, which should smoothen the actual process of interaction within the village. As noted by Massard: ... although neighbours are perceived as irrevocably different from blood kin or perhaps for this very reason, they must be treated like (author's emphasis) "brothers-and-sisters"~ macam adik-beradik ~ because they arc met and needed in everyday interaction. Kinship here plays a part by providing a social code: broadly speaking, local standards of etiquette offer two different codes, one that applies to strangers, "unrelated people"~ orang lain~ one that applies to relatives ~ saudara. Obviously, next door neighbours cannot be treated like strangers and, on a wider though looser basis, it makes social life smoother and reassuring if one can talk of the village community as one large family, orang sitzi, semua saudara (we are all related here). 4 S

Some of the central concepts which define these standards ofbehaviour are budi bahasa (the language of character), patut and sesuai (proper, fitting) and malu (shame,

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humility, embarrassment). Of particular importance in regulating asymmetrical exchanges between villagers and all other members of the social world is the concept ofberhutang budi (to owe a debt ofkindness), the significance of which will be further discussed in Chapter 14. Suffice it to note here that the study appears to confirm the views of Maeda and others who stress the essentially dyadic nature of these interactional exchanges. 46 Thus, a characterization of the forms of integration at the village level would be: reciprocity rather than redistribution, and balanced and asymmetrical reciprocity rather than generalized reciprocity. The role of exchange in maintaining solidarity throws further light on the phenomenon of the frequent feasts which are held in Malay villages. According to Kuchiba, The resultant feelings of instability are relieved, and the solidarity of the village is reinforced by the Malay custom of inviting each other to communal feasts at every opportunity. At the least, friendship is ,expressed and reconfirmed through this custom, which is ritualized in the feast. And through the ritual, solidarity is sanctified and strengthened. Where, as in the Malay village, permanent neighbourhood associations are not found, it is necessary to repeatedly reconfirm communal solidarity. 47 At the risk of over-stating the point, it should be stressed once again that even here, balanced reciprocity is the basic rule of the game. Massard in fact uses this argument to explain the frequency of adoption practices in Malay society. This is why a childless couple remains socially isolated: how could they give their share of social production as fully-fledged members of the community if they have no son to circumcise or daughter to marry? It is answered through the practice of adoption ... suffice it here to say that adopted children enable their parents to take part in the more valuable moments of the exchange game. 48 Interestingly enough, this principle of balanced reciprocity operative in fairly undefined village boundaries with a fluid membership seems to be rather widespread in Southeast Asia. 49 The debate over the "loosely-structured society" of Thailand suggests that in many respects, Thai villages share the same features of social organization with Malay ones. 50 The one exception has been Java, and interestingly, the Javanese village has been taken to be a paradigmatic example of the closed, homogeneous traditional village typical of the Asiatic Mode of Production, as well as of the "closed, corporate village" defined by Wolf. 51 From these as well as other theoretical streams, the vague notion to which Scott, Fujimoto and others implicitly appeal has developed: that of the timeless Asian village. 52 Without reviewing in detail Breman's excellent discussion of the Javanese village and the ways in which it has been represented and misrepresented in the literature, the following quote illustrates his main argument: In my opinion, the village as a collective unit did not antedate the colonial state but is rather the product of it; a result of a process of localization and horizontalization that manifested itself during the course of the nineteenth century. 53

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According to him, even features like the existence of village communal land which was periodically redistributed were responses to the demands of the Culture System imposed by the Dutch colonial state. Given the different role which the British colonial state played in Malaysia, no pressures towards communalization existed and certainly no "closed, corporate village" developed.

CONCLUSION The verdict of both the secondary literature on Malaysia, as well as the exchange practices observed in the village, is negative with regard to the value of the "village", conceived of as a unit of redistribution, as an analytical tool for the study of the Malaysian peasantry. This is not to deny its existence as an empirical entity or its value as a unit of observation or data collection. It merely denies its efficacy as a regulator of resources working in contradistinction to that of the market.

NOTES 1. James Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University, 1976), p. 40. 2. Ibid., p. 6. 3. Lorraine Corner, "Mobility in the Context of Traditional Family and Social Relationships: Linkages, Reciprocity and Flow of Remittances", mimeo., p. 5. 4. Akimi Fujimoto, Income Sharing Among Malay Peasants: A Study of Land Tenure and Rice Production (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1983). 5. See for example the comment in the CPR study which refers to Fujimoto's "seminal work" (which) provides important focus and backing, both empirical and theoretical, for our more tentative findings and arguments concerning the considerable apparent importance of Malay kinship in ameliorating the conditions ofliving of peasant farmers facing the disruptive effects of agricultural modernization. Gibbons et al., op. cit., p. 91. 6. Scott, op. cit., p. 5: "Within the village context, a wide array of social arrangements typically operated to assure a minimum income to inhabitants. The existence of communal land that was periodically redistributed, in part on the basis of need, or the commons in European villages functioned in this way. In addition, social pressures within the pre-capitalist village had certain redistributive effects: rich peasants were expected to be charitable, or sponsor more lavish celebrations, to help out temporarily indigent kin and neighbours, to give generously to local shrines and temples." 7. Fujimoto, op. cit., pp. 153 ff. 8. Ibid., p. 159. 9. Ibid., p. 160. 10. Ibid., p. 172, footnote 12. 11. Ibid., p. 178. 12. Ibid., p. 165. 13. Ibid., p. 198. 14. Ibid., pp. 163 ff. 15. Ibid., p. 164. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., p. 165. 19. Ibid., p. 195. 20. Ibid., p. 203.

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21. Ibid., p. 203. 22. Ibid., p. 202. 23. Shukor Kassim, D. Gibbons, and H. Todd, Poor Malays Speak Out, Paddy Farmers in Muda (Kuala Lumpur: Marican, 1984). 24. See R.H. Goldmann and L. Squire, "Technical Change, Labour Use and Income Distribution in the Muda Irrigation Project", Development Discussion Paper no. 35 (Harvard Institute for International Development, 1978). 25. Fujimoto, op. cit., p. 153. 26. This is confirmed by Yamashita's study on labour utilization in the district which recorded no instance of gotong-royong. See M. Yamashita, H.S. Wong, and S. Jegatheesan, Farm Management Studies Qapan: MADA and Tropical Agricultural Research Centre, 1980). 27. Fujimoto, op. cit., pp. 182, 183. 28. Ibid., p. 182. 29. Shukor Kassim et al. seem to agree, as they note in their recent publication that "Nor can one assume that there is some kind of village welfare system operating, so that any family in difficulty will be helped by its neighbours. Tok Teh's case shows clearly that without kin there is little help forthcoming". Shukor Kassim et al. op. cit., p. 58. 30. Afifuddin, Hj. Omar, "Irrigation Structures and Local Peasant Organisation", Mada Monograph no. 32 (Alor Star: Muda Agricultural Development Authority, 1977), p. 3. 31. Ibid., pp. 1, 2. 32. Narifumi Maeda, "Family Circle, Community, and Nation in Malaysia", Current Anthropolojiy 16, no. 1 (1975): 165. 33. Masuo Kuchiba, Y oshihiro Tsubouchi, and Narifumi Maeda, Three M alay Villages: A Sociology of Paddy Growers in West Malaysia (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1979), p. 113. 34. David Banks, M alay Kinship (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study ofHuman Issues, 1983), p. 49. 35. S. Husin Ali, Malay Peasant Society and Leadership (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 42. 36. Boeke, quoted in S. Husin Ali, op. cit., p. 41. 37. Massard, op. cit., p. 11. 38. Maeda, op. cit., p. 165. 39. Afifuddin, op. cit., p. 11. 40. Ibid., p. 15. 41. Bamard, "The Modernization of Agriculture in a Kedah Village, 1967-78" (Paper presented at the Second National Conference ofthe Asian Studies Association of Australia, Sydney, 1978). 42. Afifuddin, op. cit., p. 15. 43. Ibid., p. 5. 44. Compare Maeda, op. cit., p. 165: "Generally speaking, these communities are tolerant of heterogeneous elements without having established rules to deal with outsiders." 45. Massard, op. cit., p. 4. 46. Compare Maeda, op. cit., p. 166: "Lacking autonomous community organization as an effective mobilizing agent, Malays try to get along with other people without directly pointing to their faults or hurting them publicly ... These features of Malay social relationships constitute, I have said, the dyadic equilibrium of social relationships, a situational strategem to protect oneself by balancing oneself with the other." 47. Kuchiba, Tsubouchi and Maeda, op. cit., pp. 113 ff. 48. Massard, op. cit., p. 11. 49. Compare Sahlins, who identifies "societies of certain type in which balanced exchange, if not exactly dominant, acquires unusual prominence" as those Southeast Asian societies where an external trade in rice is found. Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (New York: Aldine Press, 1972). 50. Much of the debate is to be followed in Hans-Dieter Evers, ed., Loosely Structured Social Systems- Thailand in Comparative Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969). See also Jeremy Kemp, "Processes of Kinship and Community in North-Central Thailand" (Paper presented at the seminar on Cognatic Forms of Social Organization in Southeast Asia, Amsterdam, 1983). 51. Eric Wolf, "Closed Corporate Peasant Communities in Meso-America and Central Java", Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 13 (1957): 1-18. 52. For a review of the literature, see]. Breman, "The Village on Java and the Early Colonial State", Journal of Peasant Studies 9, no. 4 (1982): 189-240. 53. Ibid., p. 15.

13 The Pattern of Leadership: From Patron to Broker

INTRODUCTION In this final chapter on the social structure of the village, focus will be on one formal institutionalization of a dyadic relationship which has drawn considerable attention in peasant studies namely, the patron-client relationship. At the very outset though, it should be stressed that Shamsul Amri's critique of this concept is well taken and entirely reflective of the methodological intention of its use in this chapter: As an organising concept, the patron-client model enables us to identify actual interactions and alignments, whatever they may be, in peasant societies. To a great extent, it becomes a necessary preliminary step before proceeding to the next step of analysis, because the model allows us to classify at the actor's level, reasons for the observed interaction and alignments ... However, as a theoretical proposition and generalisation about the mode of organisation, and politics, in peasant societies, the adequacy of the model must be questioned. For instance, I question the theoretical validity of the "social gap" thesis, which is central to the conventional model, as a casual explanation of the need for and the emergence of a patron, and hence, the formation and functions of the patron-client relationship. 1

Thus, it seems that it is a resource gap rather than a social one which is being bridged, one that can arise both from within the village itself as well as in its articulation with the larger societal whole. Disposal over personal resources defines the patron in the following analysis, while the broker is taken to be one who disposes over resources derived from an external source. While patronage is an asymmetrical and exploitative relationship, "it is frequently articulated in cultural terms or ideas with an underlying 'moral component'." 2

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One implication of broker-based clientelism however, is that the stability of the relationship can no longer be guaranteed. The broker, dependent himself on rather arbitrary forces outside of the village, loses his power of patronage once he loses their favour. His control over his client therefore cannot rest on the basis of a secure relationship of debt towards him (hutang budi); the need for coercion rather than consensus becomes greater. At the same time, these external forces endow local elites with coercive means which they had not possessed before. The argument in this chapter is that the changing sources of patronage now favour the broker rather than the village-based patron, who was previously the mediator and kinsman as well. It is suggested that it is the emergence of this new pattern of leadership, with its concurrent greater dependence on coercion than on consensus (derived from power resources endowed by forces outside of the village) which can help explain the form and content of two major sources of conflict to be discussed in this chapter which have dominated village life. in the past few years namely, the political factionalism and the introduction of the combine harvester.

THE COMBINE HARVESTER As the harvesting season approached, one of the poorer villagers said, "Bang C. (a close relative for whom she has worked for more than ten years) will not let the machine harvest his field. I have been doing it for years. What will I eat otherwise?" As the days passed, frequent comments were heard from the wealthier villagers as to the "astronomical" cost of labour for harvesting and the need for the government to intervene. When the harvesting season finally did begin, with the exception of a few large farmers, all other "patrons" withdrew their harvesting "contracts" with the poorer villagers and 80 per cent of the fields were turned over to the combine harvester. In the village, talk was heard about women in other villages who had refused to fulfil transplanting "contracts" with large farmers who had called in the machine for harvesting. After a while however, the commotion fizzled out, and it is one of the mysteries of peasant behaviour in the Muda area that relatively little overt conflict has emerged in the face of what must be a major process of social and economic dislocation for a not insignificant part of the peasantry. Part of the mystery might be solved by a consideration of the actual means by which this technological innovation was introduced. These combines were acquired and introduced by private contractors purely with a view to profit. The capital cost of one machine alone averages $170,000 and given the expected opposition to its introduction by affected villagers, the owners of these combines were faced with the problem of actually arranging for its "delivery" to the farmer and the safety of the machine during its "tour of duty". In Gelung Rambai, the problem was solved by the employment of a broker (this is also the term employed by the villagers). The broker, who lives in the village, contacts the contractor, who owns the combine, and solicits harvesting work from the farmers.

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It is he who arranges for the time scheduling of the combine and its route through the various fields, and it is he who collects the fee paid by the farmers, as well as keeps guard over the machine and ensures that no harm comes to it during its overnight stays in distant padi fields. It is not the broker himself who does this of course; in this village, he has a team of four men who operate the machine as well as carry out all other tasks mentioned above. In return, they get a share of the $5 per relong which the broker receives as payment for his services from the contractor. 3 The first broker who brought the combine harvester to the village in 1977 was a farmer with connections in Perlis, where the combine had already been introduced. In that first season, he made a commission of over $1,000. For the following season however, he was replaced by another, according to him, under threat of force. The new broker in Gelung Rambai had charge of eleven combines owned by several different contractors in Tunjang. According to his own estimates, each combine could harvest 500 re per season. This would give him, as part of his cut, an income of$27,000. This would have to be shared with the other members of the team but nonetheless, the amount is still, by village standards, incredible. It is therefore not surprising that he has just fmished building a large house in his end of the village, far larger than that which can usually be afforded by a "middle" farmer, to which category he belonged. He is actually a stranger to the village and operates 3.5 re of largely rented land. All this became slightly less surprising when it was discovered that the land on which his house was built belongs to the former head of the secret society in the village who was now "retired" and whose place had been taken over by the present "broker". 4 The secret society traced its past back to the Ariffin mentioned in Chapter 4 and includes at the present some thirty members. One source of funds remained gambling and petty theft. 5 Another was the recovery of motorcycles and other consumer durables bought on credit by farmers who were no longer able to pay the instalments- for a fee to the shopkeeper. The owner of the quarry in Tunjang said that whenever any property was stolen from the quarry, he would contact the head of the "gang", who would return the article for a fee. This intermediary role between the village and the external market economy seems to have been largely monopolized by the secret society. Land owned by absentee landlords, in this case a businessman in Alor Star, was handled, and sub-tenanted, by the former head of the secret society (see Chapter 8). Odd jobs of a manual nature offered by the private sector, in plantations for example, seem to be frequently mediated by the secret society. What they could offer in turn was brute force, which they now seem to have placed at the disposal of the owners of the combine harvester. Their "mediatory" role in the resolution of village conflicts should also not be overlooked. For example, having the "gang" on your side was mentioned as being advantageous in the event of conflict with another villager over irrigation water. Similarly, as will be described later, the "gang" intervened in village politics as well. It should be noted that some wage labour opportunities are arranged by other brokers in the village, for example, harvesting work on a kupang basis for an outsider was arranged for twenty-nine people from the village by a strong UMNO supporter.

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THE POLITICAL CONFLICT

As has been reported for several other villages in Malaysia as well, 6 Gelung Rambai was rent apart by political factionalism based on competing loyalty to the two major national political parties, UMNO (United Malay National Organisation) and PAS (Parti Islam Semalaya). For the outline of the conflict in this village, the record begins only after the 1978 general elections. When the JKK (Village Development Committee) was formed in 1976, 7 the members of the JKK chosen by the Penghulu 8 reflected the real leadership of the village at that time, which included only two UMNO men. After the 1978 general elections, a directive came from the District Office 9 to replace all PAS men in the JKK with UMNO men. This seems to have been the start of the present rancour between the two groups. Not all the JKKs in the other villages complied with the DO's order. The fact that the UMNO chairman of the JKK did, together with the new penghulu, who was openly pro-UMNO, angered the PAS supporters in the village. The bitterness generated by the campaigning and the final outcome of the elections intruded into several collective activities undertaken by the village as a whole. For example, during the fasting month, in all Malay kampungs a kenduri is held every night at the mosque for all those who break the fast there. This is arranged in turn by all households in the village. The mosque official determines who cooperates with whom - usually on a neighbourhood basis. Since 1978, this custom has been buried by the P AS-UMNO conflict. The villagers also took to boycotting each other's kenduris. According to custom, a kenduri is a village affair. It is still impressive to see the organization that swings into effect in order that a kenduri will run well and it is impressive to see the way in which invitations are extended to every single household in the village, either personally by the kenduri host or by a designated messenger. A kenduri is an extremely complex affair that involves a lot oflabour, both male and female. The major village institution that deals with the extraordinary demands on labour and money in the event of a kenduri is the Syarikat Pinggang Mangkok, or pakatan, as it is more commonly called. The pakatan has now been split into two - the old one still comprising the bulk of the villagers and the break way PAS group, with about twenty-seven members. Where work has to be done, no help is offered from some quarters and it has now reached the stage where invitations are not accepted. Thus, during the kenduri season at the end of the year, the first kenduri was held by a PAS villager on the occasion of his son's marriage. When his wife went to the house of the JKK chairman to invite him, he told her not to bother since he did not want to eat food prepared by PAS people. Many UMN 0 villagers boycotted that kenduri. The next wedding kenduri was also held by a PAS villager. When he went to the house of the UMNO villager where the crockery of the pakatan were kept, since they belonged to the same pakatan, his request was refused. They came to blows. When it came to the turn of the first kenduri by an UMNO man for the season, almost all PAS households boycotted the kenduri. As this was followed by the large kenduri of a well-to-do UMNO villager, the absence

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of PAS men made itself felt in shortage of men to attend to the guests who had come for the kenduri. The boycott involves mostly the men. For example, for Hashim E's (a PAS man) kenduri, some UMNO women went over to help with the preparations, but no UMNO men offered their services. The withdrawal of mutual labour aid for villagers from the other camp is however not limited merely to kenduris but extends also to all the other forms of to long menolong and pinjam (borrow) oflabour that traditionally takes place within the village. House removal is now entirely stratified on PASUMNO lines. All gotong-royong projects can no longer be carried out. However, after 1978, "even the women got involved" as an informant liked to say. This means essentially that the derau, the system of labour exchange for agricultural work, became involved. Previously, the labour exchange involved all women in the village, with a separate group formed by the women in Kampung Hilir. Now however, only PAS women exchange their labour with other PAS women and vice versa, and they do it on the fields of PAS or UMNO villagers, as the case may be. This has meant that the PAS group has had to call in people from Kampung Hilir because they are short of people. Thus we can see how far, and how deep into village life, this political rift has been driven. The PAS-UMNO conflict has extended itself to other aspects of agricultural production as well, for example, in the 79/80 season, there was one case where the owner of the kubota, an UMNO man, refused to hire-service his kubota to a PAS villager, although he had been doing it for the past few years. His excuse was the lack of time, but according to the PAS villager, he took it to mean that it was due to his political affiliation. What has really fueled the conflict, however, is the issue of government provision of services for the village - specifically that of water, electricity and road. Each has become a bone of contention, made use of by the rival groups in order to "score points" over the other. It must be remembered that due to the directive from the District Office, there exists in effect in the village an official leadership, with whom the government deals, and a leadership in opposition, which the government does not recognize a.t all. Actually, this opposition is now to be found in the mosque committee, the ]awatan Khariayh, which is made up almost entirely of PAS notables formerly in the JKK. These people have seized every possible instance of government intervention that is, every possible action of the JKK, to "score points". On the other hand, the JKK, being the minority government that it in effect is, has also not failed to display favouritism towards itself, and callous behaviour towards the others or buat tak kena (do something in an improper fashion) as the villagers term it. For years, the villagers have been hankering after pembangungan or development, in other words, water, electricity and tarred road. During the 1978 elections, the UMNO election platform included that of the provision of electricity and road. Last year, both were approved. The JKK had asked three times for the road to be built and it had already been rejected but after yet another new plan had been submitted, it was approved. The road

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was to run through the village, cutting it in half, and join up with another road in the interior. It would thus run through some rubber trees, cut through the house lots of some villagers, as well as the padi fields of some others. The usual procedure is for the plan to be announced to the villagers and a period of twenty days to be given for the villagers to voice their dissent. No such announcement was made in the village. The next thing they knew was the arrival of tractors (that is what they say anyway). Immediate recourse was made to the DO and a villager reported having seen at least ten people from Gelung Rambai at the DO's office one morning. About forty villagers are involved and three villagers wrote an official letter to the DO asking for compensation. The DO promised compensation and asked the penghulu to record all losses of trees and land. A lot of complaints were heard within the village itself, to the effect that the road was useless and so forth, especially from the PAS villagers, but actually, the majority of the villagers do want the road, especially those who are not affected by its construction. Closely related to the issue of the road was the issue of the installation of electricity. Electricity, like tarred roads, is part of the material development (pembangungan), that is, on the one hand, highly desired by the villagers, and on the other, closely associated with the government's beneficicnce. That it became a bone of contention in the village was due to the following: 1. fruit trees had to be felled which were in the way of the electric poles which had to be put up. Affected owners do not receive any compensation. Those affected were furious, again because, as in the case of the road, none of the JKK members themselves were affected. 2. the question of the contractor who would do the house wiring. According to LLN (Lembaga Letrik Nasional or National Electricity Board) regulations, where electricity is installed under the Rural Development Programme, as in this particular case, only one contractor is allowed to handle the job, and theoretically, this contractor should be chosen by the unanimous decision of the village. In the case of this particular village however, theJKK decided on its own to name a contractor, without any village assembly being called. It must be borne in mind that, in this as in apparently all cases, members of the JKK get from the contractor whom they name the service of free installation for their own homes. PAS leaders immediately set on this as an issue, and said they wanted their own contractor. The JKK met the challenge head-on by refusing to distribute the LLN forms to any household which wanted another contractor. In effect, it became: if you want electricity, you come and get it from me. It might be interesting to follow the measures undertaken by the opposition faction. First, it must be noted that all financial costs incurred - for transport, meals served during meetings and so forth, were paid for out of the PAS party coffers. Hashim E, the president of the local party branch, found a Malay contractor, in contrast to the Chinese contractor chosen by the JKK, and initially, they decided to leave everything in his (the contractor's) hands.

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After some months however, it became evident that he was not doing anything, and that if they (the leaders) wanted to maintain their credibility with the villagers, they had to try and get things going. Another party leader then arranged for another contractor, through the brokerage of his landlord, who lived in Alor Star. This one wrote a letter to the LLN in Kuala Lumpur- pleading their case also with reference to the fact that their contractor was a Bumiputra, in contrast to the Chinese one of the JKK. A meeting was also arranged for the villagers with the LLN official in Alor Star, who reacted to their case by saying: "You bodoh, you tak erti" (you stupid, you don't understand). For the villagers, this was extremely humiliating. When that did not seem to work either, the head of the secret society in Gelung Rambai, a good friend of one of the party leaders, approached the parliamentary representative of the area and told him to distribute the LLN forms, or they would tear up the electricity poles which had already been erected. He promised he would come to distribute the forms, but on the night of the appointment, he did not turn up either. Everything had come to a dead end, and there was nothing to do but wait until the year was over. But some villagers could not wait and soon, the crossing of lines became evident. PAS-identified households began to install their wires through the JKK contractor. The PAS response was an appeal to the large societal whole into which the village was irredeemably encapsulated, delivered by a guest speaker during a PAS ceramah (assembly) some months after the conflict over the installation of electricity in the village: "Buat apa,jalan, buat apa api. Sedang itu, negara kita kenajual ke orang. Pendatang haram satu bala dari Tuhan, nanti Vietnam akan datang melalui Siam, kejam lagi pada pemerintahan jepun" . 10

THE PATTERN OF VOTES It would be interesting at this point to look into the voting pattern of the village households. The first thing of note is that every single household is identifiable as a PAS or UMNO household. Quite unlike the official fiction, whereby voting is a secret, in the village, politics is structured in such a way that one openly belongs to one camp or the other. This is indicative not only of the notorious difficulty of keeping secrets in the village, but more of the way in which political coalition has penetrated into other aspects of village organizational life, for example, kenduris, derau groups and so forth, as has been described earlier. In numerical terms, the PAS faction dominates - 74:60. But this numerical dominance is due to the fact that the neighbourhood of Kg. Hilir, which has traditionally been separate from Gelung Rambai as such, is almost completely PAS. If Kampung Hilir is left out, UMNO would be found to predominate 50:31.

Political Loyalty at Gelung Rambai No difference can be noted at the level of the elite or the well-to-do farmers where

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the ratio is PAS:UMNO 5:5. Thus, well-to-do farmers are almost equally distributed between the UMNO and the PAS camps. One difference in the origin of the elite can be found. The UMNO well-to-do come from the two established families ofTok Idris and Tok Ahmad. The PAS well-to-do come from outside these families- two of them are outsiders who have married local girls, the other three are all hardworking, essentially self-made men. On the other hand, there seems to be a marked preponderance of middle farmers in the ranks ofP AS w hilc the poor gravitate towards UMNO. Thus, in Kota Buloh (one of the neighbourhoods) the only PAS members are the koranic teacher and a middle peasant, while all the rest, who are really quite poor, are UMNO, under the patronage of one of the wealthiest men in the village. In fact, among the poor in Gelung Rambai, the ratio of PAS to UMNO is 1:19. However, in the neighbourhood of Kampung Hilir, the relationship is reversed where many of the poor are also PAS supporters. There however, the patron is a middle farmer who because ofhis secret society connections, can offer jobs and because of his control over the land of a non-resident landowner, can also offer land for rent. In Gelung Rambai the patron are two leading UMNO supporters. The PAS wellto-do do not play this role because they arc almcst self-sufficient in labour, having smaller farms and larger families. The hypothesis would thus run like this: the very poor enter into a patron-client relationship with the wealthy who can offer employment and for credit, be they PAS or UMNO, while the middle peasant can afford to be "free" so to speak, and in the case of Gelung Rambai, they then identify themselves with PAS. It seems that the role and assertiveness of the middle peasant is extremely significant. It should be noted in this respect that in the Alor Star demonstration which took place in early 1981, the majority of the participants were said to be middle peasants. The PAS peasantry seems to be essentially a middle peasantry, although the PAS elite may also be the well-to-do. As discussed in Chapter 5, the middle peasants arc primarily those still in the nuclear stage of their family development cycle, having inherited relatively small plots from their parents and trying to increase their holdings through rentals. Haid Y, whose household was described in Chapter 6, may be taken to be a representative figure. This brings us back to the theme of"brokcrage" stressed above. A suggestion here is that one reason for the active participation of "middle" peasants in politics is their lack of independent resources with which they can manage their own production or patronage needs. Their emergence as a counter-elite would thus not necessarily imply that "traditionally" leadership has been challenged by tensions arising from economic disruption within the village economy (not before 1979 at any rate) but much more by the increasing integration of the village into a national network of bureaucratic control, and the corresponding goods and services which it offers.

CONCLUSION Whereas the patron-client relationship still allows us to "identify actual interactions

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and alignments", the sources of patronage have shifted considerably. The key factor is the change in the system of production, from that dominated by a shortage oflabour in the local economy, to one dominated by its integration to the national economy. New resources originating from outside the village economy become available to brokers who on their own would have had little to offer. The old networks break down, as they have done in Gelung Rambai, due to the new resources, both from the state and the market economy which in this case have acted in concert with one another. The local patrons no longer need their clients now that the problem of the shortage oflabour has been solved by the introduction of the combine harvester. Their place has been taken by the secret society, which acts as the broker for economic interests outside of the village. At the same time, the "goods" made available by the introduction of government services far overshadow the resources which the local patrons could have offered their clients. Far more important in influence are now those brokers who can deal in services made available by the government via the political parties. The previous two chapters dealt with principles of social organization associated with notions of solidarity, harmony and consensus. This analysis of the political process has focused on the extent and depth of conflict to be found in the village and has tried to relate this to the changing pattern of access to resources both within and outside this boundaries. Changes in the economy traced in the first part of the book, arc being reflected in the political process as well.

NOTES 1. Shamsul Amri Baharuddin, "Patron-Client Relationship in Peasant Society: A Theoretical Critique and a R.e-evaluation oflts Application to Malay Peasant Society", Akademika, 17 July 1980, p. 84. 2. Ibid., p. 87. 3. The use of a broker for the introduction of the combine harvester is also mentioned by M. Yamashita, H.S. Wong, and S. Jegatheesan, Farm Management Studies Uapan: MADA and Tropical Agricultural Research Centre, 1980), p. 48, as well as by Ahmad Mahdzan b. Ayob, "Choice of Technology in Rice Harvesting in the Muda Irrigation Scheme, Malaysia" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Florida, 1980). 4. The term "secret society" has been used here for want of a better term to describe the "gang" (this is the term used in the village) whose origins can clearly be traced to the social banditry described by Cheah Boon Kheng, "Social Banditry and Rural Crime in North Kedah 1902-22",JMBRAS 54, Part 2 (1981): 98-130. 5. Compare the activities of the "social bandits" discussed by Cheah, op. cit. Another reference to Malay secret society is: David Banks, Malay Kinship (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1983), p. 19: In the areas distant from the capital, peasants had to put up with lawlessness and periodic oppression by outlaw bands. For example, in the 1860s the southern district "Kedah, where the villages were said to be dispersed & small, had become a refuge for relocated peasants & outlaws. The residents organized themselves into secret societies for mutual protection ... ". 6. Compare for example Kuchiba's Study of Padang Lalang in Masuo Kuchiba, Yoshihiro Tsubouchi and Narifumi Maeda, Three M alay Villages: A Sociology of Paddy Growers in West Malaysia (Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1979) and S. Husin Ali, Malay Peasant Society and Leadership (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1975). 7. JKK stands for Jawatankuasa Kemajuan dan Kesclamatan Kampung and was established by the government in all villages in order to mobilize popular participation in the government's rural development programme. In effect, however, it is the only official village leadership recognized by the government.

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8. The penghulu, in the present administration, is a paid official of the government placed in charge of several villages. In this particular case, the penghulu responsible for the village is an UMNO man residing in another village. The District Office is the local administration that is responsible for the administration of the district. 9. The District Offtce is the local administration that is responsible for the administration of the district. 10. "What is the use of a road, What is the use of electricity, When our country is being sold to others? The illegal immigrants ("boat people" - author) are a scourge from God, if the Vietnamese come one day via Thailand, they will be even more cruel than the Japanese."

Part V Conclusion

14 Peasants in the MakingMuda's Green Revolution?

The study of agrarian transformation, which could well sum up the theme of this book, has been dominated by two opposing paradigms: one associated with the name of Lenin, the other with Chayanov. Both concurred methodologically in employing the household as the basic unit of analysis (defined as the unit of production and consumption) 1 while differing in their analytical focus: for Lenin, relations of production, which were open to the influence of external factors, structured relations between households; for Chayanov, relations of reproduction, which were generated by internal, demographic factors, structured relations within rather than between households. In keeping with the first model, the process of change in a peasant economy is usually envisaged in terms of the confrontation between a "traditional society" embedded in a "subsistence economy" and the capitalist market economy, represented, for most Third World countries, by the so-called "Green Revolution". This integration of the peasantry into the market economy or commercialization of agriculture "generally sets in motion a tendency towards the concentration of land in fewer hands" via the dispossession of the smaller and marginalized peasants. A process of social differentiation begins resulting in the constitution of large capitalist farms on the one hand, and landless agricultural labourers on the other. The elimination of the peasantry is its historical product. 2 This model has also been applied to studies of the Malaysian peasantry. 3 The second model locates the peasant in a toiler or family labour farm which is embedded in supportive kinship or village structures and whose productive activities are directed towards subsistence rather than profit. Such a farm would be impervious to capitalist encroachment and thus resistant to its otherwise transformative effects in the direction of polarization and elimination. Echoes of this position also rebound in the Malaysian literature. 4

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This study of a Muda village which was subject to the tremendous forces of change unleashed by the "Green Revolution" comes to the same conclusion as that of another Malaysian scholar, namely, the possibility of alternative trajectories of change. 5 In this concluding chapter the threads of the preceding chapters will be drawn together to present the pattern of change which commercialization and capitalist penetration has entailed for the Muda peasantry the trajectory which shall be termed "peasantization" before concluding with a review of the theoretical and methodological considerations which have informed the entire analysis.

PATTERNS OF CHANGE IN THE VILLAGE ECONOMY Any reconstruction of the agrarian transformation experienced by the village under study will first have to discard the notion that commercialization or capitalist penetration began with the Green Revolution. A dualistic model of a subsistence economy versus a double-cropping cash economy glosses over the considerable changes which were wrought in the nature of the subsistence basis of the village economy 6 even before the establishment of capitalist forms of production. Secondly, it will have to discard the notion of the "Green Revolution" as a monolithic entity comprising a fixed set of technological innovations releasing the same consequences regardless of time and place. In a sense therefore, the question regarding the consequences of the Green Revolution is one which is wrongly formulated. It disregards the multidimensionality of the processes involved, as well as the temporal dimension in which these processes unfold. For this village, its history of market integration that falls within the scope of this study can be divided into three phases: 1. Commercialization without major productivity increases, with market integration limited to the sphere of circulation. This prevailed to the late sixties. 7 2. Increasing commercialization in the context of significant productivity increases, derived however not from improved labour but land productivity. 8 This occurred in the first decade of the Green Revolution. 3. Capitalization or mechanization. Mechanization, in particular of the harvesting process, which became widespread in the second half of the seventies, marks the market integration of the sphere of production into the national and international economy as well as a marked improvement in labour productivity. 9 Before entering into a more detailed analysis of the implications of these three stages of commercialization in the village ecouomy, it should be stressed that this also very much depends on the kind of crop and its socio-economic conditions of production. The essential distinction would be based on whether commercialization is of a traditional food crop or of a newly-introduced cash crop. A second important distinction, although this is less often taken account of in the literature, is whether the crop allows regular consumption, or whether the harvest is seasonal, with a period of "delayed consumption".

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In the case of this Kedah village, rice is both a food crop, and the major staple of the villagers, as well as a cereal which entailed delayed production. The seasonality of production, and especially with the climatic and pedological conditions of the North Kedah Plain, the forced simultaneity of the production process, resulted in the scarcity of labour during seasonal peaks as the main production constraint to the successful culmination of a padi cycle.

COMMERCIALIZATION WITHOUT MAJOR PRODUCTIVITY INCREASES: THE PRE-DOUBLE-CROPPING VILLAGE Even before double-cropping, the sale of padi was already widespread since various consumer items like clothing, had to be bought. The commercialization of padi monoculture in the context of delayed production, however, encouraged a process of rapid impoverishment or accumulation. This occurred primarily through the excessive sale of padi at the harvesting period, when prices were at their lowest. Some households ran out of their stocks before the next harvest was due and were then forced to raise a mortgage on their standing crops or to borrow padi at highly usurious rates. I was told by the villagers that padi kunca was one of the easiest, quickest and most common ways of getting rich in the village. The few genealogical records collected also show that three generations ago, the size of farm holdings was much larger than they are now, and that these lands were bought from others, usually through the system of land mortgage known as jual janji, or through beli usaha, that is, buying the land which has just been cleared (a land frontier still existed) by someone who usually has to sell in order to pay off debts incurred during the non-productive period of land pioneering. That this is not specific to the village is shown by a recent study of all large landowners in the Muda region, which came to the conclusion that "didapati, kesemua ETP yang memiliki tanah 50 re ke atas terlibat didalam pembelian melalui jual janji clan sebahagian daripada ET A yang memiliki tanah diantara 30 hingga 50 re terlibat di dalam proses pembelian yang sama".1° The village was thus characterized not by homogeneous units one very much like the other, but by a pattern of social differentiation that was already evident in an agrarian structure composed of fairly large landowners and large numbers of tenant operators. The large landowners in this village were, among others, the Tok Guru (Islamic religious teacher), whose surplus accumulation was based on his substantial receipt of zakat (the religious tithe imposed on padi farmers); the Penghulu (headman) who had access to krah (corvee labour), and the Gang leader, the head of the secret society. Given the availability of a land frontier, and the production constraints mentioned above, the scarcity of labour was the key factor in padi cultivation. This point should be stressed perhaps since our attention has been fixed on land for such a long time. As Wilson notes,

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It is a matter of some interest that the existence of proprietary rights to padi land in Malaya came after, instead of before, the payment by the cultivators of crop shares. Rents were in fact paid long before there existed any scarcity of potential padi land, which has operated only in recent decades to raise these tents to higher levels. 11

Households, both large and small, were also tied to each other via labour exchange practices. The larger farm households were also dependent on hired labour especially for harvesting. This crucial role of labour, it seems to me, explains the presence of certain features of village society which had an ameliorative effect on the otherwise rapid and destructive process of impoverishment and dispossession then occurnng. One of these is the phenomenon of male hypogamy. Many of the wealthier villagers of today originated from poor families. The typical pattern is for a hardworking young man to marry the young divorced daughter of a wealthy villager, whereupon the new couple is integrated into the household and the farm operation of the wealthy parents for a number of years. In due course, the couple is provided with a house and land for their own family of procreation. The acceptance of a poor son-in-law was due to his worth as a source of household and farm labour. The shortage of labour, especially for the large farmer, was also reflected in the development of secure, vertical labour relations between richer and poorer households, which ensured not merely security of employment and credit for the "client" but also security oflabour for the "patron". His dependence on the "client" endowed the economic relationship with a social dimension that has often been mistaken for the "sharing ofpoverty". This became clear when Pak Soff, one of the poorest in the village, explained why Pak Li, one of the richest, would visit him frequently. This was in early 1979, before the combine harvester had invaded the village completely. The reply Pak Soff gave was: "He has to be nice to me because he might need me to help him one day". 12 The term tolong (help) was used to characterize wage labour- the wage labourer helping the farm operator. The term tolong was also used to characterize the usurious loans which the rich made to the poor, including that in the form of padi kunca. As one of the older informants said: "In those days, only three people could help." The impression is thus, that despite the social differentiation within the village rapidly proceeding as a result of its market integration into the economy outside of the village, the village to a large extent still provided the social and physical context in which production and exchange took place. Social relations were fused with economic relations of production in a long-term, ongoing series of exchanges expressed in moral categories.

COMMERCIALIZATION WITH PRODUCTIVITY INCREASES: DOUBLE-CROPPING, PHASE I Padi kunca has virtually disappeared. Chettiars (Indian money-lenders involved injual

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janji) are now almost non-existent. Double-cropping allowed all farm operators to keep enough padi for their own consumption. Wage labourers were padi in kind during harvesting and thus, even they had no need to buy rice for their own consumption. In a way, the situation stabilized. Most of the land sales which have taken place in this kampung occurred in the fifties and sixties. 13 The landless families today, apart from those of young men who would get inadequate shares of their parents' property, are those who were forced to sell their land in the fifties and sixties, or whose fathers did so. Indebtedness still occurs extensively, but nowadays, one prefers to incur consumption debts and generally, one manages to repay at least part of the debt at harvest time. In fact, because farming has now become a more profitable operation, what has been happening in respect to land is that landowners who used to rent their land out have been reclaiming these lands either for their own operation, or to be leased to others, who can afford to pay, on long-term leases. In the pre-double-cropping days, when land preparation was done by the buffalo, the labour available to one household was not sufficient to complete large acreages so that land was rented as a matter of course, even when not out of necessity. Although not directly related to doublecropping (the tractor was already in use in 1961, ten years before double-cropping), the mechanization of the process of land preparation deprived it of its arduous and time-consuming character. At the same time, these richer as well as middle farmers compete with landless or virtually landless households for access to land which is being rented out or leased out by others. Since rents have now been monetarized, and have increasingly to be paid in cash at the beginning of the season, rather than in kind at harvest time, land which is available for rent is taken up by landowner-operators rather than by poor households, who cannot afford to pay the rent in cash in advance. An even more disturbing trend is the increasing shift to pajak, or leasing ofland on a long-term basis. Even more capital is required on the part of the lessee, and it is usually only the middle and the richer farmers who can afford to raise this capital. Access to land has thus become more restricted, even though no process of land concentration (through sale and acquisition of land can be detected. 14 The income effect of this restriction was attenuated by the fact that doublecropping has also resulted in a far greater demand for wage labour, now required twice a year and during concentrated peak periods. There has been a steady rise in wage levels: in 1972, the wage for transplanting was $16 per relong but food had to be provided; by 1976, the last season where food was still provided, it had risen to $24. In 1979, it was $35 per relong. It is said that participating in wage labour alone is as profitable as operating two relongs of rented land. Double-cropping generated both a supply and a demand for wage labour. Labour thus remained a crucial factor in the padi economy, with labour costs representing the largest item in the total production cost of rice. 15 In fact, as a MADA study noted, the Muda area remains a "labour deficit padi area" ';Vith an "incessant labour problem". 16 The initial effect of doublecropping was thus an enormous improvement in the standard of living, from which all villagers profited including the poor, due to the high returns to labour. The process

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of dispossession was halted, the rate of tenancy reduced and farming became increasingly based on owner-operation. 17

COMMERCIALIZATION WITH MECHANIZATION: DOUBLE-CROPPING, PHASE 11 The recent developments mark what can be referred to as the second phase of doublecropping. One took place at the end of the first decade, namely, mechanization of the harvesting process. Within two years of the first introduction of the combine harvester in 1977, 70 per cent of the crop was mechanically harvested. The second began at the beginning of the second decade, namely, the introduction ofbroadcasting in place of transplanting. This took place after the conclusion of this study but unpublished information estimates the extent of broadcasted fields to now cover 60 per cent of the region. 18 The two innovations will solve the last bottlenecks in the large-scale commercial production of padi. Mechanization of course reduces the demand for wage labour which was created with double-cropping. On the other hand, it is important to note that mechanization has not been in the form of a general trend towards a capitalization of the farming units. Machines are rented, not bought. Farm machinery has thus not been incorporated into the production structure of the farm, as in Europe and America. Nonetheless, an increased demand for capital in the form of cash has become crucial for successful farming. Machines have to be rented and land to be leased, fertilizers and insecticides have to be bought. All this favours the owners of larger farms. Broadcasting will reduce dependence on wage and exchange labour while increasing the application of household labour. The resultant decline in wage labour opportunities will lead to a drastic fall in the income of the small farmer and the landless. 19 This is likely to be accompanied by an accelerated process of tenant displacement, 20 either through the switch to leasehold tenure to large farm operators (as happened to the 60 re discussed in Chapter 8) or through land purchase, which as mentioned in Chapter 8 also seems to be picking up again at the village level. The net result of these developments will be the emergence of the family labour farm, selfsufficient in land and labour from other village households, but increasingly dependent for its production inputs on the national and international economy. The scarcity of labour fades into inconsequence, that of land begins to dominate. A shift in land inheritance practice from adat (enjoining equal shares between all the heirs) to the Islamic Law of Inheritance (favouring the male heirs) seems to be taking place. 21 A discernible trend towards marriage later in life can be detected (of the thirty-two young men between the age of sixteen and twenty-five who are still in the village, only four are married) and hypergamic marriages no longer take place. The approvisionment of new familial units with land in the form ofBSTS becomes less frequent. Labour arrangements like exchange labour and labour contracts incorporated into a patron-client relationship, also break down, as they have done in

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the village. Corresponding to the shift in the social axis from household to household, to that of household to external unit, the position of broker assumes more influence than that of patron. In this reconstruction of the patterns of change which the village under study has been subject to, an attempt has been made to identify the different sources and consequences of social differentiation attendant upon the process of commercialization before and after double-cropping. Pauperization, rather than proletarianization, was the consequence of the initial participation in market relations and in particular, for the poor, who were even more dependent on market relations than the rich because of their lack of a secure subsistence base. Pauperization did not however lead to the elimination of the peasantry; on the contrary, a secure or any subsistence base became even more important than ever for the poor villager. The initial effect of doublecropping was to assure subsistence for all, including the poor; its long-term consequences will be further pauperization on the one hand, and peasantization, rather than proletarianization, on the other.

THE PROCESS OF PEASANTIZATION: A MUDA TRAJECTORY? The peasant and his land since time immemorial - this image has long dominated our analysis and preconceptions of agrarian structures. Working his own land with his household labour on his "family farm", the peasant proprietor or petty commodity producer has been typically conceptualized as a traditional feature of pre-capitalist farming which, depending on the different theoretical positions taken, is to be eliminated, retained or refashioned. This study suggests that for the Muda region, the family farm or peasant enterprise had first to be created. By family farm is meant a unit of production in which the ownership of the means of production - both land and labour - are in the hands of the farm operator. It presupposes a patriachally-organized family which pools its labour and income together under the benevolent dictatorship of the family head. In other words, it presupposes that the farm household is constituted as the unit of production and consumption. This family farm is widely equated in the literatur