Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  As the economic distance between rich and poor has grown, so has this privileged class’s access to influence and credit. If the interests of paddy farmers are heard at all, they are increasingly the interests of larger farmers. On some questions, such as paddy support prices or fertilizer subsidies, this may make little difference, for the interests of rich and poor will largely coincide. But on many other issues-mechanization, agricultural wage policy, credit eligibility, land rents, land reform-their interests are sharply conflicting. The vise-like grip with which large operators now control the Farmers’ Associations means both that the vital interests of Muda’s poor are systematically excluded even from the policy agenda and that those who have already profited most from the green revolution will continue to have things their own way.69

  These facts about agricultural “progress” are all too familiar from analyses of the green revolution elsewhere in Asia. As Keith Griffin has concluded:

  [Page 85]

  A major reason for this [the domination of larger farmers] was the bias of public policy which systematically channeled scarce resources to the larger and more prosperous farmers. Although policy aggravated inequality in the countryside, it had virtue, from the point of view of the government, of encouraging commercial agriculture and thereby augmenting the marketable surplus. Given the needs of urban areas for cheap and abundant wage goods… the best thing that could have happened, did happen: the “green revolution” strengthened those in the countryside who were the natural allies of the urban ruling groups and it enabled these ruling groups to perpetuate the status quo essentially unchanged.70

  In Muda as well, the economic, political, and institutional facts combine to make it extremely unlikely that the great inequities now prevailing will even be addressed, let alone mitigated.

  1. For a picture of Kedah at the end of the nineteenth century, see Sharom Ahmat, “The Political Structure of the State of Kedah, 1879–1905,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 1, no. 2 (September 1970): 115-28; and Zaharah Haji Mahmud, “Change in a Malay Sultanate: An Historical Geography of Kedah before 1939” (Master’s thesis, University of Malaya, 1965).

  2. It is in this sense, and only in this sense, that one may perhaps speak of “false-consciousness.” Even in this realm, peasants are quite capable of imagining a different system of property or a political system without elections and of expressing an opinion on such issues. Speculations of this kind are, however, of little practical relevance to the context of daily social action.

  3. For evidence along these lines see Jacob Meerman, Public Expenditure in Malaysia: Who Benefits and Why, A World Bank Research Publication (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979).

  4. Kevin Young, Willem C. F Bussink, and Parvez Hassan, Malaysia’s Growth and Equity in a Multiracial Society, A World Bank Country Economic Report (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), 24.

  5. Far Eastern Economic Review, Asia 1980 Yearbook (Hong Kong: South China Morning Post, 1981), 10.

  6. Young et al., Malaysia’s Growth, 31. The “traditional agricultural sector” here excludes the estate sector, which accounted for only 18 percent of the agricultural labor force in 1970. Three-fourths of agricultural employment is, by contrast, concentrated in rubber and rice smallholdings.

  7. Estimates taken from International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Malaysia: Selected Issues in Rural Poverty, vol. 2, World Bank Report No. 2685-MA (Washington: World Bank, 1980), 3, 13-14. Figures given in the remainder of this paragraph are from the same source.

  8. If one were to shift one’s focus from income to amenities such as health services and education, the picture would be more encouraging. For it is in this area that government policies have made a substantial impact. It is also true of course that, without the government programs directed toward the rural poor, the income statistics would have been even more dismaying.

  9. For a fine account of rice policy, see Otto Charles Doering, III, “Malaysian Rice Policy and the Muda Irrigation Project” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1973).

  10. Young et al., Malaysia’s Growth, 104-05, and Meerman, Public Expenditure, 89. The figures in Meerman are in part derived from Sudhir Anand, Inequality and Poverty in Malaysia: Measurement and Decomposition (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, forthcoming).

  11. Ibid., 90-91. The definition of poverty here is not the official poverty-line income but rather the lowest 40 percent of the income distribution.

  12. UMNO won many such seats, of course, because of the non-Malay votes it received. K. J. Ratnam and R. S. Milne, “The 1969 Parliamentary Elections in West Malaysia,” Pacific Affairs 43, no. 2 (Summer 1970): 219-20.

  13. The riots, which constitute a significant political watershed, were, significantly, confined to cities on the west coast of the peninsula. It was particularly in such areas that Chinese and Malays were not only in proximity in large numbers but also felt themselves to be in economic competition. The countryside was implicated in these events in at least three ways: First, the large-scale migration of Malays from a stagnant rural economy was seen as a source of political volatility in the cities; second, poverty in the paddy, rubber, and fishing sectors seemed, by itself, to increase the risk of communal violence in rural areas; and third, rural poverty seemed certain to increase the appeal of the Malay opposition party, then called the PMIP (PanMalayan Islamic Party).

  14. Colin MacAndrews, Land Settlement Policies in Malaysia and Indonesia: A Preliminary Analysis, Occasional Paper Series, No. 52 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1978), 7.

  15. Ibid., 45, 47.

  16. R. Thillainathan, “Public Policies and Programmes for Redressing Poverty in Malaysia: A Critical Review,” in Some Case Studies on Poverty in Malaysia: Essays Presented to Ungku Aziz, ed. B. A. R. Mokhzani and Khoo Siew Mun (Kuala Lumpur: Persatuan Ekonomi Malaysia Press, 1977), 245-60.

  17. Calculated from MacAndrews, Land Settlement, 46 (table 3) and 47 (table 5).

  18. This estimate is for the largest scheme, Muda, as the income figures for Kemubu are a matter of current dispute.

  19. In theory, the fertilizer subsidy implemented in 1979 was limited to 6 acres (or 8.5 relong) per farmer, but large farmers, with the tacit complicity of the farmers’ organizations, quickly found ways around this restriction. Like the Padi Cultivators Act before it, the limitation remained a dead letter. Even in 1955, the Rice Committee made it clear that the loan fund it was providing to help redeem mortgaged lands was intended for commercial farmers, not for subsistence producers. See Doering, “Malaysian Rice Policy,” 65-66.

  20. It might however be argued that such collective amenities as health clinics and primary schools have actually been redistributive in the sense that the poor were previously the most deprived of these services and are now the major beneficiaries.

  21. See the reference to the Bank Kerjasama Rakyat scandal and to the profit making on equity share sales to Malays in Far Eastern Economic Review, Asia 1980 Yearbook, 228, 237.

  22. For example, in at least four of the parliamentary constituencies in Kedahthose of Jerlun—Langkawi, Kuala Kedah, Ulu Muda, and Jerai (where Sedaka is located)—the UMNO winning margin in 1978 was so slim as to indicate that PAS had won a majority of Malay votes in those constituencies but had lost because the Chinese minority in each case threw its votes to UMNO. Despite the fact that PAS lost seats in this election, it got 38.5 percent of the total vote, just one percentage point less than it received in 1969 when it came near to capturing the state. See Ismail Kasim, The Politics of Accommodation: An Analysis of the 1978 Malaysian General Election, Research Notes and Discussion Paper, No. 10 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1978), 73-74.

  23. Clive S. Kessler, Islam and Politics in a Malay State: Kelantan 1838–1969 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978).

  24. R. D. Hill, Rice in Malaysia: A Study in Historical Geography (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 54.

  25. Ibid., 53.

  26. Compare, for example
, this situation with Kessler’s fine analysis of politics in the east coast state of Kelantan, which shows how much of the strong opposition to the ruling party there derived not only from class issues but was compounded by a lively resentment against the aristocratic families in the state capital, who had come to dominate the colonial bureaucracy in their own interests. One can detect something of the sort in Kedah as well, but it is not nearly so pronounced. Kessler, Islam and Politics.

  27. John M. Gullick, Indigenous Political Systems of Western Malays, London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology, no. 17 (London: Athlone, 1958), 43. The limited extraction of the precolonial Malay state was due not to any lack of ambition or would-be rapacity, but rather to a lack of means to enforce its will.

  28. Sharom Ahmat, “The Structure of the Economy of Kedah, 1879–1905,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 43, no. 2 (1970): 13.

  29. Jelapang padi Malaysia (Malaysia’s paddy granary). For the history of Malay Settlement and rice production in the area, readers are invited to consult Hill, Rice in Malaysia; K. K. Kim, The Western Malay States, 1850–1873: The Effects of Commercial Development on Malay Politics (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972); Sharom Ahmat, “The Political Structure of the State of Kedah, 1879–1905,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 1, no. 2 (1970); R. Bonney, Kedah, 1771–1821. The Search for Security and Independence (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971); Zaharah Haji Mahmud, “Change in a Malay Sultanate.”

  30. The data in this paragraph are derived from the standard source on the agricultural economy of the Muda region before double-cropping, S. Selvadurai, Padi Farming in West Malaysia, Bulletin No. 27 (Kuala Lumpur: Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, 1972).

  31. The inequities in landholding and hence the poverty of a large section of the Muda population, which the irrigation scheme was intended to address, were the historical deposit of initial land grabbing compounded by this cycle of debt. As early as 1913 the British Advisor to the Kedah, W. George Maxwell, observed that “The majority of the padi planters are at present in the hands of Chinese padi dealers.” Unfederated Malay States, Annual Report of the Advisor to the Kedah Government, December 11, 1912, to November 30, 1913 (Alor Setar: Government Printer, 1914), 23. See also Federated Malay States, Report of the Rice Cultivation Committee, 1931, H. A. Tempany, Chairman (Kuala Lumpur: 1932), 40.

  32. International Bank of Reconstruction and Development, Malaysia Loan 434-MA: Muda Irrigation Scheme Completion Report, no. 795-MA (Washington, D.C.: June 1975), ii, quoted in S. Jegatheesan, The Green Revolution and the Muda Irrigation Scheme, MADA Monograph No. 30 (Alor Setar: Muda Agricultural Development Authority, March 1977), 3-4.

  33. See, in addition to Jegatheesan, Green Revolution, Food and Agriculture Organization/World Bank Cooperative Program, The Muda Study, 2 vols. (Rome: FAO, 1975), and Clive Bell, Peter Hazell, and Roger Slade, The Evaluation of Projects in Regional Perspective: A Case Study of the Muda Irrigation Project (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, forthcoming).

  34. For quantitative details showing the scheme’s effect on the regional economy, see Bell et al., Evaluation of Projects; chap. 7.

  35. The number of motorcycles registered in Kedah and Perlis jumped from 14,292 in 1966 to 95,728 in 1976, an increase of more than sixfold. In the same period the number of private cars grew more than fourfold, buses nearly fourfold, and commercial vehicles nearly threefold. Economic Consultants Ltd., Kedah-Perlis Development Study. Interim Report (Alor Setar: December 15, 1977), 90.

  36. See the statistics on housing materials and years of double-cropping in Food and Agriculture Organization/World Bank Cooperative Program, Muda Study, 1: 26, and 2: tables 19, 20.

  37. Ibid., 2: table 21.

  38. A strong case can be made, however, that this benefit has come at a considerable cost in nutritional diversity. Double-cropping has eliminated many of the vegetables that were previously planted between seasons. Small livestock such as ducks, geese, and chickens are also rarer now that off-season grazing is cut short and now that pesticides threaten waterfowl. Rice-paddy fish, once a poor man’s staple, are both less plentiful and often contaminated with pesticides. For those who can afford to buy vegetables, fish, and occasionally meat from the market, the effect is negligible. For those of slender means, however, the effect is likely to be a diet that is at best monotonous and at worst nutritionally deficient and/or toxic.

  39. Ajit Singh, “Laporan Kesihatan Kawasan Kedah-Perlis, 1970–1977” (Alor Setar: Jabatan Pengarah Perkhidmatan Perubatan dan Kesihatan, October 1978, mimeo). These figures are not decisive because only three districts are examined, one of which is the district of Kota Setar, the location of the major urban area in the region. The declines in nutritionally related mortality are far more striking for Kota Setar than for either Kubang Pasu or for Yan (the district in which Sedaka is located).

  40. Economic Consultants Ltd. Kedah-Perlis Development Study, 17.

  41. No precise figures are available but, as we shall see below, the statistics on the distribution of paddy-land ownership from 1966 to 1976 suggest the survival, if not the proliferation, of smallholding. Such holdings, however, are also produced by the fragmentation of ownership through inheritance.

  42. Data in this section and in those immediately following are derived largely from the superb, detailed report by D. S. Gibbons, Lim Teck Ghee, G. B. Elliston, and Shukur Kassim, Hak Milik Tanah di Kawasan Perairan Muda: Lapuran Akhir (Land tenure in the Muda irrigatiaon area: Final report), Pt. 2, Findings (Pulau Pinang: Pusat Penyelidekan Dasar and Universiti Sains Malaysia, 1981). It will be cited henceforth as USM-MADA Land Tenure Study. It is based on a 1975–76 survey of all farms in the Muda region. Comparisons are drawn with previous sample surveys in the Muda region to reach conclusions about shifts in land tenure over time. For my purposes it has only two disadvantages: it provides no information beyond 1976, and the scope of the inquiry is limited to questions of land ownership, farm size, and tenure. Thus, for data since 1976 and for issues not covered in this study, I have had to rely on other sources that are less comprehensive. The care with which the basic data in this report were collected, checked, and interpreted make it a model for emulation elsewhere.

  43. USM-MADA Land Tenure Study, 145. The odd cutting points of the size categories arise from the fact that the original data were collected following local units (1 relong equals .71 acre) of land measurement. Thus 0.01 to 2.83 acres is equivalent to 0.01 to 3.9 relong; 2.84 to 7.09 acres is equivalent to 4.0 to 9.9 relong; and above 7.1 acres is equivalent to 10 relong and above.

  44. No figures for the Muda-area as a whole appear to be available, but this figure, derived from a careful study of selected districts, is likely to be close. See Masanabu Yamashita, Wong Hin Soon, and S. Jegatheesen, “MADA-TARC Cooperative Study, Pilot Project ACRBD 4, Muda Irrigation Scheme, Farm Management Studies” (May 1980, mimeo.), 5. Hereafter referred to as “MADA-TARC Farm Management Studies, 1980.”

  45. USM-MADA Land Tenure Study, 167.

  46. Ibid., 164.

  47. Ibid., 167, gives comparable figures for 1955 and for 1972–73 as well. It is not clear exactly what happened to these ex-tenants. Some have undoubtedly become landless laborers in the village, while others, particularly if young, have emigrated temporarily or permanently to urban areas for work. A small proportion have perhaps been tenants who have retired from active farming and who have then not been replaced.

  48. See Keith Griffin, The Political Economy of Agrarian Change: An Essay on the Green Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974), chap. 3. The one exception is that, while the green revolution has occasionally resulted in the near liquidation of small owner-operators, this class has more than held its own in Muda despite the fact that it is increasingly marginalized in economic terms.

  49. A majority of tenants in Muda are related to their landlord and rent land at prices below market rates. See the fine case study by 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, 1978), and the remarkable analysis of the same phenomenon elsewhere in Malaysia by Akimi Fujimoto, “Land Tenure, Rice Production, and Income Sharing among Malay Peasants: Study of Four Villages” (Ph.D. diss., Flinders University, Australia, 1980). Paradoxically, it is easier to withdraw the land from related tenants in order to farm it oneself—villagers accept that the owner and his children take precedence over more distant relatives—than to raise rents that kin must pay. This explains why landlords cannot simply take advantage of land hunger and higher returns from cultivation by extracting the full economic rent from tenants who are close relatives.

  50. A recent restudy of a village near Alor Setar by Rosemary Barnard notes the importance of combine-harvesters in influencing landlords to rent out less land. “Recent Developments in Agricultural Employment in a Kedah Rice-Growing Village” (Paper presented at the Second Colloquium of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, James Cook University, August 29-31, 1979), 30. Increasing displacement of tenants is also noted by the head of the agricultural division of the Muda Agricultural Development Authority, Afifuddin Haji Omar, in “The Pivotal Role of an Integrated Institutional Reform in Socioeconomic Development of Rice Peasantry in Malaysia” (Paper presented at Conference on Development: The Peasantry and Development in the ASEAN Region, University Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, May 26-29, 1980), 12.

  51. For the statistics on paddy rents and cash rents from 1955 to 1976, see USMMADA Land Tenure Study, 66. The term “paddy rent” (sewa padi) is always treated by studies as if it was actually paid in kind. It is my experience, however, that it has come to mean only that the rent is fixed in terms of the market price of a predetermined amount of paddy, which is usually given to the landlord in cash. It should also be noted that paddy rents were not crop-sharing arrangements, as the paddy rent was a fixed amount of grain, not a fixed share of the crop, which would have fluctuated with the harvest.