52. The only figures I have are for Sedaka, where something like one in seven tenants may have been displaced, but it would be hazardous to project similar rates for all of Muda.
53. The authors of the USM-MADA Land Tenure Study found, to their surprise, that pajak rents worked out to M$122.74 for the main season as compared with M$112.49 for cash renting season by season. One interpretation they offer is that such leases “are highly commercial transactions struck up between landlords who are sensitive to market conditions of rent and well-to-do tenants (possibly including non Malays who experience more difficulty in obtaining land and are anxious to obtain some degree of security of tenure).” P. 72.
54. Mohd. Shadli Abdullah, for example, found that in Gelung Rambal village nearly one-third of the tenancy agreements took the form of pajak leasehold, “Relationship of the Kinship System,” 110. Diana Wong, in a subsequent study of the same village, writes that “An even more disturbing trend is the increasing shift to pajak.” “A Padi Village in North Malaya” (1980, mimeo.), 18. Jon R. V. Daane, in his analysis of farmers’ organizations, noted that pajak was increasingly used by even poor landlords to raise cash while avoiding the numerous claims of relatives who wished to rent land from them cheaply. See Farmers and Farmers Organizations: A Study of Changing Resource Use Patterns in the Muda Area, Preliminary Report No. 2 (August 1978, mimeo.). Afifuddin Haji Omar has also noted with alarm the tendency of syndicates that own combine-harvesters to lease in large plots at premium rents. “Pivotal Role,” 12. In Province Wellesley, a highly commercialized rice-growing area to the south of Kedah, Fujimoto has found that 24 percent of all rental contracts are leasehold tenancies. “Land Tenure,” 80. The only exception is Rosemary Barnard’s restudy of Kampung Asam Riang, in which pajak seems to have disappeared in the past decade. “The Modernization of Agriculture in a Kedah Village, 1967–1968” (Paper presented at Second National Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, University of New South Wales, Sydney, May 15-19, 1978, mimeo.), 19-20.
55. It is instructive, however, to note the shift in income transfers that the use of tractors prompted. Before their use, large operators would often hire modest local farmers with water buffalo to plough (menggembur) and to harrow (menyisir) their land. The effect was mildly redistributive. With the use of tractors, the payments are typically made to outside businessmen and rich farmers who own this expensive item of capital.
56. Alas, it seems to have occurred to no one that an oral history of their appearance in the fields in 1975 would have been worth collecting.
57. Wages paid for transplanting, cutting, threshing, and in-field transportation comprise about 90 percent of the hired labor component in rice cultivation in Muda. Of that, cutting and threshing, which are carried out in one operation by the combines, comprise abut 55 percent. Combine-harvesters also eliminate a substantial amount of in-field transportation by transporting paddy directly to the bunds or to the roadside. This loss, however, is more or less compensated for by employment created in the bagging of rice. As of 1980, combines harvested about 80 percent of Muda’s paddy land. Assuming that this figure is likely to remain the norm, I arrive at a net loss of hired labor income of 44 percent (80 percent of 55 percent). Farm income figures for 1974, before the combines were used, show that paddy wage labor income for small farm households (below 2.84 acres) was approximately M$350 per annum. A loss of 44 percent of that income would reduce it to M$196. For a tenant in this category, the loss in total net income is 15 percent; for an owner-operator, the loss is 11 percent. For a wage laborer the loss is far larger. As these classes comprise the more than half of Muda’s population that lives below the official poverty line, the income consequences are grave. For a careful case study of the wage impact of combine-harvesting, see “MADA-TARC Farm Management Studies, 1980,” 47-54.
58. For example, there is good reason to believe that gross paddy income may be overstated by as much as 20 percent because of differences between crop-cutting surveys and actual yields as well as reductions in sale price made for moisture content. “Other income” for most farmers is almost certainly overstated as well since the averages are inflated by a few farmers with steady off-farm salaries or wages. The picture given here is perhaps even more optimistic than a more complete account would allow.
59. Virtually all of the major studies in Muda concur with this conclusion. Thus the authors of the Food and Agriculture Organization/World Bank Cooperative Program report, Muda Study, write, “This increase in income at the farm level, however, has not been evenly distributed across the already unequal pattern of income distribution and has, therefore, served to worsen that distribution” 1:2. See also Afifuddin Haji Omar, “Peasants, Institutions, and Development: The Political Economy of Development in the Muda Region” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1977), 339-40, and Clive Bell, “Some Effects in the Barter Terms of Trade on a Small Regional Economy” (Washington, D.C.: Development Research Center, World Bank, July 1979, mimeo.), 32.
60. For a superb and meticulous analysis of the relative impact of production and prices in this period, see Jegatheesan, Green Revolution, 31-50.
61. As Jegatheesan notes, “Such estimates (i.e. yields, farm size, tenure, cost of production, paddy price) have always to be treated with care in the actual quantitative assessments of net income, but have as yet never been proven wrong in showing a continuing decline in average net farm incomes in Muda since 1975 owing to relatively static yields, a stable padi price, and rising production costs.” “Monitoring and Evaluation in the Muda Irrigation Scheme, Malaysia”’ (n.d., circa 1979, mimeo.), 39. Bell et al., Evaluation of Projects, on a related issue, have estimated the capital flow out of the Muda region following gains in production and reached pessimistic conclusions about the possibility for self-sustaining regional growth. “The conclusion that the project’s effects were of a once-and-for-all kind seem to us virtually inescapable.” Chap. 9, p. 35.
62. In 1981, after my research was completed, the government raised the paddy price by roughly one-third. The effect of this change by itself would have been to restore average real incomes to their 1974 level or slightly above. Income distribution would, however, have become even worse. The increase in the official support price was most certainly motivated in part by the farmers’ demonstrations for a price hike held in January 1980 in Alor Setar.
63. Griffin, Political Economy, 73.
64. There is some dispute about how the poverty level has been established, with some claiming that it should be set lower for rural areas where the cost of living is lower. Without pretending to judge this issue, I believe it is clear that there may be strong political reasons for the government to set the poverty level reasonably high in order to justify certain programs aimed at attracting Malay votes. Quite aside from the question of what an appropriate poverty level might be, it should be added that, given the official level, the estimate of 30 percent is quite conservative. This is the conclusion reached by the most thorough recent study of poor households in the Muda region, in which households interviewed in 1972–73 were reinterviewed a decade later. The study confirms that half or more of Muda’s population is still below the official poverty line and the “downstream” employment created by double-cropping has gone largely to wealthier households, not to those who need it most. See the excellent preliminary report by Sukur Kasim, “Evolution of Sources of Income in the Muda Irrigation Project (1972/73-1981/82)” (Paper presented at Conference on Off-Farm Employment in the Development of Rural Asia, Chengmai, Thailand, August 1983, mimeo.).
65. This very conservative figure is derived by adding the number of small farm households to that of nonfarming wage laborers. Of course a small percentage of small farm households are in fact above the poverty line. By the same token, however, a fair number of average tenants and owner-operators with farm sizes above 3 acres are below the poverty level.
66. As Norman Uphoff and Milton Esman note, “if such organizations become institut
ionalized, they would be as instruments of the large and middle farmers, while small farmers would be thrown back on traditional links of dependency on patrons or be compelled to rely wholly on their own meagre resources.” Local Organization for Rural Development: Analysis of Asian Experience (Ithaca: Rural Development Committee, Cornell University, 1974), 66.
67. Originally, membership and annual subscription fees were nominal (M$3), but as members began to subscribe to equity shares, new members were required to purchase a block of shares equivalent in value to the amount held by members of long standing. It is now rare for membership to cost less than M$30 and it often runs as high as M$ 100. For small farmers, whose production credit allowance, given their acreage, might be less than M$100, this provision is an effective bar to entry. Even were they to join, the annual deduction of at least M$15 for compulsory share purchase from their credit allowance makes joining less attractive than the familiar alternative of credit from shopkeepers. Compiled from USM-MADA Land Tenure Study, 68, and Zakaria Ismail, “Institutional Short-term Production Credit Programme in Muda Scheme,” MADA Monograph No. 38 (Alor Setar: MADA, n.d., probably 1977), 24.
68. Ho Nai Kin has provided evidence of increasing delinquency up to 1977 in “Implementation and Supervision Problem of Institutional Padi Production Credit in MADA’s Farmers’ Association,” MADA Monograph No. 35 (Alor Setar: MADA, 1978), app. 2. There is also evidence to suggest that delinquency is more characteristic of large farmers than small farmers. See Mohd. Noh Samik, “Delinquent Loanees” (Alor Setar: MADA, Bahagian Pertanian, n.d.).
69. For a convincing analysis of state agricultural policy in the Third World and its consequences for income distribution, power, and development, see Robert H. Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981).
70. Griffin, Political Economy, 128.
4 • Sedaka, 1967–1979
[Page 86]
THE VILLAGE
The foreground of the landscape we are viewing is formed by village-level “facts” as they have become evident in the past decade. Here the focus is even sharper, for they are “facts” that have been directly experienced—for example, changes in rental forms, mechanization, wages, land tenure, credit, charity. These facts are not simply the replication of the middle ground in the village context. This particular village is, as any other particular village would be, to some extent unique. Put another way, Sedaka has had its own special green revolution in keeping with its particular history, its particular cast of characters. It is this special, local variant of the green revolution that Sedaka’s villagers have helped to fashion and to which they are responding.
The village of Sedaka falls within the administrative district of Yan, which straddles the southern frontier of the Muda Irrigation Scheme.1 (See map 2) The small town of Yan itself, some eight miles to the south, houses the district office complex, including the local land office, police station, and a nearby clinic. It is to this town that villagers must go to execute and notarize land transactions of long-term rentals as well as to pawn gold jewelry at the licensed pawn shop. If Yan is the main focus of administrative life for Sedaka, the nearby town of Kepala Batas might be described as the main focus of commercial life. Villagers buy most of their food and provisions at its shops and at its twice-weekly rotating market on Wednesday and Sunday. It is also the center for credit and marketing, whether through the Chinese shopkeepers who extend loans and buy paddy or through the Farmers’ Association and the local branch of the Paddy Marketing Authority (LPN), which has a large rice-drying facility on the outskirts of town [Page 87] near the village. Kepala Batas is also the site of the subdistrict (Mukim Sungai Daun) chief’s (penghulu) office, at which minor administrative matters such as the registration or sale of water buffalo are handled, and of a once-a-week maternity clinic staffed by government nurses.
The seventy-four households of Sedaka are strung out along a nearly milelong dirt path. (See map 3) This path leads from the all-weather road joining Yan to Kepala Batas and ending abruptly at the rice fields separating the village from the neighboring settlement to the east, Sungai Bujur. Like most villages on the Muda Plain established in this century, the pattern of settlement follows the linear plan of the drainage canals that originally brought the land into production. This ribbon of settlement is often contrasted with the pattern of nucleated or clustered villages, where social and ritual cohesion is said to be greater.2 It is certainly true that villagers themselves are not quite sure where Sedaka ends and where Sungai Tongkang, the village along the main road, begins. Despite these vagaries of geography, the village is, as we shall see, far more than just a collection of households in close proximity. If its boundaries are ill defined, all but a few families are nevertheless quite unambiguously of Sedaka. If neighborhoods subdivide it, the prayer house (surau) as a focus for religious life and the large feasts to which all villagers are typically invited serve to ritually unify it. Administratively as well, it is usually treated as a distinct unit. When it is not, as in the case of the Farmer’s Association until recently, villagers have lobbied to have Sedaka recognized as a separate branch. Above all, the moral existence of the village is recognized in discourse. When the collector of the Islamic tithe (amil) explains why he does not report villagers who fail to pay the full amount, he says, “We all live in the same village.”3 When a tenant tells me why he would not try to expand his farm by outbidding another local tenant, he says, “Everyday I see his face.”4 And when the rules are broken, as they occasionally are, the culprit is shamed in precisely the same terms.
Looking straight down the path, no houses are visible-just the solid archway of coconut palms, banana fronds, nipah, and the water hyacinths and grasses growing in the ditches alongside. Idris’s store, facing the surfaced road leading north to Kepala Batas and south to Yan Kecil, is the first building in Sedaka. Idris takes advantage of his roadside location and the electricity it provides to sell drinks and cigarettes to the young men who gather there in the evenings and to offer the only popsicles available locally. A little farther along is a hinged timber spanning the path, which is fastened by chain and lock preventing trucks from entering. This village gate is, as we shall see, an object of some controversy.
[Page 88]
MAP 3 • Kampung Sedaka
[Page 89]
The key is held at the nearby house of Lebai Pendek, a wealthy, elderly cultivator who, together with his sons, Musa and Ariffin, is influential in the small group that controls village politics. Houses interspersed with paddy fields line the path for the next two hundred yards; the dwellings (see photos) of the well-to-do with zinc roofs and clapboard siding and those of most poor with attap roofing and siding made of bamboo split and beaten flat (pelupoh). Even the condition of the houses is an acrimonious political issue, which we shall explore, inasmuch as the local ruling party and its supporters are accused of having monopolized a government subsidy for house repair. Mansur, a landless laborer, and Taib, a poor smallholder, live in this stretch and their houses contrast sharply with the refurbished and repainted house of Shamsul, a ruling party stalwart who owns 6 relong (4.2 acres) and has a rare and coveted job at the government paddydrying installation nearby.
Near the middle of the village stand the two most substantial houses in the village, each with high roofs, louvered shutters, and verandas. One belongs to Haji Kadir, the richest villager, and makes a stark contrast with the dilapidated houses of Hamzah and Razak just beside it. The other is the house of Haji Jaafar, the village headman (ketua kempung). As headman, Haji Jaafar is influential but rather retiring; his married son Daud, who lives with him, and the shopkeeper, Basir, are far more visibly active. Haji Jaafar prefers to emphasize his unifying role by giving an annual feast (Kenduri) to which the entire village is invited and by occasionally leading prayers at the village surau across the path (see photo). While there are many public gatherings in Sedaka, the surau, whose lower floor serves as a village meeting hall, cla
ssroom for religious teachers, and lecture hall for sermons and political speeches, is the only designated public space in the community.
The informal gathering places, however, the places where idle chatter and gossip are exchanged, are around the tables of the two small shops (see photo). Each shop carries a small inventory of daily items such as dried chillies, soap, matches, kerosene, tobacco, sweets, spices, tinned fish for last-minute purchase. After the day’s work and during slack periods, men will gather to pass the time smoking and drinking homemade soft drinks, with the circle constantly changing as some arrive and others leave. Basir, the owner of the first store, is the acknowledged leader of the local ruling party (UMNO) branch and his shop thus serves as a gathering place for his allies. The same holds for Samat’s store nearby, except that he and his father, Tok Mahmud, are staunch supporters of the opposition party and their clientele is drawn especially from its ranks. A few strongly partisan villagers will, on principle, never go to the “other” shop, but a majority claim that they go to both, being above such petty considerations.
The three best-known and most outspoken women live within shouting distance of the stores, farther along the path. All three are, as it were, honorary men in the sense that they have all had to assume male roles and responsibilities. Rokiah and Rosni are both heads of transplanting groups, which requires them [Page 90] to negotiate with farmers; Rosni is a widow, while Rokiah’s husband is alive but judged rather feebleminded, and she has assumed control of the family. The third, the midwife Tok Sah Bidan, is a widow whose training and forty-odd years of midwifery give her a unique place in village life.
Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance Page 15
