74 • THE LANDSCAPE OF RESISTANCE

of small farmers in the region. Leasehold tenants are increasingly drawn from the ranks of the wealthy Malay landowners and Chinese businessmen armed with capital and machinery (tractors, combine-harvesters) and looking fur profitable investment opportunities. They are willing to pay premium rents and prefer to rent large tracts of paddy land. What is emerging, then, is a rich, fully commercial tenant class whose entry into the rental market serves to displace small, capital-poor tenants.

How much of the diminution of the tenant class befOre 1976 was due to the replacement of many small tenants by their capitalist competitors is impossible to estimate. What is clear, however, is that since 1976 there has been a marked acceleration of large-scale, long-term leasehold tenancy. Very few of the village studies conducted since then have failed to note its growing use or to express alarm at the likely consequences fur the poor peasantry in the Muda region. 54

Mechanization

Growing wet rice under traditional conditions can absorb an astounding amount of labor. Most of this labor is devoted to the four main stages of cultivation: land preparation, transplanting, reaping, and threshing. If hired labor is used, it is largely confined to these four operations, since other activities such as weeding or repairing bunds can be spread out conveniently and accomplished with fumily labor. Land-poor peasant households in Muda typically relied on just such wage labor opportunities to patch together their meager subsistence. The introduction of tractors for land preparation and combine-harvesters fur reaping and threshing has thus effectively eliminated most ofthose opportunities;

54. Mohd. Shadli Abdullah, fur example, fuund that in Gelung Rambal village nearly one-third of the tenancy agreements took the furm 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 &rource Use &tterns 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-grow- ing area to the south of Kedah, Fujimoto has fuund that 24 percent of all rental contracts are leasehold tenancies. "Land Tenure," 80. The only exception is Rosemary Barnard's restudy of Kampung Asaro 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 ofNew South Wales, Sydney, May 15-19, 1978, mimeo.), 19-20.

THE LANDSCAPE OF RESISTANCE • 75

transplanting remains the only unmechanized farm operation that provides wage employment for poor households-and even it is now threatened.

Strictly speaking, the use of tractors for land preparation was neither a consequence of the green revolution nor a labor-replacing innovation. Most of the paddy land in Muda was ploughed by tractors before 1970, but speed in ploughing became vital if double-cropping was to take place. Thus, initially at least, tractors facilitated double-cropping, which in turn doubled the annual wage work in transplanting, reaping, and harvesting. Because tractors helped to create far more employment than they destroyed, their introduction caused no concern at the time. 55

Combine-harvesters were a different matter. In 1975, virtually all the paddy in Muda was cut and threshed by hand. By 1980, huge Western-style combines costing nearly M$200,000 and owned by syndicates of businessmen were harvesting roughly 80 percent of the rice crop. If it is hard to imagine the visual impact on the peasantry of this mind-boggling technological leap from sickles and threshing tubs to clanking behemoths with thirty-two-foot cutting bars, 56 it is not so hard to calculate their impact on the distribution of rural income.

The consequences for income of combine-harvesting are especially applicable to households farming less than 2.8 acres (over 46 percent of Muda's families) and wage laborers (7 percent). The former depended on paddy wage labor for at least one-fourth of their net income, while the latter were often totally dependent on it. Calculations based on the share of cutting (usually women's work) and threshing (usually men's work) in total hired labor and the intensity of combineharvester use suggest that the combines have cut paddy wage labor receipts by 44 percent. 57 For the poorest class of small farmers, this represents a 15 percent

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 fur 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 fur 1974, befOre the combines were used, show that paddy wage labor

76 • THE LANDSCAPE OF RESISTANCE

loss of net income in the case of tenants and an 11 percent loss in the case of owner-operators. For full-time wage laborers, of course, the results are catastrophic and it is hard to imagine how they can survive as a class in the new circumstances. Combine-harvesting has meant, then, a loss of nearly half the wages previously received for paddy work by the poorer strata of Muda's peasantry. The loss in the volume of work has by no means been compensated for by a rise in wage rates for the work still available.

The direct impact of combine-harvesting on wage income is obvious and dramatic, but in the long run the indirect consequences may prove more damaging. Mechanization, by promoting large-scale farming and leaseholding, has greatly reduced the opportunity for small-scale tenancy. It has also eliminated gleaning, shifted local hiring patterns, reduced transplanting wages, and transformed local social relations. These last changes, which are rarely captured in the aggregate regional statistics, are best deferred to our detailed discussion of Sedaka in the next chapter.

From Exploitation to Marginalization

The impact of double-cropping has thus far been considered as if it were largely a matter of access to land, work, and wages. It is well worth pausing briefly to suggest its implications for class relations as well. What the transformations brought about by Muda's green revolution have done is nearly to sever the bonds of economic interdependence betweeen agrarian classes. Prior to double-cropping and, to some extent, even until1975, the land-rich class and the land-poor class of Muda were joined by an exchange of work and wages, cultivation and rents which, however exploitative, fused them together in the enterprise of rice farming .. Rich landlords and farmers had more paddy fields than they could cultivate alone; they needed tenants, ploughing services, transplanters, reapers, and threshers. The land-poor and landless, having more labor than property, provided these services. Because of the labor peaks typical of rice cultivation, it was not uncommon for employers to help secure timely labor by modest gifts and loans or, in more general terms, to "cultivate" not only the land but also the poorer villagers whom they needed to make the land profitable.

With mechanization, tenancy became an expensive luxury. Those tenants who remained, aside from close kin, were typically paying fixed market rents with

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 ofMuda'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.

THE LANDSCAPE OF RESISTANCE • 77

no allowance for crop failures or were themselves large capitalist leaseholding tenants. More important, cultivation could now be undertaken largely independent of village labor. Except fur transplanting and for those occasions when a plot that ripened early or lodged (was beaten flat by wind and/or rain) had to be harvested by hand, large farmers simply had little need to hire poor villagers. Thus, they had correspondingly little incentive to cultivate their goodwill. The linkage between classes has by no means totally disappeared, but there is little doubt that it is far more constricted than it was and that all indications point toward its eventual demise. If poor villagers were earlier tied to their richer employers by bonds ofinterdependence and exploitation, they now find themselves cut adrift and marginalized. If they are no longer exploited, if they are now "free," this is the freedom of the unemployed, the redundant.

Income

The effect of the Muda Irrigation Scheme on incomes and on the distribution of those incomes throughout the region is best examined in two phases: an initial phase from 1966 to 1974 and a subsequent phase from 1974 to 1979. The basic, summary figures are shown in table 3.4, covering five tenure categories of farmers that are most common in Muda. They are, as all averages must be, abstractions hiding an enormous variation of circumstances and conditions in order to create some measure of central tendency. Whenever judgments were necessary, they were made so as to avoid understating the income of small farmers. 58

The initial impact of double-cropping in Muda was to raise incomes on a broad front in both nominal and real terms. This gain, however, was at the expense of a much worse distribution of that income. 59 Owner-tenants, the

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" fur 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 Pro-

gram 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), 33940, 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.

NOTE: A much expanded table from which this is derived, together with sources and explanation, may be found in appendix B.

THE LANDSCAPE OF RESISTANCE • 79

wealthiest'tenure category with by far the largest farm size, were the greatest gainers, improving their real income by 137 percent. The incomes of average tenants and average owner-operators grew by 72 and 89 percent respectively. By contrast, the gains of small tenants and owners (nearly half rf Muda's form households) were far more modest: 35 percent and 51 percent. Even the percentages are misleading here, given the different base incomes, fur while the typical ownertenant gained M$2,577 in real income, the average small tenant gained only M$335: a ratio of 8 to 1. Both the gains in income and their maldistribution, it should be added, were not due solely to the production effects of doublecroppings. They were due as much to the doubling of farm-gate paddy prices in the worldwide economic crisis and inflation of 1973-74. 60

The five-year period from late 1974 to 1979 was, by contrast, one of declining nominal and real income fur all categories of farmers. 61 Losses fur average tenants and small owners meant that, at the end of the period, they were less than 20 percent ahead of their 1966 real incomes. Small tenants suffered most dramatically, as their real incomes were, if anything, below what they had been thirteen years befOre. Only owner-tenants and owner-operators remained substantially ahead of their 1966 real incomes.

The causes of this retreat across a broad front may be traced to three factors. First, the earlier increase in production brought about by double-cropping had leveled off and yields remained stagnant throughout this period. Second, paddy prices after 1974 were steady for the next five years. 62 The cost of inputs to farmers, on the other hand, continued to rise as did the consumer price index (up 22 percent), thereby eroding the real incomes of all tenure categories. There

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 Jegatheesannotes, "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 197.5 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 fur self-sustaining regional growth. "The conclusion that the project's effects were of a once-and-fur-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 1974level 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.

80 • THE LANDSCAPE OF RESISTANCE

is no doubt that declining farm incomes contributed to the January 1980 mass demonstration of paddy growers-the first in over fifteen years-in which thou- sands of peasants assembled in Alor Setar to demand an increase in paddy prices.

The worsening trend in income distribution from 1966 to 1979 is captured in table 3. 5 in comparisons in the net income of small farmers over time as a proportion of the net income of other tenure categories. All the disparities, it is clear, were essentially generated in the first stage of double-cropping. Ironically, the second stage arrested (but did not reverse) these new inequities, although at the cost of lower real incomes all around. Small tenants who had half the income of owner-tenants in 1966 now have roughly one-quarter of their income. To put it more accurately, those tenants who are lucky enough still to be tenants have slid to about one-fourth the income of owner-tenants. Small owner-operators, even more numerous, had over half the income of owner-tenants thirteen years ago and now have roughly one-third that income. The declining position of Muda's small peasants is the result of their small farm size and of the direct and indirect effects ofan irrigation scheme that disproportionately rewards the owners of scarce factors of production. They were poor to begin with; they remain poor; and they have grown relatively poorer. There is no need, on the basis of this data, to question the general assessment of the green revolution by Keith Griffin that "the changes which are at present occurring tend to increase relative inequality. "63

TABLE 3.5 • Income Comparisons between Tenure Categories 1966, 1974, 1979

II.Net income of small owner-operator as proportion of income of:

The gulf separating the large, capitalist farmers who market most of the region's rice and the mass of small peasants is now nearly an abyss, with the added (and related) humiliation that the former need seldom even hire the latter to help grow their crops. Taking 1966 as a point of comparison, it is still the case that a majority of Muda's households are more prosperous than before. It is also the case that the distribution of income has worsened appreciably and that a substantial minority-perhaps 35-40 percent-have been left behind with very low incomes which, if they are not worse than a decade ago,. are not appreciably better. Given the limited absorptive capacity of the wider economy,

63. Griffin, Political Economy, 73.