SEDAKA, 1967-1979 • 125

their chances of success are slim. 47 Nearly thirty unmarried men and women have left-many temporarily, a few permanently-to seek work elsewhere. No doubt quite a few of them would have left eventually in any case, but the changes in local land tenure and employment since 1977 precipitated their early departure.

The proximate cause for the exodus was the outright cancellation of the 1978 irrigated season due to drought. Losing an entire crop and the wage labor it might have brought was enough to send many small farmers and laborers to the city temporarily. Those who stayed on in the village, accumulating debts, not only fuund that the next harvest was mediocre but that their harvest earnings had been substantially reduced by competition from combine-harvesters. Many of them left with their grown sons immediately after planting the subsequent crop, in the hope of recouping their losses and repaying debts to pawnbrokers and shopkeepers.

The result was probably the largest emigration of villagers seeking work in memory. 48 In a month or two of work most married men among them were able to save M$200 or more from their earnings to support their families back in Sedaka. Although it is something of an exaggeration, one small tenant who joined the exodus said that "the only ones remaining were those who were not up to the work."49 In nearby villages the exodus has been, if anything, even more pronounced, and there is little doubt that, fur those poor households and small farmers who remain in Sedaka, temporary wage-labor migration is becoming a way of life. So long as the urban economy provides this safety valve, it will be the only means by which Sedaka's marginal families can maintain a foothold in the community.

LOCAL INSTITUTIONS AND ECONOMIC POWER

The Farmers' Association

The enormous impact that double-cropping in Muda has had on tenure, incomes, and social relations has inevitably fuund expression in the character of local institutions. In Sedaka, this process can be seen most palpably in the brief history of the Farmers' Association, established by law in 1967 and designed originally to provide extension and credit facilities fur paddy production fur all farmers in the locality. It may never quite have lived up to its original promise,

47. Settlers must, in theory, be younger than forty-five years old, although in practice it is possible to bribe to have an identity card (Kad pengenalan) altered to show a later birth date.

48.The only possible exception was after a major drought and crop failure in 1954 in Kedah, when many able-bodied villagers left to find work on rubber estates and in the cities.

49.Tinggal orang tak tarat sabaja.

126 • SEDAKA, 1967-1979

but it has served other uses admirably. The local branch in nearby Kepala Batas theoretically serves over twenty villages and a population of some eighteen hundred families. Only six hundred families have ever become members. The vast majority of smallholders and tenants have never joined, judging the costs too great and the benefits too small. Local members of the Malay opposition political party (PAS), including many who are quite well-to-do, have never joined, judging-in most cases correctly-that the Farmers' Association was run by the state in the interests of the ruling party. The Kepala Batas branch has, like most others, thus become the creature of rich peasants affiliated with UMNO.

When farmers speak of the Farmers' Association they call it MADA, referring not to the Farmers' Association or its elected leadership, but to the government agency that directs its activities. Its main function, both as they view it and in practice, is the provision of production credit and fertilizer. Credit is allocated to members, on the basis of area farmed, to cover tractor costs (M$30 a relong fur two passes in 1979) and fertilizer, which is supplied in kind. 50 When the 1978 irrigated season was cancelled, creating much hardship, MADA also served as the manager of a large program of drought relief (bantuan kemarau) consisting of generous wages paid to labor gangs fur clearing draining and irrigation canals. MADA also makes small loans fur such ventures as fish ponds and beef cattle raising as well as organizes occasional "study tours" at state expense to such farflung places as Sumatra and Singapore. MADA is thus seen not so much as the seat of an autonomous Farmers' Association but as the funt of credit and patronage distributed, above all, to its membership.

The principal beneficiaries of this largesse in Sedaka are the eighteen village members (sixteen families) listed in table 4. 10. They stand out in several respects from the village as a whole. All but two are from among the richest half of the households in Sedaka. Twelve are from the richest twenty families. They farm an average of 8. 3 relong apiece, far above the village mean, and, taken collectively, a total of 139.5 relong, or fully 43 percent of the total paddy land cultivated by villagers. Politically, all but two are members of the local branch of the ruling party. 51 In fact, all but three of the UMNO households among the richest twenty families have joined the Persatuan Peladang. 52 None of the seven

50.Since 1979 fertilizer has been supplied through MADA to all farmers, whether members or not, thereby further reducing the potential benefits of membership. .

51.The two exceptions are Mat Buyong, an opposition PAS member who once paid dues to UMNO to hedge his bets and who has in any case not paid back his initial loan from MADA, and Kamil, who is a genuine fence-sitter considering moving to the UMNO camp.

52.Two of these anomalies are also easily explained. One, Tok Mah, is a widow who would not join what is nearly exclusively a men's organization and another, Ghazali, although a discreet UMNO member, is also the son-in-law of the wealthiest PAS landowner in the village and wishes to avoid a too open identification with the local UMNO elite.

TABLE 4.10 • Village Members of Farmers' Association, with Shares Owned, Land Claimed fur Loan Purposes, Land Actually Farmed, Political Affiliation, and Income Rank, June 1979

*indicates that the individuals or, in 3 cases, members of their immediate family, were members of the Executive Committee of UMNO in Sedaka.

**Sons of Haji Jaafar, thus three members of a single family.

128 • SEDAKA, 1967-1979

PAS families has joined. 53 What we have here, then, is a Farmers' Association membership almost exclusively confined to the class of wealthy cultivators affiliated with the dominant party. So close is this linkage that the four elected leaders of the local unit of the Farmers' Association (Daud bin Haji Jaafar, son of #70, Basir, #64, Amin, #72, and Fadzil, #42) are precisely those who form the small cabal which, in practice, controls village politics. As for the poor of Sedaka, no matter which party they belong to, they are conspicuous by their almost complete absence from the Farmers' Association; only two have ventured to join. 54

This small elite has profited substantially from its control over the Farmers' Association. In the matter of crop and production loans, the profiteering is most blatant. With four exceptions, the members of the Farmers' Association take loans for considerably more land than they actually farm (see table 4.10). They thus assure themselves an additional loan at subsidized rates and a surplus of fertilizer they can sell at a profit to nonmembers. ss The salaried staff of MADA in Kepala Batas, where this petty but systematic loan fraud takes place, are well aware of what is happening. Their compliCity in registering inflated acreage represents their effOrt to keep their present membership and to avoid antagonizing the rural leadership of the ruling party. Thus Daud bin Haji Jaafar, son of the village headman (#70), registers 30 relong and receives M$900 in cash when in fact he is entitled only to register 7 relong and borrow M$210; Basir (#64), shopkeeper and Sedaka's political kingpin, farms only 7 relong but takes loans for 20 relong, thus availing himself of working capital at subsidized interest rates.

It is only by the most charitable definition that these production credits could in fact be termed "loans." By June 1979 six of the eighteen members had, in effect, transformed these loans into outright grants by the simple expedient of not repaying them (the "ineligibles" of table 4.10). At least four others do not appear on the list of members, because they defaulted on their loans some time ago and no longer bother to pay dues. Of the remaining twelve members in more or less good standing in mid-1979, at least two--Basir (#64) and Ghani Lebai Mat (#54)--defaulted in the following season and became ineligible for further loans. Basir owes the Farmers' Association nearly M$2,000.

53.Four of these seven families are, in effect, one extended family: Haji Kadir, his father, his sister and her husband, and his daughter a:nd her husband.

54.One of these exceptions is Mat Buyong, whose special situation is described in n. 51 above, while the other, Lebai Hussein, is the brother-in-law of the village

headman, Haji Jaffar, while his son is treasurer of the local UMNO branch. Both are very close (ranks 34 and 35 respectively) to the middle of the village income distribution.

55. The free fertilizer given to all farmers beginning with the main season of 1979-80 eliminated this advantage as well as making loan repayments to MADA less attractive.

SEDAKA, 1967-1979 • 129

The Agricultural Officer who leads the local branch estimates that less than half the membership still qualifies fur production credit. Delinquency has grown despite the easing of repayment schedules fOllowing the drought in 1978, which hurt even well-to-do cultivators. The reasons fur default, however, have nothing to do with the capacity of the membership to pay. As a group, they come from that wealthy strata of the village that can most easily borrow from Chinese shopkeepers or, more likely, finance production costs from their own ample savings. Thus the sanction of being denied further credit from MADA is only a minor inconvenience fur them, an inconvenience that is, moreover, far outweighed by the attraction of simply appropriating as much as M$2,000 in a de facto grant. They know, with a political wisdom born of experience, that they will not be prosecuted, and they lightheartedly ignore the letters they periodically receive demanding repayment. As the local Agricultural Officer laments, "It's because politics is mixed in; if we take action, the courts will press hard [fur repayment} and the political party wants the votes of the people." 56 The logic is impeccable but incomplete. Prosecuting for debt collection would not alienate the UMNO rank and file. It would, however, alienate precisely that class of large farmers who form the rural leadership of UMNO in the villageY A headlong pursuit of debtors would probably be the coup de grace for the institution itself.

The partisan and class character of the Farmers' Association has never been in serious doubt. From the beginning, it has been run for and by that class of large cultivators and landowners affiliated to the ruling party. This acknowledged fact was, in itself, not much more than a minor irritant in village politics and class relations-the grating evidence that a small oligarchy enjoyed privileged access to credit from the Persatuan Peladang. In mid-1978, however, the partisan character of MADA and the Farmers' Association became more visibly and acrimoniously manifest in the course of administering a drought relief program. The drought, to the rare good fortune of many cultivators, coincided with the general election campaign in 1978, thus allowing the ruling party to kill two birds with one stone through its patronage. MADA, with its offices scattered throughout the rice plain, a professional administrative staff, and strong ties to UMNO, seemed the logical vehicle to distribute relief on a large scale. The results bore the distinctive marks of MADA's political and class character.

The drought relief was designed as a labor-intensive public works program. In practice, the wages were more intensive than the labor; many villagers received as much as M$80 fur two days of canal clearing in a region where the typical

56.Oleh Kerana politik campur kalau ambit tindakan, makamah nak tekan ... dan parti politik mau suara rakyat. For parallels from Africa, see Robert H. Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), chap. 7.

57.Not incidentally, it would also almost certainly further erode the membership base of the Farmers' Association, thereby weakening its already hollow claim to speak fur all farmers in the Muda region.