Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective (Transforming Asia) 946298817X, 9789462988170

Table of contents :
Cover
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective
Eric C. Thompson, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen
1 Cambodia: Political Strife and Problematic Land Tenure
Chivoin Peou and Sokphea Young
2 Indonesia: Whither Involution, Demographics, and Development?
Holi Bina Wijaya
3 Japan: Government Interventions and Part-time Family Farming
Gen Shoji, Kunimitsu Yoshida, and Satoshi Yokoyama
4 Laos: Responding to Pressures and Opportunities
Outhai Soukkhy and Robert Cole
5 Malaysia: The State of/in Village Agriculture
Ibrahim Ngah and Khairul Hisyam Kamarudin
6 The Philippines: Fragmented Agriculture, Aquaculture, and Vulnerable Livelihoods
Edo Andriesse
7 Singapore: Making Space for Farming
Sakunika Wewalaarachchi and Eric C. Thompson
8 Taiwan: Toward the Revitalization of Smallholder Agriculture
Po-Yi Hung
9 Thailand: The Political Economy of Post-Peasant Agriculture
Tubtim Tubtim
10 Vietnam: From Socialist Transformation to Reform
Nguyen Tuan Anh
Index
List of Maps, Figures and Tables
Maps
Map 1.1 Areas of rice cultivation in Cambodia
Map 6.1 Regional Distribution of Number and Average Size of Landholdings
Map 6.2 Regional distribution of four important crops: palay (rice), corn, banana, and coconut
Map 8.1 Distribution of Farmland in Taiwan
Figures
Figure 2.1 Percentage comparison of agriculture landholding in 2013
Figure 2.2 Comparison of smallholders between Java and other islands 2013
Figure 2.3 The Percentages Landholding Sizes Changes in Java
Figure 2.4 Agriculture land in Indonesia 1961-2013
Figure 4.1 Tending food crops for a nearby urban market
Figure 4.2 Teak planted on degraded upland
Figure 4.3 Women gather wood on former village land , which has been developed as a Chinese-owned cement factory
Figure 4.4 Students of Laos’ Northern Agriculture and Forestry College threshing rice
Figure 9.1 Proportion of land holdings wholly owned by size of farm between years 1963 and 2013
Figure 9.2 Number of holding for five main crops 2013
Figure 9.3 Planted area of five main crops 2013
Figure 9.4 Farm value of five main crops gained by farmers 2013
Figure 9.5 Value of the five main crops in baht per rai calculated from harvested area 2013
Tables
Table 2.1 Public funding transfer to village in medium term (IDR trillions, unless otherwise indicated)
Table 3.1 Working hours of the rice smallholder
Table 3.2 Composition of income according to area of paddy eld
Table 4.1 Comparison of 1998/99 and 2010/11 Agricultural Census Results
Table 4.2 Number of farm households by province, 1998/99 and 2010/11
Table 4.3 Rice area, yield, and output in Laos by season and region, 2015
Table 5.1 Planted areas of main crops in Malaysia according to types of holding 2006-2012
Table 5.2 Number and size of smallholder’s land parcels, 2002 (hectares)
Table 5.3 Smallholders development programme of RISDA/BRI 1952-2010
Table 5.4 Types of subsidy schemes for rice cultivation
Table 6.1 Acreage and value of top seven major crops in the Philippines (‘000 hectares; PhP millions)
Table 6.2 Value of animal production and seaweeds (PhP millions)
Table 6.3 Trade in agriculture, fisheries, and aquaculture (USD millions)
Table 6.4 Tenure security in Lantapan
Table 6.5 Evolution of household types, East Laguna Village
Table 6.6 Growing seaweed in Guimaras province
Table 7.1 Manpower data by farm employee type from 1970 to 2004
Table 7.2 Singapore’s food production in 1982 and 2017
Table 8.1 Number of smallholders in Taiwan
Table 9.1 Definitions of the smallholder
Table 9.2 Number and area of agricultural landholdings by region, 2013 (NSO)
Table 9.3 Number of holdings reporting owned land, area of owned land, and type of land document and region, 2013
Table 9.4 Number of holdings by land tenure and total area of holding, 2013
Table 9.5 Population size and number of farmers in 1993, 2003, and 2013
Table 9.6 Number of smallholder household members by sex and age group from 1993-2013
Table 9.7 Area of holding by land use (2003-2013)
Table 10.1 Agricultural land as of 31 December 2015 (hectares)
Table 10.2 Agricultural, forestry, and fishery households in 2011 and 2016
Table 10.3 Average land area per person in rural northern Vietnam before and after land reform (m2/person)
Table 10.4 Agricultural yield and food per person from 1976 to 1980

Citation preview

TRANSFORMING ASIA

Edited by Eric C. Thompson, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen

Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective

Amsterdam Univ ersi ty Press

Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective

A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Transforming Asia Asia is often viewed through a fog of superlatives: the most populous countries, lowest fertility rates, fastest growing economies, greatest number of billionaires, most avid consumers, and greatest threat to the world’s environment. This recounting of superlatives obscures Asia’s sheer diversity, uneven experience, and mixed inheritance. Amsterdam University Press’s Transforming Asia series publishes books that explore, describe, interpret, understand and, where appropriate, problematize and critique contemporary processes of transformation and their outcomes. The core aim of the series is to finesse ‘Asia’, both as a geographical category and to ask what Asia’s ‘rise’ means globally and regionally, from conceptual models to policy lessons. Series Editor Jonathan Rigg, University of Bristol Editorial Board Jonathan Rigg, University of Bristol Colin McFarlane, Durham University Dilip Menon, University of the Witwatersrand Soo Yeon Kim, National University of Singapore Katherine Brickell, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway Itty Abraham, National University of Singapore

A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective

Edited by Eric Thompson, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen

Amsterdam University Press A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Cover Illustration: Farmer ploughing his land in northern Laos Source: Jonathan Rigg Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout 978 94 6298 817 0 isbn e-isbn 978 90 4854 020 4 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789462988170 nur 740 © Eric Thompson, Jonathan Rigg & Jamie Gillen / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss



Table of Contents

Preface

9

Introduction: Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective

13

1 Cambodia: Political Strife and Problematic Land Tenure

39

Eric C. Thompson, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen

Chivoin Peou and Sokphea Young

2 Indonesia: Whither Involution, Demographics, and Development? 57 Holi Bina Wijaya

3 Japan: Government Interventions and Part-time Family Farming Gen Shoji, Kunimitsu Yoshida, and Satoshi Yokoyama

81

4 Laos: Responding to Pressures and Opportunities

109

5 Malaysia: The State of/in Village Agriculture

145

6 The Philippines: Fragmented Agriculture, Aquaculture, and Vulnerable Livelihoods

181

7 Singapore: Making Space for Farming

213

8 Taiwan: Toward the Revitalization of Smallholder Agriculture

239

9 Thailand: The Political Economy of Post-Peasant Agriculture

271

10 Vietnam: From Socialist Transformation to Reform

307

Index

345

Outhai Soukkhy and Robert Cole

Ibrahim Ngah and Khairul Hisyam Kamarudin

Edo Andriesse

Sakunika Wewalaarachchi and Eric C. Thompson

Po-Yi Hung

Tubtim Tubtim

Nguyen Tuan Anh

A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

List of Maps, Figures and Tables Maps Map 1.1 Map 6.1 Map 6.2 Map 8.1 Figures Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2 Figure 2.3 Figure 2.4 Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Figure 4.4

Areas of rice cultivation in Cambodia Source: International Rice Research Institute, 2016 Regional Distribution of Number and Average Size of Landholdings Source: Map by author, based on information from PSA, 2015a Regional distribution of four important crops: palay (rice), corn, banana, and coconut Source: Map by author, based on information from PSA, 2015b Distribution of Farmland in Taiwan Source: National Land Resource Conservation Society, 2015

43 189

190 246

Percentage comparison of agriculture landholding in 2013 61 Source: Calculation from BPS – Statistics Indonesia, 2013 Comparison of smallholders between Java and other islands 2013 62 Source: Calculation from BPS – Statistics Indonesia, 2013 The Percentages Landholding Sizes Changes in Java 63 Source: Calculation from Booth, 1989; BPS – Statistics Indonesia, 2013 Agriculture land in Indonesia 1961-2013 64 Source: Calculation from FAO, 2016 Tending food crops for a nearby urban market 110 Source: Photo, Rob Cole Teak planted on degraded upland 116 Source: Photo, Jonathan Rigg Women gather wood on former village land , which has been developed as a Chinese-owned cement factory 124 Source: Photo, Rob Cole Students of Laos’ Northern Agriculture and Forestry College threshing rice 129 Source: Photo, Outhai Soukkhy A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Figure 9.1 Figure 9.2 Figure 9.3 Figure 9.4 Figure 9.5 Tables Table 2.1 Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3 Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3 Table 5.4 Table 6.1 Table 6.2 Table 6.3

Proportion of land holdings wholly owned by size of farm between years 1963 and 2013 Source: Created by author from the National Statistical Office (Thailand) website, http://www.nso.go.th/ sites/2014en Number of holding for five main crops 2013 Source: Created by author from the National Statistical Office (Thailand) website, http://www.nso.go.th/ sites/2014en Planted area of five main crops 2013 Source: Created by author from the National Statistical Office (Thailand) website, http://www.nso.go.th/ sites/2014en Farm value of five main crops gained by farmers 2013 Source: Created by author, based on Office of Agricultural Economics (2016) Value of the five main crops in baht per rai calculated from harvested area 2013 Source: Created by author, based Office of Agricultural Economics (2016) Public Funding Transfer to Village in Medium Term Working hours of the rice smallholder Composition of income according to area of paddy field Comparison of 1998/99 and 2010/11 Agricultural Census Results Number of farm households by province, 1998/99 and 2010/11 Rice area, yield, and output in Laos by season and region, 2015 Planted areas of main crops in Malaysia according to types of holding 2006-2012 Number and size of Smallholder’s Land Parcel, 2002 Smallholders Development Programme of RISDA/ BRI 1952-2010 Types of Subsidy Schemes for Rice Cultivation Acreage and Value of Major Crops in the Philippines Value of animal production and seaweeds Trade in agriculture, fisheries, and aquaculture A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

278

287

287

287

288

75 88 99 113 119 120 151 153 161 167 188 191 192

Table 6.4 Table 6.5 Table 6.6 Table 7.1 Table 7.2 Table 8.1 Table 9.1 Table 9.2 Table 9.3 Table 9.4 Table 9.5 Table 9.6 Table 9.7 Table 10.1 Table 10.2 Table 10.3 Table 10.4

Tenure security in Lantapan Evolution of household types, East Laguna Village Growing seaweeds in Guimaras province Manpower data by farm employee type from 1970 to 2004 Singapore’s Food Production in 1982 and 2017 Number of Smallholders in Taiwan Definitions of the smallholder Number and area of agricultural landholdings by region, 2013 (NSO) Number of holdings reporting owned land, area of owned land, and type of land document and region, 2013 Number of holdings by land tenure and total area of holding, 2013 Population size and number of farmers in 1993, 2003, and 2013 Number of smallholder household members by sex and age group from 1993-2013 Area of holding by land use (2003-2013) Agricultural land as of 31 December 2015 Agricultural, forestry, and fishery households in 2011 and 2016 Average land area per person in rural northern Vietnam before and after land reform Agricultural yield and food per person from 1976 to 1980

A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

196 197 202 218 227 244 274 277 279 280 282 283 286 315 316 322 328

Preface This book owes its origins to conversations at a small roti prata-cum-coffee shop in Singapore, where two of the editors (Rigg and Thompson) discussed ways in which we could extend our prior research endeavours in rural Southeast Asia. There we conceived a project in which we would leverage the resources afforded us by the National University of Singapore and Singapore’s Ministry of Education to draw on the expertise of colleagues across East and Southeast Asia. We were fortunate to have Jamie Gillen join early in the conceptualization period of the project as well. Our goal has been to inspire comparative analysis of the conditions that have led smallholder agriculture to change and transform, but also to persist, over the past century. This has been an era in which Asian societies have shifted from overwhelmingly rural and agrarian to urban and industrial. A key question for us has been: why is it that small-scale or smallholder agriculture appears to have persisted in Asia to a greater degree than is apparent in places such as the Americas or Europe, even while much of Asia has become as affluent and urbanized as those other regions of the world? All three of us are grounded in traditions of primarily qualitative, ethnographic research in anthropology and human geography. Such research allows, at its best, for nuanced insights into the lives and experience of peoples and places. But it is also constrained in its comparative capacity, particularly when carried out by single researchers or small teams examining singular sites. In this project, we have sought to draw on a larger team of experienced researchers, whose expertise crosses ten countries in Southeast and East Asia. Indeed, we feel this is a particularly novel component of the project: our collaborations involve academics and researchers from across the countries in our study. The current volume is the first, comparative product of this project. Smallholders in Asia examines the national-level histories and policies that have shaped the fate of small-scale agriculturalists. The contributors to this book, along with a large team of research assistants, provide here a broad-brush background, explaining the situation of small-scale agriculturalists in each of the ten countries covered in these pages. Our findings have

Thompson, Eric, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen (eds), Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789462988170/pref A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

10 

ERIC C. THOMPSON, JONATHAN RIGG, AND JAMIE GILLEN

been developed over a number of workshops held in Singapore. The project, which was officially launched in October 2015, began with a conference in January 2016, followed by a second in January 2017. These gatherings provided the opportunity to reflect on preliminary, national-level findings in a comparative perspective. This book presents the findings of that first phase of the project. Subsequent publications, some now appearing in journals, will present findings from the second phase of the project, in which our research teams conducted on-the-ground fieldwork in rural sites across the countries covered in the project. Considerable discussion went into determining which countries we could reasonably cover within the framework of this project. Funding as well as logistics constrained our ability to cover “Asia” in a comprehensive fashion. Our work focuses on East and Southeast, but not South, Central, or West Asia. And even within East and Southeast Asia, we are not able to comprehensively cover all nations – from the largest, such as China to the smallest such as Brunei. Moreover, many if not all of the countries discussed here are large and complex, so we cannot cover and discuss everything to do with small-scale agriculture in every country. We have, however, sought to include a selection of countries that represent the wide diversity of Asia. The chapters of this volume cover the histories and policies of nations from relatively small Singapore to vast and complex Indonesia, and from early modernizing and urbanizing nations such as Japan to those that remain primarily agrarian such as the Lao PDR – to name just two of the many dimensions of Asia’s complexity. While we do not claim the contents of this volume to be comprehensive, we hope and expect that experts and others interested in agrarian transitions and smallholder agriculture will find value in the broad comparative chapters and framework employed here. The chapters provide insights into the key forces that have sustained and changed small-scale agriculture in the various places and times across the region. As readers will see, we find that there is not one singular answer to why small-scale agriculture has persisted in Asia, nor a singular path through which it has transformed. At the same time, it is no pure accident of geography that this singular fact stays generally true across so many different places. It has been a great pleasure to work with the many colleagues and contributors to this book and the project. We have learned a great deal in the process. The opportunity to collaborate with these colleagues from across Asia would not have been possible without the substantial funding provided by Singapore’s Ministry of Education (MOE2015-T2-1-014) and the National University of Singapore (Grant R-111-000-147-112 and an earlier pilot Grant A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

11

Preface

R-111-000-143-112). In addition to the contributors to this volume, a small army of research assistants and colleagues have been indispensable to the completion of this book and the broader work of the project: in Cambodia, Rosa Yi, Socheata Vinh, Sokkea Hoy, and Sophannak Chhorn; in Indonesia, M. Indra Hadi Wijaya, Herlina Kurniawati, Surya Tri Esti Wira Hutama, and Putri Prasetyan; in Japan Seishiro Sakita; in Laos, Nou Yang, and Dalaphet Soukkhy; in Malaysia, Mohamad Fadhli Rashid, Noor Aimran Samsudin, Nur Zainol Arifin Norizan, and Mohamad Hanif Hamsah; in the Philippines, Stephanie Grace Dela Cruz and Zack Lee; in Singapore, Hanan Alsagoff and Koh Ren Jie; in Thailand, Soimart Rungmanee and Monchai Phongsiri; and in Vietnam, Nghiem Thi Thuy, Vo Thi Cam Ly, Nguyen Thi Minh Thuy, Vu Yen Ha, Nguyen Thi Xuan, and Dang Thuy Linh. We are indebted to Philip Hirsch and Andrew Walker, who attended one or more of our project workshops and provided valuable feedback on the works in progress. Several doctoral candidates at the National University of Singapore have been involved with and contributed to the development of this project in conjunction with their own PhD projects, including Jessica Clendenning, Rob Cole, Do Quy Duong, Veronica Gregorio, and Carlo Gutierrez. The editors also want to give special thanks to Sakunika Wewalaarichchi, who in addition to co-authoring the chapter on Singapore was a research assistant on the project since its beginning and without whose consistent diligence the project could not have succeeded. Eric C. Thompson, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen Singapore & Bristol February 2019

A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss



Introduction: Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective Eric C. Thompson, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen

Asia’s trope is one of modernization. Economic growth and structural change are transforming the region, with implications for the balance of global production and trade. In light of this, it is easy to forget that the most numerous economic and social unit across Asia is the “smallholder” or small-scale agriculturalist. Globally there are estimated to be 570 million such rural producers, and of these some three-quarters or 420 million are to be found in Asia (Hazell et al. 2010; Lowder et al. 2014, 2016; Fan and Kang-Chan 2005:135; Samberg et al. 2016). The expectation from the early twentieth century onward, not least on the part of agricultural economists, was that small-scale agriculture would rapidly give way to land consolidation and large-scale farming, with a shift of populations into the urban and industrial sectors (Banaji 1990; Birner and Resnick 2010; Kautsky 1988). Engel’s Law (Bezemer and Hazell 2006: 2) and the “natural” process of the farm-size transition (Hazell and Rahman, 2014: 3) predicted as much. More than a century on, while this has largely happened in places like Europe and North America – the historical experience of which underpinned such assumptions – smallholder and small-scale agriculture have apparently persisted in other places, and not least in Asia (Drahmoune 2013; Rigg et al. 2016). Village-based and family farming continue to be the image of farming in Asia, often shored up by an enduring stereotype of the Asian countryside as a haven of peace and a redoubt of tradition. Realities on the ground, of course, are far more complex. On the one hand, preindustrial, subsistence-oriented “peasant” agriculture is by and large a thing of the past (Elson 1997), and in any case was likely never as peaceful, moral or egalitarian as accounts often present (see Rigg 2019). At the same time, there are many places where small-scale and smallholder agriculture continues to predominate, apparently viable even when crowded out or marginalized by consolidated plantation-type agricultural ventures.

Thompson, Eric, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen (eds), Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789462988170/intro A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

14 

Eric C. Thompson, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen

This book takes stock of the situation of small-scale and smallholder agriculture across East and Southeast Asia. It takes as its geographical “f ield”, ten countries: Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. These countries are, self-evidently, a varied group ranging from low to high-income, from putatively communist to democratizing, and from land-short to landabundant. The number of smallholders in each country also varies from a handful in the city state of Singapore to tens of millions in Indonesia. Table 1.1 sets out, in aggregate terms, some defining characteristics of these ten countries. The table emphasizes that the smallholder exists in very different national Asian contexts. Where small-scale agriculture and large rural populations persist, such persistence is often cast as being connected to rural poverty, so that the concentration of poverty in the countryside is associated with the persistence of the smallholder. Some scholars (Fan and Chan-Kang 2005; Otsuka 2012, 2013, Otsuka et al. 2016), policymakers (Government of Malaysia 2010), and development advisors (World Bank 2007) have suggested that if only more smallholders could be encouraged to “exit” their smallholdings and engage with more remunerative and productive endeavours in urban areas and non-farm sectors, then farms could be amalgamated into larger and tacitly more efficient units of production, and rural poverty reduced. Consolidated and corporatized landholdings are often expected to be more economically efficient and productive. Even where poverty is not a central issue, rural life itself is often taken to be inherently “backwards” and conceptualized in terms of “lack” – with the urbanization and deagrarianization of society assumed to be progressive, cosmopolitan, and in other ways desirable (Gillen 2016; Nguyen et al. 2012; Thompson 2007). In general, the presence of poverty and lack of prosperity have more often than not been taken as inherent characteristics of rural agrarian society (see Hirsch 2012). And the gulf between the agrarian rural and industrial urban societies, both between and within nations, is regularly taken to be vast. And yet, small-scale agriculture has persisted across much of Asia into our current century. This book takes stock of the persistence as well as the transformation of agrarian smallholders in Asia. Our approach to compiling this volume has been to collaborate across the area and country fields of expertise of the contributors. All of the contributors to the volume have long-standing involvement in research on rural and agrarian issues in their respective countries and in many cases comparatively as well. While our disciplinary backgrounds range across several social-science disciplines – especially A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Introduction: Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective

15

geography, anthropology, and sociology, in this endeavour we seek to provide a comparative national-level overview of the status and processes of transformation and persistence for smallholders across Asia. We have drawn on locally available government, non-governmental data, published works and a variety of “grey literature” to present an overview of the situation of smallholders in each country, primarily over the past century. In addition, the research teams that have joined together to produce this volume are conducting specific case studies at multiple field sites in each country, and where applicable insights are drawn from this ongoing research as well. In order to assure comparability across the contributions, each chapter is organized around a parallel set of topics and headings – how smallholders are defined in each case (i.e. what is a smallholder?), the situation of smallholders today, processes of transformation and persistence, issues facing smallholders, and the future of smallholders. There are a number of trenchant questions to consider when it comes to unpicking the “problem” of the smallholder (Rigg et al. 2016). The first is a matter of definition. What is a “smallholder”? How is small-scale farming defined both in varied social and cultural contexts and within varied policy regimes? How do societies and states conceptualize and categorize the landholdings and people involved in small-scale agriculture? What are the implications of these definitions and categories? From the outset of this project, we have found that while “the smallholder” may be apparent across national landscapes, defining who and what we mean by “smallholders” or “small-scale farmers” yields neither simple nor singular answers (Calcaterra 2013; Samberg et al. 2018). At best, we are able to see how smallholders are defined across different national contexts and the points at which such definitions do and do not intersect. The second set of questions in this volume explore in greater depth the status of smallholder and small-scale agriculturalists across Asia. Notwithstanding the many tensions and contradictions that have accompanied Asia’s rapid economic growth, there is little doubt that rural populations have become markedly better off in material terms. Rural poverty may remain higher than urban poverty but, even so, rural living conditions have improved significantly for most people, in most countries (Warr 2015). We also know, however, that on paper rural landholdings are often insufficient to meet household needs. How have smallholders, then, managed to improve their material living conditions on the basis of holdings which are sub-livelihood in extent? How is small-scale agriculture organized, both economically and socially? What are the relationships between rural and urban economic endeavours? A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

16 

Eric C. Thompson, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen

Our third set of questions concern the historical processes, particularly over the past century and in recent decades, through which smallholders have persisted and transformed in different national contexts. What are the ways in which smallholders, delineated according to size of holding (whatever that size may be), have endured against a backdrop of rapid economic growth and structural change? The experience of the countries of the global north is that as countries “modernize” the so-called “farm-size transition” takes hold. The number of farms declines and their size increases. This has not happened in Asia. Indeed, often the reverse appears to be occurring: the number of farms is increasing, and their size is falling (Hazell and Rahman 2014: 3). What explains this counter-trend to the experience elsewhere, what does it mean for theorizations of agrarian transition, and will it continue? We then turn, fourth, both here and in each of the subsequent chapters, to issues facing small-scale agriculturalists today. In some cases, these have to do with demographics – of an excessively old or young population – or with labour and land shortages or surpluses. In most places, issues have to do with the commodification of agriculture. Even a short foray into rural Asia demonstrates the enthusiasm and alacrity with which consumerism and commercial relations have been embraced. This commodification of life and living has not, for the most part in most places, extinguished subsistence production. While farming for cash is important, many smallholders also continue to follow subsistence (or semi-subsistence) modes of own-account production. Smallholders have not become, in the main, solely profit-oriented entrepreneurs; farming has not neatly made the transition from a way of life, to a business (cf. Fan et al. 2013). How is it – and why is it – that populations which are commercially minded in so many other aspects of their lives, still adhere to an approach to farming which seems to be rooted in the past, sometimes seemingly immune to the laws of commodity production? Yet another common issue is the puzzle of how village absence generates – or permits – village presence. There is widespread concern that villages are being “hollowed out” socially, with large numbers of left-behind children and abandoned elderly (Thompson 2004, 2007). But it is because of some leaving their rural homes that others can stay. Absence and presence, it seems, are co-produced in the Asian countryside and “left-behind” and “abandoned” assume a degree of disconnection which may not be warranted. Finally, we conclude our introductory overview and each individual chapter by addressing the future prospects of smallholder and small-scale agriculture in Asia. Based on the histories and present status of smallholders, what might we predict about the status of smallholders over the coming A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Introduction: Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective

17

century – and again, is this something we might expect to be similar or widely varied across different national contexts? All of the preceding queries are high-level questions and puzzles, and their resolution will be different across localities and countries – and this is made clear in the chapters that follow. Nonetheless, the fact that at some level they have some resonance across all countries in the Asian region is, itself, a surprise and worthy of comparative consideration.

What Is a Smallholder in Asia? From the outset of the current project, we have struggled to clarify and delineate the object of our interest; and to do so without precluding or obscuring the diversity of situations found among Asian nations. Farming across Asia is often imagined through a prototypical idea of small family farms or of small-scale, community-based village agriculture. Studies of rural society in Asia, at least through much of the twentieth century, centred on understanding “peasant” agriculture (e.g. the debate on the moral versus the rational peasant between James Scott [1976] and Samuel Popkin [1979]). Throughout the project of which this book is a product, we have been challenged by the problem that there is no good, straightforward term to adequately describe the sort of farming and associated social and economic relationships we are seeking to study. The term “smallholder” draws attention to the amount of land owned or cultivated by the farmers in question. An alternative, but less commonly used term, might be small-scale farmers and small-scale farming (cf. Lowder et al. 2016). As the chapters of this book demonstrate, small-scale farming remains a vital part of the agricultural sector everywhere in Asia, despite its great diversity. Across Asia, there are important local cultural notions and terms for small-scale agriculture. In Thailand the popular term for farmer chaao-rai chaao-naa (ชาวไร่ ชาวนา) is often used as a form of self-identification, even by some long-term migrants to urban Bangkok. In Laos, a variety of local terms for small-scale farmers make distinctions between lowland and highland cultivation. The Chinese phrase “xiaonong” (small farmer) in Taiwan has connotations not only of farming but also of lower education. Similarly, in Malaysia, the common term “orang kampung” (village person) has come to imply a degree of backwardness (Thompson 2013). Moreover, its use to cover agricultural work (kerja kampung, lit. village work) implies a relationship between rural residence and agricultural work that is increasingly tenuous (Thompson 2004, 2007). These and other cultural notions and terms have A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

18 

Eric C. Thompson, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen

important effects on how small-scale agriculture is understood in local and national contexts. In many cases, these can obscure social and economic processes in agriculture, particularly as they change over time. In this book, we have focused more on these – the social and economic conditions of small-scale agriculture – rather than the varied local, cultural notions of agriculture held in Asian societies. Nonetheless, the act of labelling is far from innocent and the words that describe small-scale farming in different national contexts carry with them a weight of signification. The two main elements of the sorts of agricultural conditions discussed in this book are, first, the size and scale of farming practices; and second, the socio-economic organization of land tenure and cultivation. The size of landholdings, for individuals and families, is shaped by a combination of “bottom-up” activities of farmers themselves and “top-down” policies implemented by governments. The organization of farming is even more diverse, to the point that cross-national trends can only be observed at a most general level, with most important elements being very specific to particular countries or particular locales within countries. In the academic and policy literature on smallholder agriculture, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) criteria of 2 hectares (ha) or less is commonly used and cited (e.g. Fan et al. 2013). (fn: 1 hectare = 10,0002 meters [100m x 100m area]) But the difficulty of assigning any simple criterion to what counts as “small” is widely acknowledged (e.g. Samberg et al. 2016). Across the ten national case studies here, we find a wide variety of legal definitions of smallholder farming. Most of these tend to limit the smallholding, for policy purposes, to something less than about 3 hectares. The most expansive definition of “smallholdings” we have come across in any country is that found in the Malaysian Rubber Industry Smallholders Development Authority (RISDA) Act of 1972, which defines a “smallholder” as any lawful occupier or owner of less than 100 acres (40.5 ha). In effect, the RISDA Act includes as smallholders all but larger, corporate agricultural enterprises and applies to rubber cultivation, a purely commercial crop. Other cases where official definitions of smallholding within government policy sometimes go beyond 3 hectares include Japan, the Philippines, and Thailand. In Japan, government and policy documents set “smallholder” limits at 10 hectares for the Hokkaido region (which has traditionally had larger, expansive farms as compared to the rest of the country) and 3 hectares for all areas outside Hokkaido. In the Philippines, the Carabao (Water Buffalo) Act of 1992 and the Rubber Research Institute Act of 2010 follow a maximal limit of 5 hectares. In Thailand, the Office of the National A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Introduction: Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective

19

Economic and Social Advisory Council (ONESAC) defines smallholders as those cultivating not more than 50 rai (8 ha) of field crops or 15 rai (2.4 ha) of fruit orchards. Elsewhere, legal, policy-driven definitions of smallholders generally range between 1 and 3 hectares. In Cambodia, where international NGO activity is extensive, the United Nations FAO definition of smallholders as owning and cultivating less than 2 hectares operates alongside that of the AgriFood Consulting International (ACI) of under 3 hectares and the World Bank, which identifies three categories of smallholder: small (1 ha or less), medium (1 ha to 3 ha), and large (3 ha to 4 ha). Vietnamese government policies set a limit of smallholdings to 3 hectares in the Mekong Delta and 2 hectares elsewhere in the country. Similarly in Laos, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry defines smallholders as those owning 2 hectares or less. The lowest maximal limit for defining “smallholders” we have found is that of the Indonesian government’s statistics bureau (Badan Pusat Statistik or BPS), which defines smallholders as those owning 0.5 hectare or less on Java, but 2 to 3 hectares outside Java. Indonesia’s 2013 Law of Farmers’ Empowerment and Protection, provides specific benefits to smallholders defined as owning less than 2 hectares, without respect to region. The contributors to this volume also note that in some countries or in certain instances of agrarian policymaking, “smallholders” go undefined, for instance in Singapore and Taiwan. Apart from the varying definitions in terms of size of holdings, another problem with the term “smallholder” itself is that it denotes landholding (ownership) as opposed to land use (cultivation). The owner-operator model implied by “smallholder agriculture” excludes or obfuscates a great deal of small-scale agriculture. In Indonesia and elsewhere, for example, many small-scale farmers are landless sharecroppers who work on land owned by others. In other cases, agriculture and land tenure have been organized collectively. Wet-rice paddy cultivation systems often rely on collective maintenance of irrigation works. Many of Asia’s hundreds of diverse ethnic groups have traditional systems of organizing collective agriculture, ranging from sharing labour to communally held land. Focus on the land (holdings) also may draw attention away from rather more vital issues of how farming is socially and economically organized (Cramb and Newby 2015). These may be changing even when farm size remains the same. Individual chapters in this book describe important configurations of small-scale farming across various national contexts. For example, in post-War Japan, rapid economic growth and industrialization led to the development of a “san-chan” system in which farming activities A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

20 

Eric C. Thompson, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen

were taken over by wives and elder parents (the three “chans”), while male heads-of-household took up off-farm employment. In Thailand, extended family-farming households have become the norm, relying on remittances from urban employment of family members and occasional, seasonal labour of migrant returnees. Malaysian, Singaporean, and more recently Thai smallholders have increasingly turned to migrant foreign labour to make up for local labour shortages. Since the 1980s, Vietnam and Cambodia have undergone varying degrees of de-collectivization. Even though the general trend of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century has been toward individual land ownership, in almost all national and local contexts, smallholders rely on various sorts of agricultural cooperatives for everything from planting and harvesting to marketing. The ten national case studies in this book demonstrate that smallholders remain a vital part of agriculture and, even more so, rural society in Asia. Yet beyond this it is also evident that formal, policy-defined and informal, socially and economically organized aspects of such smallscale agriculture are extremely varied, not only from country to country but also within countries. Understanding the dynamics of small-scale agriculture must largely be done on a case-by-case analytical basis, within and between national contexts. There is no simple or even useful basis on which to singularly define the “Asian smallholder” or small-scale farmer. The FAO criteria of 2 hectares or less is at best a rough metric providing a crude cross-national estimation of the size of different country’s smallholder sector (cf. Samberg et al. 2016). It provides a starting point, but certainly not an end point, for examining Asia’s small-farm sector. In terms of smallholder organization and processes of transformation and persistence, there are some general trends that can be observed and compared across countries; but only with caution and often more qualitatively than quantitatively. That said, from a normative, prescriptive and policy setting point-of-view, this great diversity might usefully be approached comparatively as a vast laboratory of experiments in how small-scale farming is organized and undertaken, and how the more successful variants might be fostered.

Smallholders in Asia Today As alluded to in the previous section, a prevailing theme in this collection is the sheer heterogeneity of the smallholder in Asia. We mean this in three ways. In the first place, smallholders are heterogeneous in their A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Introduction: Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective

21

profile. Along with the figure of ageing parents presiding over their land in Japan and Thailand, we also find younger smallholders, as in the case of the “re-ruralization” phenomenon occurring in Taiwan. The smallholder is also heterogeneous in his or her activities. A smallholder’s traditional way of life has moved past singular cultivation of a small rice paddy to a bevy of on-farm and off-farm activities. In the Philippines, for example, Andriesse notes the “diversified, pluri-active nature of many households” and in Laos smallholders have different “logics” depending on the lands they own and have access to (which are not always the same). The authors of the chapters imply that it is more important to think of the relationship among varied smallholder activities than to consider farm work in isolation. Lastly, Asian smallholders face a heterogeneity of challenges, some of which are longstanding and others unique to national contexts or shifting political winds. The “problems” of the ageing smallholder and market integration struggles are well-known and occupy prominent positions in the stories in this collection (cf. Montague and Kealy 2000). On the other hand, some issues have emerged rather more recently and singularly, such as the difficulties surrounding contract farming in Cambodia. A fundamental story of the smallholder in Asia today is one of progressive and deepening commercialization (Fan et al. 2013; Dawe et al. 2014). Technologies ranging from machinery to chemical inputs are components of production in most places, and dependencies on agribusiness, various commercial actors and intermediaries and, more widely, “markets” characterize the sector. The evidence in the book shows that subsistence farming can continue in lockstep with (not in opposition to) commercial farming; the two should be seen as co-dependent aspects of contemporary smallholder lives in Asia. Tubtim describes a range of land use and land ownership valuations in Thailand, complicating the distinctions between public and private land. For example, those smallholders in northern Thailand holding a “public-land use pass” are in the precarious position of cultivating public land and thus in danger of losing their use rights if the government reclaims land for conservation or sale (or both). In northern Vietnam, contract farming with large agribusiness corporations is largely perceived as a positive development for smallholders because the company provides all of the livestock, infrastructure, materials, feed, medicine, and logistical support and the smallholder provides the land and everyday upkeep. What we find when looking into the details of the many national development policies in our case study countries is that the logics of “improvement” and “development” run closer to market growth aspirations than any comprehensive advancement plans for the smallholder. Indeed, market A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

22 

Eric C. Thompson, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen

growth policies pose problems for an ageing smallholder workforce like that in Japan, although the entire Asian region may see a drop in productivity as the smallholder ages (see Li and Sicular 2013). In Taiwan, however, ageing smallholders are understood to hold “authentic” traditional knowledge that is to be tapped by younger farmers in a calculated manner to “integrate their idealist visions of agriculture with their parallel pursuit of stronger market connections”. This recalibration of the smallholder market brings established agricultural knowledge into conversation with present-day market complexities, an intriguing idea signalling the interplay between persistence and transformation that marks this volume. The various legal, policy-based definitions of smallholdings and smallholders in some instances reflect historical, organic conditions under which farmers came to develop landholdings of particular sizes. There was a certain inevitability to smallholdings, and particularly wet-rice-based smallholdings, being around 2 hectares in extent: peasant production relied on household labour and, in the absence of mechanization, anything more was almost impossible to farm. In other instances, there are clear indications that policy definitions themselves have influenced the common sizes of holdings in various countries. With regard to historical circumstances for instance, much of Malaysian “kampung” (village) agriculture dates to a history of peasant pioneer farmers clearing forest and staking out claims along rivers and later roads which tended, again, to be about one or two hectares in size. In many other instances, we find cases where government orchestrated land reform efforts have played a major role in defining – and particularly in limiting – the size of smallholdings across different countries. In Japan, land reform initiatives of the American post-War authorities sought to break up large landholdings and redistribute them to previously landless or land-poor farmers. In so doing, they set a limit of redistribution at no more than 3 hectares, which in part accounts for there being few farms of greater than 3 hectares (outside Hokkaido). A similar 3-hectare limit was set in the Philippines during post-1987 EDSA Revolution land reforms. Under resettlement schemes in Indonesia (transmigrasi) and Malaysia (FELDA), farmers or families were given lots of 2 to 4 hectares. In these and other cases, the current configuration and size of many smallholdings can be traced to such government interventions. While smallholders almost everywhere in Asia today – apart from the most remote upland or island locales – are integrated into market economies, there remains in most places an association with land that maintains at least a sensibility of subsistence agriculture. That is to say, a sense that at the very least, under conditions of economic downturn or individual A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Introduction: Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective

23

family tragedies, agrarian smallholders can return to the land as a source of minimal economic maintenance and subsistence. But in general, almost everywhere, small-scale agriculture and agrarian smallholders operate in conjunction with the urban and industrial economy. In most cases, this involves family and extended kin relationships. In Thailand, for example, the “extended family household” is common, where adult children work in urban areas, remit money to parents and occasionally return home to assist with harvests and other agricultural activities. In Malaysia, it is common for men and sometimes women, to have industrial or urban-based jobs while also tending sporadically to orchards (kebun) with each form of activity supplementing the other to provide a living or family wage. All of these various arrangements exemplify the “pluri-active” nature of smallholder and small-scale farmer economies in Asia today, which more often than not involve a mix rather than separation of rural agrarian and urban endeavours. The ability to move strategically between rural and urban economies, either as individuals or as family- or kin-units, is one important factor in the persistence of smallholder and small-scale agriculture in Asia. At the same time, it is clearly a situation far different from the past, when Asian societies were overwhelmingly agrarian rather than urban, and “peasant” agriculture was more thoroughly subsistence rather than market oriented.

Processes of Transformation and Persistence The countries of East and Southeast Asia have undergone a variety of experiences over the past century, which have shaped the transformation and persistence of small-scale agriculture throughout these regions. Reading across these cases, we do not find one singular path that small-scale agriculture has taken. At the same time, a number of key dynamics influencing small-scale agriculture have surfaced in the national cases in this book. First, specific histories of colonialism, national-oriented development, war, and peace have shaped the history of agriculture in a variety of ways. Second, Asia has broadly, though unevenly, experienced urbanization and industrialization. To varying degrees, these societies have shifted away from a primary agrarian base. They have also experienced integration into transnational regional and global markets. Such economic changes have been paired with important demographic trends as well. But as much or more than any of these trends of the past century, politics and policies have played important roles in the extent to which smallholder agriculture has continued to be an important social and economic role in various countries. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

24 

Eric C. Thompson, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen

Both colonial and post-colonial national governments have taken it upon themselves to intervene in shaping practices of agriculture. Arguably, following Scott (2017), governing agriculture has been central to statecraft since the birth of the state itself (cf. Walker 2015). That said, with respect to small-scale and smallholder agriculture, states – certainly in the past century or two – have undertaken policies that vary widely in terms of consolidation and redistribution of land. Colonial governments, in general, pursued policies aimed at extracting natural resources for the benef it of the colonial metropole. In many colonial regimes, this involved large land concessions and signif icant land consolidation under a variety of plantation schemes – such as haciendas in the Philippines and estates in Malaysia. But even under colonial conditions, agricultural policies often formed in ways to protect or reinforce aspects of small-scale, smallholder farming. Dutch policy in Indonesia, for example, tended to favour operating through local feudal relations, maintaining a peasantry even while the world in general was modernizing. British authorities in Malaysia, similarly established a dual economic policy, which while promoting large-scale, cash-crop plantation “estate” agriculture utilizing foreign (mostly Indian) labour, also “protected” Malay smallholder agriculture as a source of subsistence and surplus food production. Spanish colonial authorities in the Philippines may have been the most thoroughly committed to land consolidation; but the complex geography of the archipelago meant that many smallholding and small-scale enterprises persisted into the American and national periods. Historically, collective or community-based organization of agriculture has been an important part of many farming systems, such as the bawon system for sharing labour in Java (Indonesia). But from the nineteenth century onward, community-based agriculture has given way to individualized land ownership and the commodification of land. Adoption of European and colonial legal systems, such as Torrens title land registration implemented in Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Laos have played a key role in this process. In Cambodia and Vietnam, collectivization of land was undertaken under Communist governments, but shifted back towards de facto individualization from the late 1980s onward. Individual land ownership and the commodification of land – making it property that can be bought and sold – provide a framework for the possibility of land consolidation. And there has been a significant amount of land consolidation in particular areas. Much of Malaysia, many outer islands of Indonesia and large areas of the Philippines are dominated by large-scale plantation agriculture, though usually with important pockets of small-scale agriculture A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Introduction: Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective

25

existing side-by-side the plantations. In the past couple of decades, land grabbing has been a notable phenomenon in Cambodia (Schoenberger and Beban 2018; Kent 2016), though it has not erased smallholdings in the country (Parsons, Lawreniuk, and Pilgrim 2014). But other forces have militated against large-scale agriculture becoming the norm in much of Asia. Many Asian cultures maintain an attachment to landholdings and are reluctant to sell off family land, even when it is not economically viable. In Malaysia, for example, while village land is commonly bought and sold, this is done more often than not through extended family networks, rather than to outsiders let alone corporate interests. In addition to cultural norms around maintaining agricultural land, the political position of small-scale farmers has been of particular significance to the fate of smallholder agriculture in specific countries. In the post-colonial period (including for countries like Japan and Thailand, which successfully avoided direct colonial rule), national governments have tended to see agrarian smallholders as a backbone to emergent national economies and important political constituencies. In Malaysia, with the establishment of democratic governance after independence, rural Malay agriculturalists became a site of contest between Malay-based political parties even though, from at least the 1970s, the government sought to draw Malays off the land and into the urban, industrial economy. Such mixed signals and conflicting impulses have been quite common in various national contexts. There are often cross-currents of national policy that seek to fundamentally reform the economy toward a more market- and profit-oriented one, especially and more universally since the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At the same time, governments from Japan to Indonesia have seen the importance of maintaining the social and economic viability of their rural populations. In Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, long periods of war and civil strife held these nations back from full participation in the economic development, industrialization and urbanization that happened through much of the rest of Asia in the mid- to late twentieth century. They have, however, been more rapidly developing in the past two or three decades. Along with urbanization and industrialization, the more affluent nations, such as Japan and Singapore have “passed through” the demographic transition to smaller families and low birth rates. One of the demographic surprises of Southeast and East Asia, however, is the degree to which even those countries that are less urbanized and industrialized have seen quite dramatic declines in fertility. Total fertility rates in Malaysia and Thailand are below replacement levels, while in Cambodia and A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

26 

Eric C. Thompson, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen

Indonesia they have fallen sharply from 5.9 and 4.4 in 1980 to 2.6 and 2.4 in 2015, respectively. The ageing of the farm labour force is a feature across the region, driven partly by these demographic trends but also by a generational shift from farm to non-farm work, as the young move out of agriculture. The result is that the average age of farmers in Japan and Taiwan is 70 and 62 years respectively, but it also exceeds 50 years of age in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. Farmers in countries which would seem on paper to face labour surpluses and land shortages, such as Thailand and Malaysia, sometimes struggle to source workers and resort either to employing migrant workers, or mechanizing or dis-intensifying production. A final key to the processes of transformation and persistence of smallscale agriculture in Asia, have been the varied policy regimes of national governments over the past century. While each of the chapters of this volume devotes some time to the effects of national agricultural policies on smallholder production, the chapters on Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Taiwan, Singapore, and the Philippines emphasize the intersections between national policies and smallholder lives over time. For Nguyen writing about Vietnam, the New Rural Development programme established by the Vietnamese government in 2010 has achieved much of its stated goals of land consolidation, poverty alleviation, skills training, and infrastructure improvements. In the Philippines the story differs: Andriesse describes the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) of 1988 as not “reaching its intended objectives” of alleviating rural poverty because of mismanagement, red tape, and population growth. In Singapore, Wewalaarachchi and Thompson show how state policies toward agricultural land and labour have contributed to a certain stigma attached to smallholder work. The authors trace agricultural policies in the 1980s to broader efforts to “modernize”, with “family farms (…) seen as backward impediments” to the state’s development plans. For those engaged in agricultural work, the Singapore state now supports smallholders by permitting the employment of inexpensive temporary foreign labour and pushes “edu-tourism” endeavours in communities to supplement on-farm work. Smallholders in Laos find their room to manoeuvre limited by policies that shape and sometimes control access to land and by the state’s active encouragement of foreign investment in the agricultural sector. Despite this, the number of smallholders is increasing in every area but Vientiane city, as households search for alternative working opportunities but continue to retain a foothold in rural areas. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Introduction: Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective

27

Issues Facing Asian Smallholders Land and labour are two of the key issues or constraints affecting the viability of ongoing small-scale farming across most of Asia. Land – whether in terms of use value, exchange value, or symbolic value – continues to be an important facet of smallholder lives, even as already smallholdings become smaller still. Growing numbers of farming households do not have access to sufficient land to meet their needs – holdings are therefore “sublivelihood” – driving the pluri-active nature of livelihoods noted earlier. Countries like Taiwan, Cambodia, and Laos have dramatic topographical range which lends them a variety of landholding possibilities and crops. In Malaysia the opposite has occurred: with agriculture driven by plantation monocropping, dominated by rubber and oil palm and with struggles centring on labour shortages. Declining farm size means that land use is changing as well. The region is famously marked by its rice paddy cultivation and this continues across the region. A few countries, such as Thailand and Vietnam, have developed a significant rice export economy. But for many others, rice farming is primarily for household consumption rather than for sale. Seasonal intercropping features in a few case study sites and upland areas are regularly cultivated with cash crops such as maize or cassava. Many Southeast Asian rural communities keep household “rice land” (farm land) separate from their residences, and household farmlands are sometimes fragmented too. People’s relationship to their land is also undergoing significant modification. What is called “spatial reorganization” in many of the chapters can be quite pronounced, as in the Laos case with forced resettlement of farmers, and it can be voluntary as in the case of Taiwanese young people returning to the countryside. With the exception of Singapore, in all of the countries examined it is the urban, and more particularly non-farm manufacturing, construction, and service jobs that lie within these areas, that are redrawing the rural in dramatic ways. High levels of mechanization are common across Asia because of the ageing workforce, labour shortages, and the availability of relatively low-cost agricultural machinery geared to small farms, which is sometimes termed micro-mechanization or scale-appropriate mechanization. The notion that the singular Asian smallholder works by hand and with oxen to cultivate land is broadly obsolete due to these developments. In Taiwan, Japan, and to a certain extent Singapore, there are active rural revitalization movements that are leading to a reclamation of the countryside for activities like local food movements. The fact that these three countries are the wealthiest and most “developed” among the ten A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

28 

Eric C. Thompson, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen

covered in this book is a contributory explanatory factor. In these highly industrialized and urbanized nations, newer generations experience a sense of loss vis-à-vis rural, agrarian pasts. Attempts to reclaim the perceived social benefits and social values of rural ways of life have been varyingly successful across these three affluent nations. At the same time, nearly everywhere, a pressing issue for smallholders is market viability (Hall 2004). We mean this in terms of the extent to which smallholders have commodified their crops and agricultural products for sale as well as their relationship to buyers and inputs. Additionally, their labour and outputs are affected by weather-related fluctuations, global market forces, and governmental interventions over which they largely have no control. In some of our case studies there is not a problem of labour shortage generally, but rather specific sorts of labour shortages within the family or with regard to physical ability, particularly with ageing farmers. In places like Vietnam and Thailand, smallholders who cannot rely on their kinship networks employ low-skill contract farmers on a seasonal or crop-specific basis. In Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, and elsewhere, even parts of Indonesia, some agricultural land lies fallow because there is not enough labour to cultivate it. In Eastern Indonesia it is said to be tidur, or “sleeping”. Themes like these run throughout the country chapters and the economic conditions of the smallholder in many cases can be characterized as uncertain and precarious. A substantive dimension of the economic uncertainty is a lack of communication between smallholders and other decision-makers who are involved in their livelihoods; there is also a general lack of understanding about who wields real power over their land and labour (Glassman 2006). In Cambodia, for example, the widespread availability of microfinance organizations offering “payday loans” often do much more harm than good because loan recipients have little understanding of the conditions of the loan or what they have to pay back. This problem often results in having to surrender agricultural property and farming resources to pay the loans back, quickening a cycle of poverty and indebtedness. Agricultural collectives do something to alleviate these issues by providing a political mouthpiece for smallholders, but many government officials and moneylenders live among smallholders and are members of the collectives themselves, which complicates communication channels. The most critical geographical issue facing smallholders in Asia today is the transforming relationship between the countryside and the city. An ageing workforce in rural Asia, improved technologies, more productive inputs, and higher-quality infrastructure have made it possible for people A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Introduction: Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective

29

to leave the countryside to work in industry, construction, and other labour activities and maintain their agricultural land. This is a pluri-active approach to keeping smallholdings viable; it is also a poorly understood dimension of the smallholder experience. Chapters throughout this book address the enhanced ability of smallholders to mobilize family members to leave their holdings for urban work while also maintaining a foothold on their family’s land. This is not to say that pluri-activity always results in a net positive for smallholders. For example, in some cases wages from this urban-based work keeps smallholdings viable while in other cases a lack of opportunities for industrial work nearby encourages smallholders to cultivate someone else’s land as seasonal or crop-based contract farmers. What is clear in the pages that follow is that smallholder land is here to stay, at least in the medium term and albeit in ways that differ from country to country and village to village. As a final point to this subsection, we can also see how aspirations for smallholders place a great deal of emphasis on wanting something better for their children, in terms of an improved quality of life, more financial capital, and (most importantly) a good education. Education is seen as a clear pathway to more options, including as a way out of the countryside and, perhaps paradoxically, to also be able to have the financial resources to hold on to family holdings. The future is a frequent topic in the chapters that follow because the issues that face smallholders today are not ones that smallholders wish for their children to have to grapple with down the road. There is a belief that education advances the capacity to aspire (Appadurai 2013), creates the conditions to innovate and be creative, and encourages risk-taking. Smallholders rationalize the preservation of their landholdings by explaining that they serve as a hedge for their offspring in case of failure and are also a ready-made form of capital, through mortgage or sale, to help pay for schooling, weddings and funerals, and motorbikes and other big ticket purchases.

The Future of Asian Smallholders The chapters in this book demonstrate that while smallholders, small-scale farmers, or family farmers, may be continuing, even prevailing, features of the Asian rural landscape, they are so having “followed” different paths of transformation and currently occupy different positions whether viewed in terms of livelihoods, politics, or economy. There is ample reason, then, to be cautious of mapping out any singular rural future for “the” Asian A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

30 

Eric C. Thompson, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen

smallholder. What the discussions do permit, however, is an opportunity to reflect on rural possibilities. We need to be careful to resist the temptation of taking the experiences of countries like Japan, Singapore and Taiwan as offering insights into other countries’ rural futures, but the country cases do provide an empirical sounding board to think about a range of rural futures for nations aspiring to greater affluence through urbanization and industrialization. Likewise, Cambodia, Laos, and other cases of “Later Developing Countries” (LDCs) highlight the ways in which everywhere smallholder agriculture is diminishingly own-account or subsistence farming and instead has become or is becoming thoroughly integrated with and subject to regional and global market forces. Cambodia is faced with the dual “problem” of low productivity and rising costs, set against a burgeoning of alternative activities in other sectors and spaces. With the advent of aggressive agribusiness practices, there are fears that small family farms might simply “evaporate”. However, based on the many national case studies in this book, it is far from certain that land consolidation and marginalization of small-scale farmers and farming is a necessary future for Cambodia or any other of the lower income countries of Asia. Small farmers in Indonesia face similar conditions to those in Cambodia, but the country demonstrates how state rural development policies offer prospects for village revitalization as substantial funds are channelled to village projects, providing the means to revivify community economies and create a space for smallholders to persist even while farm production and profitability are squeezed. Whether quite marked improvements in rural infrastructure will persuade villagers to remain in rural areas or entice them to leave is one of the questions that will be worked out in differentiated ways, over time. Certainly, urbanization and industrialization were key themes of social change in the twentieth century and they will likely remain dominant trends through the twenty-first century. Japan, famously, has the oldest farmers of all. Small, family farms have persisted against a backdrop of significant subsidy, both agricultural and social (pensions and other transfers and investments). The expectation is that rather than generational renewal, Japan will see generational replacement. A population of super-aged farmers will be replaced by an aged generation. This will see farming becoming an occupation structurally, and permanently, linked to workers entering agriculture after “retirement”. What might work against this rural future is if those “younger” generations close to retirement in other sectors of the economy are not inclined to enter farming; if this occurs, then the area of idle or unused land will likely expand and there might be opportunities – and pressure – to consolidate holdings. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Introduction: Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective

31

Laos’ rural future is, perhaps more than other countries in the region, in the hands of external forces, whether “natural” (e.g., climate change), regional (the influence of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai economic interests), or coming from the Lao state’s policy decisions. With regard to the challenge of climate change, adaptive capacity is said to be “weak”. At the same time Laos’ geographical position sandwiched between Thailand, Vietnam, and China will mean that its agrarian transition and, therefore, the future of smallholders and agriculture in general will be significantly contingent on developments in those countries. The balancing of own-account farming with commodity production, and rural interests with national development, will be a delicate one, and whether the voice and concerns of the rural population will be mainly ignored or significantly valued will be key. The Malaysian government is intent on modernizing the smallholder sector, preferably through land consolidation, but faces a smallholder population reluctant to permit this to happen; farms are cherished and retained, and transferred within families rather than sold. Some land is left idle and unworked. Broadly, the government has attempted consolidation without dispossession through major government bodies that oversee rubber and oil palm enterprises that consolidate smallholdings through leasing and management agreements. Because Malay smallholders are a critical political force, subsidies and other forms of central government support have been generous. But while Malay-Malaysian rural poverty may be a thing of the past, rural poverty is not. A new class of rural poor, mainly non-Malaysian workers from neighbouring countries, constitute an uncounted, precarious, and marginal population who play a large role in keeping Malaysian smallholdings productive (a phenomenon seen on a smaller scale elsewhere, particularly Thailand). There is also evidence of a weakening in the flow of the young out of farming and rural areas, and the return of Malay civil servants, on generous pensions, to their rural homes. Retiring into farming in a similar fashion to that seen in Japan. In the Philippines, it is in rural areas and, in particular, among smallholders in rural areas, where poverty is concentrated. There is little evidence of sustained improvements in rural livelihoods, and long years of policy failures, state incompetence and political cronyism have done little substantially to improve rural conditions. Climate change and weather extremes add further pressures. Many of the other chapters in this book identify elements of positive change in smallholder livelihoods; in the Philippines these have been few and this can be laid squarely at the door of political elites in Manila who have consistently failed to see beyond their own, narrow self-interests. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

32 

Eric C. Thompson, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen

The Singapore government’s approach to the country’s smallholders is singularly different from that pursued by the other countries included in this book: smallholders are neither numerous nor important, and the focus is on the farm sector rather than smallholders. Thus the future of smallholders will depend on how they fit within the state’s vision for the small areas of land available for farming. For the present this seems to be high-tech farming on the one hand, in line with the state’s vision for the city state in general, and post-productivist on the other, with rural production being shaped to wider social interests, whether for education, tourism, or therapy. If small farmers no longer serve any national purpose, the expectation is that they will be managed into oblivion. That said, in recent decades, interest has grown in small or even micro-scale urban farming, which here and elsewhere may become a trend to watch beyond mere “gardening”, and toward a new, more substantive trend in small-scale agriculture. Such farming may be small-scale, but it is a world away from the peasant smallholder that has such a grip on the regional imagination. Like Japan, Taiwan faces the challenge of ageing smallholders and youth emigration from rural areas. But more than any country considered in this volume, we also see a rural revitalization process driven by younger people. Some of these are the children of smallholders returning “home” from urban areas, but there is also an important group of “new” farmers who have had no prior connection to agriculture. They bring with them ideals of sustainability and land justice, a preference for organic methods and food safety, a motivation to promote local food movements, and a desire to establish networks and collaborations, sometimes international. In these ways Taiwan’s experience chimes with trends in some areas of the global North, and provides a contrast with Japan’s, where efforts to entice younger generations to return to or enter farming have proved relatively unsuccessful to date. The distinctiveness of the direction that Thailand’s smallholder sector has taken, at least to date, is in terms of the complexity of the interplay of work, space, and livelihoods. Smallholdings may persist on paper, but how they persist and what form this persistence takes is rather harder to ascertain, such is the degree to which household livelihoods are stretched across space, and between sectors and activities. A second feature of the Thai case is the way in which agribusiness has intruded into and “captured” smallholder value in terms of land and labour. Finally in Vietnam, the role of communes, notwithstanding doi moi and the partial individualization of farming from the mid-1980s onwards, has been to create opportunities for areas of individually allocated land to be A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Introduction: Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective

33

amalgamated into larger units of production, driven by the state’s “new countryside” movement. In the government’s rhetoric this is a form of (re-) collectivization, but in reality rewards wealthy and more entrepreneurially minded smallholders under a commercial aegis. These national cases emphasize how distinctive each country’s rural present is, and therefore rural future is likely to be. But beyond these important detailed differences, are four axes around which we think most issues revolve. First, the significance of smallholders as an interest group with the power, whether political, moral, or popular, to change and shape things to their benefit. On one side, are countries such as Japan, Malaysia, and to some extent Indonesia and Thailand, where the rural “lobby” has significant sway; and on the other, Singapore, Laos, and the Philippines where it is negligible, or distinctly limited. The question remains as to the extent to which smallholders, and rural populations more widely, will be able to shape and direct policies and policymaking to their collective interests. But so far, and in aggregate terms, the divide between rural and urban, and farm and non-farm, has widened rather than narrowed. Second is the generational angle in shaping rural futures. The chapters that follow show that in some countries younger farmers are coming to play a key role in shaping rural futures; in others, they have either distanced themselves from farming, spatially, occupationally, and aspirationally, or they have been actively excluded by an entrenched older cohort of farmers. A youthful revivification of farming could do much to bring new approaches to agriculture and also to quash entrenched views in many countries that farmers and farming are unsophisticated and backward looking. The third element is the role of agribusiness and commercial relations more generally. How is agribusiness capturing smallholder value, whether through various forms of contract farming or more extended production networks, sometimes across national borders? As periods of economic stagnation or contraction have shown, the rural often provides a social and livelihood safety net, a place of return and of succour. Even when land stands idle and the young profess not to be interested in farming, the smallholding remains a quiet sentinel in the rural landscape. Fourthly, and perhaps even more importantly, how do rural futures link to wider development futures? The term “the Asian Century” (Mahbubhani 2008) is often bandied around by public intellectuals to signal an Asianled twenty-first century, a transformation led by rapid urbanization and widespread rural-to-urban migration. Is there a corresponding “ruralization” (Krause 2013) in play as well, and what role might it play in future growth, aspirations, and challenges in the region? A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

34 

Eric C. Thompson, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen

As a ten-country survey of the transformation and persistence of smallholder and small-scale agriculture in Asia, this book aims to be a valuable resource for both scholars and policymakers concerned with the present state and future prospects of farming in Asia. We have organized the chapters in parallel fashion so that each addresses in turn the ways in which “smallholders” are defined socially and through policy documents in each country, the status of smallholders today, forces shaping their persistence and transformation over roughly the past century, issues currently faced by smallholders, and finally their future prospects. While the histories, current situation and problems facing smallholders vary widely, the national case studies here provide insights into the factors that have led to more or less favourable outcomes. Against all expectations of agrarian smallholder disappearance, current from the early twentieth century onward, smallholder agriculture has persisted – albeit often in very different forms and socio-economic contexts – into our present century. The mere fact that there continue to be well over 400 million small-scale farmers in Asia is reason enough to take them seriously.

References Appadurai, A. (2013) The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. London, Verso. Banaji, J. (1990) “Illusions about the peasantry: Karl Kautsky and the agrarian question”, Journal of Peasant Studies 17(2): 288-307. Birner, R. and D. Resnick (2010) “The political economy of policies for smallholder agriculture”, World Development 38(10): 1442-1452. Brennan, T. (2017) “On the image of the country and the city”, Antipode 49(S1): 34-51. Calcaterra, E. (2013) Defining Smallholders: Suggestions for a RSB Smallholder Definitions. https://energycenter.epfl.ch/f iles/content/sites/energy-center/ files/projets/Bioenergy%20Team/Defining%20smallholders_v30102013.pdf Accessed on? Cramb, R.A. and J.C. Newby (2015) “Trajectories of rice-farming households in mainland Southeast Asia”. In: Trajectories of Rice-Based Farming Systems in Mainland Southeast Asia”, R.A. Cramb, ed. pp. 35-72. Canberra: Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research. Dawe, D., S. Jaffee, and N. Santos, eds. (2014) Rice in the Shadow of Skyscrapers: Policy Choices in a Dynamic East and Southeast Asian Setting. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Introduction: Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective

35

Drahmoune, F. (2013) “Agrarian transitions, rural resistance and peasant politics in Southeast Asia”, Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs 32(1): 111-139. Elson, R.E. (1997) The End of the Peasantry in Southeast Asia: A Social and Economic History of Peasant Livelhood, 1800-1990s. London: Palgrave. Fan, S. and C. Chan-Kang (2005) “Is small beautiful: Farm size, productivity and poverty in Asian agriculture”, Agricultural Economics 32(1): 135-146. Fan, S., J. Brzeska, M. Keyzer, and A. Halsema (2013) From Subsistence to Profit: Transforming Smallholder Farms. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. Gillen, J. (2016) “Bringing the countryside to the city: Practices and imaginations of the rural in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam”, Urban Studies 53(2): 324-337. Glassman, J. (2006) “Primitive accumulation, accumulation by dispossession, accumulation by ‘extra-economic’ means”, Progress in Human Geography 30(5): 608-625. Government of Malaysia (2010) Tenth Malaysia Plan 2011-2015. Kuala Lumpur: Unit Perancang Ekonomi. Hall, D. (2004) “Smallholders and the spread of capitalism in rural Southeast Asia”, Asia Pacific Viewpoint 45: 401-414. Hazell, P. and A. Rahman, eds. (2014) New Directions for Smallholder Agriculture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hirsch, P. (2012) “Reviving agrarian studies in South-East Asia: Geography on the ascendency”, Geographical Research 50(4): 393-403. Li, M. and T. Sicular (2013) “Aging of the labor force and technical efficiency in crop production: Evidence from Liaoning province, China”, China Agricultural Economic Review 5(3): 342-359. Kautsky, K. (1988) [1899] The Agrarian Question. London: Swan Books. Kent, A. (2016) “Conflict continues: Transitioning into a battle for property in Cambodia today”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 47(1): 3-23. Krause, M. (2013) “The ruralization of the world”, Public Culture 25(2): 233-248. Lowder, S.K., J. Skoet and T. Raney (2016) “The number, size, and distribution of farms, smallholder farms, and family farms worldwide”, World Development 87: 16-29. Mahbubhani, K. (2008) The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East. New York: Public Affairs. Montague, Y. and L.J.M. Kealy (2000) “The graying of farmers”, Population Today 28(4): 6. Nguyen T.A., J.R., Luong T.T.H., and Dinh T.D. (2012) “Becoming and being urban in Hanoi: Rural-urban migration and relations in Vietnam”, Journal of Peasant Studies 39(5): 1103-1131.

A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

36 

Eric C. Thompson, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen

Otsuka, K. (2012) “Food insecurity, income inequality, and the changing comparative advantage in world agriculture”. In: Presidential Address at the 27th International Conference of Agricultural Economists. Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil. Otsuka, K. (2013) “Food insecurity, income inequality, and the changing comparative advantage in world agriculture”, Agricultural Economics 44: 7-18. Otsuka, K., Liu, Y., and Yamauchi, F. (2016) “The future of small farms in Asia”, Development Policy Review 34(3): 441-461. Parsons, L., S. Lawreniuk, and J. Pilgrim (2014) “Wheels within wheels: Poverty, power, and patronage in the Cambodian migration system”, The Journal of Development Studies 50(10): 1362-1379. Popkin, S.L. (1979) The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam. Berkeley/ Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press. Rigg, J., A. Salamanca, and E.C. Thompson (2016) “The puzzle of East and Southeast Asia’s persistent smallholder”, Journal of Rural Studies 43: 118-133. Rigg, J. (2019) More than Rural: Textures of Thailand’s Agrarian Transformation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Samberg, L.H., J.S. Gerber, N. Ramankutty, M. Herrero, and P.C. West (2016) “Subnational distribution of average farm size and smallholder contributions to global food production”, Environmental Research Letters 11(124010): 1-12. Schoenberger, L., and A. Beban (2018) “‘They turn us into criminals’: Embodiments of fear in Cambodian land grabbing”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 108(5): 1338-1353. Scott, J.C. (1976) The Moral Economy of the Peasant. New Haven/ London: Yale University Press. Scott, J.C. (2017) Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven/ London: Yale University Press. Thompson, E.C. (2004) “Rural villages as socially urban spaces in Malaysia”, Urban Studies 41(12): 2358-2376. Thompson, E.C. (2007) Unsettling Absences: Urbanism in Rural Malaysia. Singapore: NUS Press. Thompson, E.C. (2013) “Urban cosmopolitan chauvinism and the politics of rural identity”. In: Bunnell, T., D. Parthasarathy and E.C. Thompson, eds., Cleavage, Connection and Conflict in Rural, Urban and Contemporary Asia, pp. 161-179. Dordrecht: Springer Publishing. Walker, A. (2015) “From legibility to eligibility: politics, subsidy and productivity in rural Asia”, TRaNS: Trans-Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia 3(1): 45-71. Warr, P. (2015) “Agricultural growth and rural poverty reduction in mainland Southeast Asia”. In: Trajectories of Rice-Based Farming Systems in Mainland Southeast Asia, R.A. Cramb, ed. pp. 17-34. Canberra: Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Introduction: Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective

37

White, B. (2012) “Agriculture and the generation problem: rural youth, employment and the future of farming”, IDS Bulletin 43(6): 9-19. World Bank. (2007) World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development. Washington DC: The World Bank.

A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

1

Cambodia: Political Strife and Problematic Land Tenure Chivoin Peou and Sokphea Young

Abstract Small landholding is a def ining feature of Cambodian farmers and represents the ways of life of the majority of Cambodians. Despite rapid urbanization, a large majority of Cambodians remain living in rural areas and most of them are smallholders. Socially and historically Cambodian smallholders were ‘a class in themselves’ and their cultural significance has been relevant to recent Cambodian social and political lives. Today Cambodian smallholders play a critical role in the country’s economy but are faced with issues that threaten their ways of life, from national politics and policies to regional economic dynamics and climate change. While smallholding remains economically and politically crucial for Cambodia, the next generation of Cambodian smallholders may find their smallholding future uncertain. Keywords: agriculture, Cambodia, farmers, rice, smallholdings, youth

Despite rapid urbanization in recent years, Cambodia remains largely an agrarian country. An overwhelming majority of the population (78%) still lives in rural areas, and agriculture makes up 31% of the country’s GDP (Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries [MAFF] 2015) and employs 80% of the national labour force (National Institute of Statistics [NIS] 2013). The country’s major agricultural commodity is rice, or ang-kor in Khmer, which also largely constitutes the identity and way of life for Cambodians. Other major crops include cassava, maize, mung bean, and soybean. Rice is grown for both household consumption and trade, but other crops are grown mostly for commercial purposes and exports, mainly to Thailand, Vietnam, and, to a lesser extent, China. Given that 70% of

Thompson, Eric, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen (eds), Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789462988170/ch01 A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

40 

Chivoin Peou and Sokphea Young

agricultural landholding is used for rice farming, this chapter will focus mainly on rice smallholders more than on farmers of other agricultural crops and activities. Small landholding is a defining feature of Cambodian farmers. While the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) defines those with 2 hectares or less of land ownership as smallholders, there is no existing figure on Cambodian farmers with 2 hectares or less of land. A newly released report on agricultural census conducted by the National Institute of Statistics (NIS) and other international development partners contains only figures of agricultural landholding of less than 1 hectare (47%), 1 to 3.99 hectares (45%), 4 to 9.99 hectares (7%), and 10 or more (1%) (NIS 2013). Drawing on relevant literature, this chapter attempts to demonstrate that smallholders play a critical role in the country’s economy but are faced with various issues that threaten their ways of life, including a lack of irrigation, limited cultivation techniques, a lack of affordable capital, constrained production and market knowledge, and insecure land ownership due to land grabbing and problematic land tenure. Before elaborating on these issues and the future prospects of Cambodian smallholders, the rest of the chapter will explore the meanings of “smallholding” in the context of Cambodia, a general picture of smallholders today, and their historical trajectories up to the present.

What Is a Smallholder in Cambodia? Smallholding is theoretically characterized in terms of labour, capital investment, income, equipment, skills, land size, and assets (Hazell et al. 2007; Chamberlin 2008), but the size of landholding can provide an anchor for discussion and cross-country comparison (Rigg, Salamanca, and Thompson 2016). In Cambodia, the definition of “smallholders” varies but appears to be mainly based on land size and, to a lesser extent, farmers’ capital investment. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) considers Cambodian farmers with 2 hectares or less of land as smallholders. AgriFood Consulting International (ACI) defines smallholders in Cambodia as those owning 3 hectares or less of agricultural land (ACI 2005). The World Bank classified “small” landholders into three categories: small farms (up to 1 hectare), medium farms (from 1 to 3 hectares), and large farms (above 3 hectares but less than 4 hectares) (World Bank 2015), by which definition up to 93% of Cambodian farmers can be categorized as “smallholders” – 84% of whom are rice farmers (NIS 2013). A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Cambodia: Political Strife and Problematic L and Tenure

41

These farmers’ livelihood is primarily defined by their crops. Smallholders with 1 hectare of wet-season paddy field are financially much worse off than those with 1 hectare of vegetable field. For example, the price of cauliflowers is USD 400 per hectare and that of lettuce is USD 1,400 per hectare (commonly known as high value crops growing in and mostly consumed in the peri-urban areas), compared to USD 100 to USD 300 per hectare of rice. In general, horticultural production can, due to its intensification, generate a net return from 16 to 30 times higher than that of wet-season paddy (Yu and Diao 2011). Wet-season smallholders, often lacking reliable irrigation and dependent on unpredictable rainfalls, can have only one crop per year. Vegetable farmers, on the other hand, are often situated along riparian riverbanks and endowed with sufficient water supply and can grow crops all year round. In addition, stark differences exist between smallholders in terms of knowledge, practice, yield, and profitability. Wet-season rice smallholders still employ traditional methods of farming with limited use of inputs while vegetable smallholders are more productive using inputs such as hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides. As a result, rice yield in Cambodia is among the lowest in Southeast Asia with only 3.3 tons per hectare compared to 6.2 tons in Vietnam (Asia Development Bank [ADB] 2014). Despite giving a low return, rice remains a dominant crop as it is consumed daily by Cambodians. Smallholding farmers also represent socio-cultural significance in Cambodian society. The rural-urban divide is a defining feature for social structure and mobility in Cambodian society. “Pre-war” Cambodia, prior to the 1970s, was fundamentally a peasant society based largely on subsistence-oriented household farming. Most peasants cultivated rice and were commonly known as naek sre, or “rice people”. Their livelihoods were supplemented by kitchengarden vegetables, local fishing, and fruit trees, and by seasonal income-earning activities, including labour work in urban centres (Ebihara 1968; Martin 1994: 7-9). The peasants, whose income was generated mainly from rice cultivation, were “a class in themselves” often distinguished from the “city people”, who were intellectually and economically better off (Ebihara 1973; Martin 1994). Besides naek sre, some peasants were better known as naek chamkar, which referred to farmers who lived near riverbanks and farmed food crops, rather than rice, to sell at local or urban markets. The naek chamkar made up one-sixth of the peasant population in the 1950s (Slocomb 2010). Although the naek chamkar were often descended from Chinese migrants, they became naturalized and were usually described as Khmer peasants. In prewar years, the “rice people” represented Khmer society and the countryside was also romanticized amidst urban growth. These dimensions remain to some degree at present. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

42 

Chivoin Peou and Sokphea Young

Smallholders in Cambodia Today The conditions of smallholding in Cambodia are shaped by the country’s socio-political developments in recent decades, particularly before and after the violent upheavals in the 1970s. “Prewar” Cambodia, prior to the 1970s, was fundamentally a peasant society based largely on subsistence-oriented household farming. Warfare and social calamities in the 1970s-1980s radically changed this state of affairs. The Khmer Rouge, ruling the country between 1975 and 1979, abolished traditional, family-based farming and imposed “ultra-collectivization” of farming to achieve a utopian socialist regime (Frings 1994), killing up to one-fourth of the population. Private ownership of land was eliminated during the Khmer Rouge rule in 1975-79. The Soviet- and Vietnam-backed People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), the de facto Cambodian government between 1979 and 1989, implemented forms of collective farming and gradually allowed family-based farming to return (Gottesman 2004). A more moderate form of collectivization was implemented in the 1980s, whereby rice farming was based on solidarity groups, called krom samaki in Khmer, consisting of 10 to 15 households. Each household was given a small plot for residence and farmed collective farm land, which belonged to the state (Ledgerwood 1998). The solidarity groups became unpopular and were discontinued towards the end of the 1980s (Gottesman 2004). One among several reasons compelling the termination of the latter is that the patterns of solidarity groups were similar to the approach employed by the Khmer Rouge region. In 1989, control and use rights were enacted and households were eligible for private landholding of up to 5 hectares of land depending on household size and productive use of land. Given the need of new household establishments, the allocation to each household at that time was based on consultation with village and commune authorities (Ramamurthy et al. 2001). The f irst “postwar” Land Law was passed in 1992 to derecognize all claims to land property prior to 1999 and define use rights for Cambodians. However, the law was not well disseminated and enforced, and hence not many smallholders were aware of it. The revised Land Law was passed in 2001 to strengthen and formalize land tenure rights of all eligible persons and households. Following the undistinguishable boundary between “state public”, “state private”, and “individual private” lands, the law defines a cutoff date for the eligibility of owning or occupying a land plot, providing a vital implication for smallholders in rural areas. Specifically, those who had occupied and cultivated a plot of land for five years prior to the introduction of the Land Law are eligible for applying for a land title of owning the plot. The A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Cambodia: Political Strife and Problematic L and Tenure

43

Map 1.1  Areas of rice cultivation in Cambodia

Source: International Rice Research Institute, 2016

Land Law has also created two types of agricultural landholding: juridical agricultural landholdings and household-based agricultural landholdings. The former refers to holdings operated by state and private corporations, which is by now almost non-existent as the government adopted neo-liberal policies to privatize most of it state enterprises, and the latter to holdings by individual or household farmers (NIS 2013). Soil types and topography are a main factor determining crops cultivated in Cambodia. Cambodia has four main topographical features: central plains, the Tonle Sap Lake region, coastal areas, and highland plateaus. Eight provinces constitute the Tonle Sap Lake region, seven provinces the central plains, six provinces the upland and plateau region, and four provinces the coastal areas. Rice is vastly grown across the country, but the central plains and Tonle Sap zone dominate rice cultivation in the country (NIS 2013), with Battambang Province known as the country’s best rice granary (see Map 1.1 below). Out of the total area of agricultural holdings in Cambodia (3.3 million hectares), 70% is cultivated for rice and the rest for other food and industrial crops (NIS 2013). Cassava is the second largest A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

44 

Chivoin Peou and Sokphea Young

crop, followed by maize grown in most parts of the upland areas, cultivated on around 0.66 million hectares of land (MAFF 2014). While rice is grown for both household consumption and trade, upland crops are grown mostly for commercial purpose. Thailand, Vietnam, and to a lesser certain extent China, are the main markets from Cambodia’s upland crops. Regardless of the different criteria for defining employment, agricultural activities, especially rice farming, are claimed by the government to employ about 80% of the population. According to the recent agricultural census (NIS 2013), young people aged between 10 and 29 years old and older adults (between 30 and 49 years old) of both sexes are active in agricultural activities. Compared to the older population (50 years old and above), children under 10 years of age are actively engaged in the agricultural sector. It is a common practice that children accompany their parents to the rice field (after school). The involvement of young adults (20-29 years old) suggests that these smallholders receive low levels of education. For instance, less than 10% of the total population in agricultural cultivation finish grade five of general education, and just around 4% are reported to have finished grade 12 (NIS 2013). Cambodian smallholders today are gradually adopting modern cultivation techniques, replacing manual labour with mechanized processes. Means and tools for cultivation are also transforming, for instance from using draft animals, like cows and buffalo, and ox carts for transporting harvests to machines such as tractors and trucks or, more commonly, tractor-pull carts. While some smallholders are still employing manual post-harvesting processing, such as using mortars and pestles, the majority have now employed the help of machinery such as threshers and milling machines. This has increased their yields; however, costs have also risen. Between 2002 and 2012, rice production more than doubled, from 3.8 million tons to 9.3 million tons (World Bank 2015). Given the vast majority of employment provided by the agricultural sector, rice cultivation in particular, rice is vital for the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Agriculture accounted for 32% of GDP in 2013, compared to 24% by industry sector and 39% by service sector (MAFF 2015). Cambodian paddy rice production reached 9.38 million tons in 2013, an increase of 23.78% from 2009, producing a surplus of 3.09 million tons of milled rice (4.82 million tons of paddy surplus), 37.68% more than 2009. The significant increase in rice yield over the years is the consequence of the government’s and the smallholders’ efforts to modernize and intensify rice cultivation, and also the rise of rice price during the late 2010s. Such a sustained increase in rice yield, in tandem with the rise of the price of rice A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Cambodia: Political Strife and Problematic L and Tenure

45

at that time, has contributed to a poverty reduction (MAFF 2015; World Bank 2015). The poverty rate in Cambodia declined significantly, although at a slow pace, from 34.68% (or 39.18% among rural population) in 2004 to 18.89% (or 19.98% among rural people) in 2012 (Royal Government of Cambodia [RGC] 2013). This reduction has occurred largely in the rural areas with more than 60% of the decrease attributed to agriculture. This global price spike has allowed many households, mostly smallholders, to improve their incomes (World Bank 2015). The year 2008 was a turning point in Cambodia’s rice market when the world was facing food price volatility. Under the Everything but Arms (EBA) Scheme, which took full effect in 2009, Cambodia was able to export rice without tariff to the EU market, accounting then for about 90% of Cambodia’s (officially recorded) rice export. Cambodia has now become one of the fastest-growing rice exporters, exporting to nearly 70 countries, with the EU and China the biggest destinations. Around half a million tons of milled rice was exported in 2015. Despite this export potential, sanitation and phytosanitation (SPS) remains an impeding issue to export not only rice but also other products by smallholders. This growing export orientation means Cambodian smallholders are increasingly exposed to the global demands, quality standards, and price of rice. Recently, Cambodian rice smallholders in Battambang Province orchestrated protests by blocking a national highway and demanded the government and relevant stakeholders to address the plummeting rice price from around USD 350 per ton in 2015 to around USD 150 per ton in 2016. The low paddy rice price was reportedly due to the high volume of surplus in the region, particularly Thailand and Vietnam, and low demands from the regional and international markets. In 2010, the Royal Government of Cambodia produced the Policy on the Promotion of Paddy Rice Production and Export of Milled Rice, better known as the Rice Export Policy to export one million tons of milled rice per year by 2015. With this policy, modern rice mills have started to expand to accommodate the promised good return on investment through measures stated in the policy, including (1) infrastructure building and enhancement (roads, irrigations, energy/electricity, and information communications and technology), (2) improvement on the provision of extension services and agricultural inputs, (3) land management reform, (4) finance, (5) marketing, (6) farmer organization, and (7) institutional building and coordination. The policy is meant to diversify markets for smallholders, yet smallholders claim their market has become more limited due to difficulties imposed on their paddy at the borders. Since more paddies are wanted to be milled in-country, authorities make it hard for farmers to export directly to Vietnam A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

46 

Chivoin Peou and Sokphea Young

and Thailand. However, farmers prefer to sell their produce to their existing neighbouring counterparts for immediate payments, which cannot be made by local millers, who normally have financial constraints. From a regional perspective, a seeming lack of commitment from the government prior to and in the early 2010s, resulted in Cambodian rice being traded mainly with neighbouring countries, Thailand and Vietnam. At the end of the harvesting season, almost all paddy rice surpluses were exported informally and directly to the two neighbours, where rice was milled, processed, and taxed added value for export. In the meantime, MAFF (2015) reports that official (milled) rice export reached 387,060 tons in 2014, compared to 378,850 tons in 2013. In 2011, Cambodia was ranked the world’s fourteenth largest producer of paddy rice, lagging behind Thailand (7th), Vietnam (5th), and Indonesia (3rd) among ASEAN countries (World Trade Organization [WTO] 2011). Despite the vital economic value of rice domestically and regionally, Cambodian rice is prone to regional competition for price, demand, and quality.

Processes of Transformation and Persistence The dynamics of smallholder transformation in Cambodia are driven by the calamity in the socio-economic and political environment. Following the dramatic regime changes mentioned above, the peace agreement was signed in 1991 and Cambodia was thrust into the dynamics of the post-Cold War world order of international politics and market economy. Imposed multiparty democracy in the early 1990s has brought about new political actors, discourses, and dynamics through which local (rural) political tensions and adaptations have played out (Öjendal and Lilja 2009; Hughes and Un 2011). Cambodia reopened itself to the world in the early 1990s, which accelerated in-country landholding dramatically. It had to compete with not only the neighbouring countries whose socio-economic structures were similar, but also the rest of the world. In 1995, Cambodia became a net exporter of rice. Over time, with assistance from the government, donors, and NGOs, smallholders have shifted from subsistence-oriented to market-oriented farming, increasing the surplus for income generation and even allowing for the migration or graduation out of the agricultural sector. The transformation of agrarian smallholding is also linked with rapid urbanization in Cambodia, including such major cities as Phnom Penh, Siem Reap, Battambang, and Kampong Cham and urban centres of other provinces. Rural to urban migration is a significant feature in recent rapid A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Cambodia: Political Strife and Problematic L and Tenure

47

urbanization in the country (Ministry of Planning [MOP] 2012). Considering that 50% of the national GDP is contributed by Phnom Penh and other cities (ADB 2012), these cities are lands of economic, educational, and social opportunities, leaving smallholders prone to labour shortage and increased farming investment costs because of rising agricultural wages (WB 2015). Major cities have also expanded spatially to accommodate the growing population and new migrants. The administrative boundary of Phnom Penh, for example, was almost doubled in 2010, from 376 to 678 square kilometres, and Phnom Penh’s population is estimated to reach 1.6 million in 2016, increasing from just 1.33 million in 2008. In the early 1990s, a form of contract farming was observed between people residing in commune, district, or urban centres, who were often better-off economically, and smallholders residing in remote areas. Better-off households would provide loans in terms of inputs including seeds, fertilizer, cash, and other equipment, in exchange for rice yield after the harvest. This practice has continued to the present, but a more complex dynamic has emerged and become popular in contract farming in recent years. The contract involves rice millers, brokers or companies, and smallholders. In some cases, a formal contract is also signed. With big companies, a contract is always signed with agreements on support, price, and technical assistance. However, flaws in the contract are observed because the companies tend to and are able to adjust the buying price after harvesting on grounds of the quality of the paddy rice and the market demand of rice (Cai et al. 2008). Smallholders normally have little bargaining power in this practice. Farming contracts between smallholders and companies were normally practised in remote areas but not in areas close to urban centres or rice millers. Farmers closer to urban centres are afforded access to information pertaining to rice prices provided by different rice mills in commune, district, or provincial centres. To increase the bargaining power of smallholders in negotiating with rice brokers, moneylenders, and companies, agricultural cooperatives have been introduced in rural areas in Cambodia with assistance from non-government organizations and the government. These cooperatives vary in size and organizational complexity, and they include farmer groups, mutual support groups, farmer associations, water-user groups (for water management in particular) and farmer organizations. Some of these groups are not “legally registered” in accordance with the 2001 Royal Decree on the Establishment Agricultural Cooperative (Theng et al. 2014). According to this regulation, a cooperative consists of members, a board of committee, a monitoring committee, a managing director, a credit committee, a supply committee, a A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

48 

Chivoin Peou and Sokphea Young

marketing committee, and an information and training committee. The first agricultural cooperative, made up of about 37 smallholders, was officially established in Siem Reap Province in 2003 (Heifer International 2011). Encouraged by the rice export policy, aiming to export one million tons of milled rice per year, agricultural cooperatives have expanded in numbers. As of 2015, 750 agricultural cooperatives, consisting of nearly 80,000 farmers (61% female), have been officially registered across Cambodia (MAFF 2016). Despite this increase in number, these cooperatives often face several challenges, including agricultural and business skills, leadership and strategy, financial management, credit, and a lack of legal framework on contract farming (Theng et al. 2014). These issues are prevalent given the low level of education among members of these cooperatives, and these cooperatives have yet to improve their bargaining power or move into processing activities to ensure better returns for farmer members. Nevertheless, these formations of farmer groups and organizations illustrate how smallholders have mobilized to protect their benefits and interests by negotiating with companies and other actors, regardless of their success, while shifting from subsistence to market orientation. Rice exporters and millers also formally organize themselves as federations of exporters and millers, which has implications for smallholders. A lack of communication among these federations has often been seen as a cause for failing to meet the national export target of milled rice. Currently, these federations have been consolidated under the Cambodia Rice Association, headed by the Prime Minister’s son-in-law, in order to improve the rice export sector. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that the process of consolidation among federations leading by different companies or rice mill enterprises is to monopolize the process of rice exports (Ear 2009). The failure so far to achieve the export target of one million tons of milled rice per year is due in part to the struggle, among political elites, to monopolize and control the rice export as well as the inability to meet the required standards of rice quality by importing countries. How these federations determine the price, quality standard, and other requirements have significant effects on smallholders. In short, the transformation of smallholders from being subsistence-oriented to market-oriented has been driven by dynamic interplays among individuals, state, and other actors in and beyond Cambodia to modernize and commodify the rice sector. Such a process is similar to those smallholders in mainland Southeast Asian countries, such as Thailand and Vietnam, which have commercialized their rice sector, to some extent ahead of Cambodia, to improve their livelihoods (see Rigg 1987; 2005). A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Cambodia: Political Strife and Problematic L and Tenure

49

Recent regionalization, for example, the ASEAN Economic Community, requires Cambodian smallholders to modernize their farming practices in order to compete with their counterparts in neighbouring countries and to meet the global demands, in terms of both quality and quantity. The Cambodian government has introduced a number of policies and initiatives to tackle these issues. Extension services, at least on paper, have been promoted to support smallholders to increase their yields. Major efforts have been made by the government to attract foreign capital to invest in the agricultural sector. The growing global demands for food and feed has also increased economic land concessions in Cambodia, attracting hundreds of millions of US dollars despite the economic crisis of 2007 (Young 2017). The aim is to generate employment and reduce poverty in the countryside, where a large number of smallholders are based. In the face of regionalization and globalization, the transformation of Cambodian smallholding meets both challenges and opportunities.

Challenges and Opportunities Facing Smallholders Today Contemporary smallholding farmers are struggling with a number of issues. In addition to climate change (see Murphy, Irvine and Sampson 2013; Poulton et al. 2016; Touch et al. 2016), smallholders’ livelihoods are exacerbated by the government’s insufficient support to improve agricultural inputs, modernize farming techniques, and build rural infrastructure. As a result, the rural smallholders have increasingly been on the move, to new agricultural frontiers and urban centres as well as beyond Cambodia, to either cope with the recent transformations or pursue a better livelihood. A recent national survey shows that one in four households in rural Cambodia has at least one working age member migrate out of their village, 57% of whom to urban areas and 30% to other countries, mainly Thailand (MOP 2012). Smallholding farmers face numerous issues in feeding the nation. With years of civil war, today’s Cambodia lacks sufficient irrigation systems that would allow farmers to have more than one crop per year. Only 20% of villages nationwide have access to irrigation (NIS 2013), and during dry season just 8% of arable land is estimated to be irrigated (World Bank 2015). They depend largely on rainfalls to fill their investment bucket. A lack of water dehydrates small farmers’ ability to diversify and intensify their small plots of land. Being the most sensitive to risks, smallholders do not get even a reasonable return from their heavy investment in farming. The risks they A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

50 

Chivoin Peou and Sokphea Young

face are the most difficult to calculate to make an informed decision, due to a lack of information on agricultural input use, the fluctuating market price, and climate change, which adds to the already high credit interest rates and transportation costs. Farmers can get easier access to credit these days. Microfinance institutions (MFI) have mushroomed across rural Cambodia, almost doubling in number from 2012 to 2015. Small farmers can get micro loans much easier than ever before. However, land and house collaterals are required along with very high interest rates of 20% to 30% per year. Smallholders take loans to farm and need to immediately sell off their produce after harvests in order to pay back the banks. Therefore, they have no bargaining power over their farm output and must accept whatever price given by the buyers. MFIs compete fiercely with each other; however, the interest rates are still high and claim to have very low default rates from farmers, thanks to the reserved collaterals. The return on assets and return on equity have also increased among the MFIs reaching around 4% and 19%, respectively (National Bank of Cambodia [NBC] 2015). While associated risks regarding the inability to pay back the loans are unclear to smallholding farmers, banks often claim farmers are well aware of default consequences. The potential political backlash of the extent of indebtedness is so severe that in 2017 the Cambodian government and the ruling party made several MFIs change their logos and explicitly declare themselves as private enterprises to the public as the government and ruling party were keen to distance themselves from public resentment towards indebtedness. As indicated above, the majority of Cambodian smallholders are not well educated. Therefore, Cambodian smallholders are challenged by the need to understand or to acquire new knowledge and techniques pertaining to all kinds of crop plantation, in addition to other major issues, such as land tenure and market. While technology spillover from neighbouring countries is acknowledged, Cambodian smallholders lack techniques to deal with emerging pests, diseases, and climate change. Information on different measures to improve yield has been inadequately disseminated, and smallholders lack the capacity and investment to exploit their potential. Poor extension service is reported to be one of the main constraints that limit any increase in productivity for smallholders (Theng et al. 2014). While water management is a crucial process in effectively utilizing inputs like fertilizer, 75% of land is cultivated in a single season by most smallholders, who lack irrigation. As of 2013, only 30% of the total paddy field was irrigated, amounting to about 1.48 million (1.05 million hectares of wet season and 0.43 hectare of the dry season rice) (MAFF 2014). A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Cambodia: Political Strife and Problematic L and Tenure

51

Land ownership and usage has been a complex and rampant issue among Cambodian smallholders since the collapse of Khmer Rouge. The Ministry of Land Management, Urban Planning, and Construction (MLMUPC) since 2001 has had a mandate to issue official land titles. However, access to the land titling service provided by the MLMUPC remains limited in reach, is time-consuming and unaffordable for many smallholders in the remote areas (So 2009). The agricultural survey in 2013 documents parcels of land with titles but fails to address clearly the types of land title farmers hold. These titles only suggest that their ownership is acknowledged by local authorities, and further complications regarding their security of ownership remain. In 2012, as the result of high food prices and the foreign investment boom in Cambodia, a sort of land rush through government-sanctioned economic land concession (ELC) schemes has created contentious situations between smallholders and investors in almost all agricultural zones. The government issued ELCs for agricultural purposes on the ground that all land belongs to the state, the so-called “public state land”, without considering the rapid agriculturization due to the significant increase in the area of agricultural land demanded and cleared by new farmers, particularly rural young adults who need land to farm. This has created overlaps in land occupation by smallholders and large-scale investors and resulted in protests by smallholders to reclaim paddy fields from investors. These smallholders claim they have occupied and cultivated the land for over five years prior to the cut-off date stated in the 2001 Land Law, but investors and the government argue that these smallholders do not have official land titles and have been cultivating “public state land” (Young 2016). Such contention has occurred mainly in poor or remote areas. The Cambodian government has been pointed out by rice farmers to be inactive in providing certain services, such as new farming techniques, effective information on market prices, and efficient access to export markets. Meanwhile, non-governmental organizations (NGO) have targeted small rice smallholders through various activities, which can be described in two distinct approaches: the conventional approach and the market development approache. This co-existence oftentimes leads to a competition between the two rather than a synergy in working together to achieve the objective of improving small farmers’ yields. The private sector prefers to look at where their return on investment is more promising. Additionally, due to a recent decline in the price of rice and strong competition with neighbouring countries, only medium to large irrigated dry season rice, upland crops, and vegetable farming are targeted for investment. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

52 

Chivoin Peou and Sokphea Young

Future Prospects for Smallholders in Cambodia Although agriculture shares almost one third of the country’s GDP today, it is declining in relative terms as a result of increases in other sectors. This does not imply that the yield of the agricultural products, especially rice, is decreasing. In fact, rice yield has increased with support, albeit limited, from the government and other stakeholders to modernize and intensify rice farming to compete with neighbouring countries and to address regional and international standards for export. However, Cambodia’s agrarian culture is not competitive when considering its high costs and low productivity, compared to the neighbouring countries, whose infrastructure and electrical costs are cheaper. The next generation of smallholders has increasingly been migrating out of their villages to seek other opportunities in the construction, industrial, and service sectors, which can provide a more viable livelihood, at least at present and in the immediate future. Agro-processing, agricultural diversification, and rural infrastructure are becoming competitive in the market. More investments will be seen in-country where raw materials reside. Innovative smallholders will expand and intensify their plots of land to meet the market demand and remain profitable. Larger farms will be more visible and smaller farms may evaporate. Labour has become expensive and will continue to rise. The relative share of costs allocated to hired labour will decrease as farm size increases. Medium-sized and large farms can also find better alternatives and more cost-efficient approaches to substitute for the use of hired labour than smallholders (World Bank 2015). Therefore, in a lot of cases, farmers who expand their land areas receive higher income, but farmers with land areas unchanged or reduced are not able to substantially enjoy the same benefits. Cambodian agriculture will likely in turn attract skilled workers from the region to operate the industry.

References Asia Development Bank [ADB] (2012) Cambodia: Urban Sector Assessment, Strategy and Road Map. Manila: Asian Development Bank. Agrifood Consulting International [ACI] (2005) Final Report for the Cambodian Agrarian Structure Study. Prepared for the Royal Government of Cambodia and the World Bank. Bethesda, MD.

A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Cambodia: Political Strife and Problematic L and Tenure

53

Cai, J., L. Ung, S. Setboonsarng, and P. Lenug (2008) Rice Contract Farming in Cambodia: Empowering Farmers to Move Beyond the Contract Toward Independence, ADB Institution Discussion Paper No. 109. Tokyo: Asian Development Bank Institute. Chamberlin, J. (2008) It’s a Small World After All: Defining Smallholder Agriculture in Ghana. IFPRI Discussion Paper no. 00823. www.ifpri.org/pubs/dp/ifpridp00823. asp (Accessed 26 December 2012). Ear, S. (2009) Sowing and Sewing Growth: The Political Economy of Rice and Garments in Cambodia. Working Paper no. 384. Stanford: Stanford Center for International Development. Ebihara, M. (1973) “Intervillage, intertown, and village-city relations in Cambodia”, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 220(6): 358-375. Ebihara, M. (1968) Svay, a Khmer Village in Cambodia. PhD Dissertation. Columbia University, New York. Frings, V. (1994) “Cambodia after decollectivization (1989-1992)”, Journal of Contemporary Asia 24(1): 49-66. Gottesman, E. (2004) Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge: Inside the Politics of Nation Building. London: Yale University Press. Hazell, P., C. Poulton, S. Wiggins, and A. Dorward (2007) The Future of Small Farms for Poverty Reduction and Growth. Discussion Paper no.42. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. Heifer International (2011) Studying Cooperatives in Cambodia. Phnom Penh: Heifer International. Hughes, C. and K. Un (2011) “Cambodia’s economic transformation: Historical and theoretical frameworks”. In: Cambodia’s Economic Transformation. C. Hughes and K. Un (eds.), pp. 1-26. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. International Rice Research Institute (2016) Cambodia: Basic statistics. http:// ricepedia.org/cambodia (Accessed on 26 December 2016). Ledgerwood, J. (1998) “Rural development in Cambodia: The view from the village”. In: Cambodia and the International Community: The Quest for Peace, Development and Democracy. F. Z. Brown & D.G. Timberman (eds.), pp. 127-147. New York: Asia Society. Martin, M.A. (1994) Cambodia: A Shattered Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries [MAFF] (2015) Agricultural Sector Strategic Development Plan 2014-2018. Phnom Penh: Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries. Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries [MAFF] (2016) Annual Report of Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries 2015-2016, and Planning for 2016-2016. Phnom Penh: MAFF.

A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

54 

Chivoin Peou and Sokphea Young

Ministry of Planning [MOP] (2012) Migration in Cambodia: Report of the Cambodian Rural Urban Migration Project (CRUMP). Phnom Penh: MOP. Murphy, T., K. Irvine, and M. Sampson (2013) “The stress of climate change on water management in Cambodia with a focus on rice production”, Climate and Development 5(1): 77-92. National Bank of Cambodia [NBC] (2015) Annual Report 2015. Phnom Penh: NBC. National Institute of Statistics [NIS] (2013) Census of Agriculture in Cambodia 2013: Preliminary Report. Phnom Penh: NIS. Öjendal, J. and M. Lilja (2009) Beyond Democracy in Cambodia: Political Reconstruction in a Post-Conflict Society. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Poulton, P.L., N.P. Dalgliesh, S. Vang, and C.H. Roth (2016) “Resilience of Cambodian lowland rice farming systems to future climate uncertainty”, Field Crops Research 198: 160-170. Ramamurthy, B., B. Sik, R. Per, and H. Sok (2001) Cambodia 1999-2000: Land, Labour and Rural Livelihood in Focus. Working Paper no. 21. Phnom Penh: Cambodia Development Resource Institute. Rigg, J. (1987) “Forces and influences behind the development of upland cash cropping in north-east Thailand”, Geographical Journal 153(3): 370-382. Rigg, J. (2005) “Poverty and livelihoods after full‐time farming: A South‐East Asian view”, Asia Pacific Viewpoint 46(2): 173-184. Rigg, J., A. Salamanca, and E.C. Thompson (2016) “The puzzle of East and Southeast Asia’s persistent smallholder”, Journal of Rural Studies 43: 118-133. Royal Government of Cambodia [RGC] (2013) Poverty in Cambodia – A New Approach: Redefining the poverty line. Phnom Penh: Ministry of Planning. Slocomb, M. (2010) An Economic History of Cambodia in the Twentieth Century. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press. So, S. (2009) Political Economy of Land Registration in Cambodia. Doctoral dissertation. Illinois: Northern Illinois University Theng, V., S. Keo, K. N, S. Sum, and P. Khiev (2014) Impact of Farmer Organisations on Food Security: The Case of Rural Cambodia. Working Paper Series no. 95. Phnom Penh: CDRI. Touch, V., R.J. Martin, J.F. Scott, A. Cowie, and D.L. Liu (2016) “Climate change adaptation options in rainfed upland cropping systems in the wet tropics: A case study of smallholder farms in north-west Cambodia”, Journal of Environmental Management 182: 238-246. World Bank (2015) Cambodian Agriculture in Transition: Opportunities and Risks. Washington, DC: The World Bank. World Trade Organization [WTO] (2011) “The Expansion and Diversification of Cambodia’s Exports of Milled Rice”. https://www.oecd.org/aidfortrade/48413491. pdf (Accessed 13 November 2016). A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Cambodia: Political Strife and Problematic L and Tenure

55

Young, S. (2016) “Popular resistance in Cambodia: The rationale behind government response”, Asia Politics & Policy 8(4): 593-613. Young, S. (2017) “Transnational advocacy networks in global supply chains: A study of civil society organizations’ sugar movements in Cambodia”, Journal of Civil Society 13(1): 35-53. Yu, B., and X. Diao (2011) Cambodia’s Agricultural Strategy: Future Development Options for the Rice Sector. Policy Discussion Paper. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute.

About the Authors Chivoin Peou is Lecturer at Royal University of Phnom Penh. He holds a PhD in sociology from University of Melbourne. His research covers the life course and social change. His work has appeared in Journal of Youth Studies, Journal of Education and Work, and Journal of Rural Studies, among others. Sokphea Young holds a PhD in political science from University of Melbourne and is currently a postdoctoral research associate at University College London. His work has appeared in Asian Journal of Social Science, Asian Politics & Policies, Journal of Civil Society, and Georgetown Journal of Asian Affairs, among others.

A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

2

Indonesia: Whither Involution, Demographics, and Development? Holi Bina Wijaya

Abstract The transformation of Indonesian smallholders is linked to the developmental stages of certain agricultural and social systems in Indonesia’s history. These phases include the agricultural exploitation of the colonial period and extend to the recent phenomenon of rural development decentralization. The issues faced by smallholders range from the contexts of involution to that of rural development progress. These include the limited capacity of small-scale farmers and the influence of complex external pressures resulting from dynamic socioeconomic and political forces. In the contemporary period, the economic standing of smallholders has risen. Yet, considering how limited the progress of Indonesia’s agricultural sector is relative to other non-agricultural and urban sectors, the underdevelopment of smallholders remains a persistent problem. Keywords: agriculture transformation, Indonesia, rural development, smallholder persistence

Smallholders are a significant part of the Indonesian economy with about one third of the working population employed in the agricultural sector (BPS-Statistics Indonesia 2013). In 2014, Indonesia was ranked third in the world after China and India in terms of the number of agricultural holdings in the country. However, Indonesia is ranked nineteenth in the world in terms of agricultural land area, with a total area of 485,000 km 2 (FAO, 2016). These statistics illustrate the discrepancy between the limited amount of farming land and the high number of agricultural holdings in the country. This suggests two things: first, that a significant number of landholdings

Thompson, Eric, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen (eds), Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789462988170/ch02 A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

58 

Holi Bina Wijaya

in Indonesia are small in size and second, that the Indonesian agricultural landscape is largely characterized by smallholders. There is an extensive record of research on smallholders in Indonesia. Some work on the agricultural economy of smallholders conducted between the late colonial era and the beginning of Indonesia’s independence still provokes discussion and continues to contribute to the advancement of knowledge amongst contemporary scholars. Many papers from this period highlight the pessimistic conditions of agriculture in Indonesia (Booth 1989; Geertz 1963; Boeke 1953). Boeke discusses social dualism in the country through a comparison of the colonial capitalistic system and the indigenous pre-capitalistic agrarian community. Additionally, Geertz illustrates the process of agricultural involution, particularly in Java, through which an increase in agricultural productivity and output did not lead to an increase per capita output. Among the scholarly works are some critical voices such as those of Gordon (1992) and White (1983). All of this research has contributed to our present understanding of Indonesia’s agricultural landscape and smallholders in the past, while also provoking the current empirical efforts to produce a more accurate understanding of Javanese agricultural history. The lives and livelihoods of smallholders in Indonesia have been shaped by wider political and socio-economic forces in the nation. The global Green Revolution movement made waves in Indonesia during the 1970s to the 1980s, when the intensive agriculture farming programme became implemented at the national level. With this new programme in place, Indonesia began to enjoy greater economic progress due to the higher productivity of its farming industry (Booth 1989). Despite the economic success generated by the programme, some problems also resulted, which affected smallholders in the nation. The programme created an issue of dependence, resulted in the exploitation of farmers, caused environmental problems, and raised concerns of sustainability. In more recent times, rural transformations – which include improvements made to infrastructure as well as modernization in the countryside – have influenced the conditions in which smallholders operate. These conditions in which smallholders live tend to be subject to wider, dynamic forces affecting the nation state as a whole. There exists a development gap between some regions in Indonesia which extends to the agricultural sector. In 2017, about 56.57% of the country’s 261.9 million inhabitants were concentrated in Java, even though the total area of Java constitutes only about 6.75% of the country (BPS-Statistics Indonesia 2018). The practices and conditions of smallholders in Indonesia vary across geographical locations, with the most notable differences being between Java and the outer Java islands. This chapter aims to provide a A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Indonesia: Whither Involution, Demographics, and Development?

59

comprehensive report on smallholders in Indonesia. Through an examination of key historical and political issues, this chapter seeks to illustrate the current state of affairs, key processes, major issues, and future prospects faced by smallholders in Indonesia.

What Is a Smallholder in Indonesia? Smallholders may be defined as farmers who own a small area of farmland or farmers who do not own the land they work on, such as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. There are two broad geographical locations in Indonesia where smallholders can be found – Java and the outer Java islands. Smallholders in the outer islands largely cultivate either food crop or cash crop plantations such as oil palm, rubber, coconut, cocoa, and coffee. Java is where much of the rice and food farming activities in Indonesia are concentrated. Smallholders in Java are primarily rice farmers who cultivate small plots of land of 0.5 ha or below. Smallholders in the outer islands tend to have larger farm plots due to the greater availability of land and the transmigration programme. Transmigration was a programme that relocated Javanese farmers to the outer islands and promised between 2 ha to 3 ha of farmland to participants moving to Sumatera, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Maluku, and the Papua islands. Much of the debate surrounding the definition of “smallholders” centres around the size of landholdings. Statistics Indonesia, a government institute, has classified farmers who work on lands smaller than 0.5 ha as smallholders in their surveys (2013). In 2013, a law was passed necessitating that the state and local governments provide protection and empowerment to smallholders whose landholdings measure less than 2 ha (Indonesia 2013). More informally, in the Javanese language, the term “Petani Gurem” is used to refer to farmers who practise subsistence and small-scale farming activities. In popular discourse, Petani Gurem are often associated with having a low level of income due to their limited land and the lack of value-added in their practice of farming. The association with poverty is unsurprising given that in 2014 about half (51.67%) of households categorized as poor were working in agriculture. Traditionally, Javanese rice farmers engaged in a community-sharing mechanism called the Bawon system. It was the way through which agricultural produce was shared in village communities after the harvest. Under this system, paddy field owners invited other farmers in their villages to participate in their harvesting process. They then rewarded harvesters by A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

60 

Holi Bina Wijaya

offering them a share of the yield. After the Green Revolution in the 1970s, the Bawon system began to transform. The reach of the Bawon system became limited to farm workers, family members, and only some village neighbours. Over time the Bawon system evolved even further and as political and economic structures changed, two new mechanisms developed. The Kedokan mechanism promised payments to agricultural workers hired to work on the farms, and Sambatan was the mechanism which facilitated the distribution of some of the yield gathered to the villagers who offered their services during the harvest. In the past, when rural people were mainly dependent on the limited products of farming, such a system could enable the rural economic system to support the subsistence of farmers. In general, the household income of farming families did not just come from a single breadwinner. Farming activities have traditionally been carried out as a family. The traditional Javanese peasant proverb, “Banyak anak banyak rejeki” translates to “more children will bring more blessings”. For the traditional farming household, having more family members meant that there would be a larger supply of available workers to help cultivate the farmland. However, this adage did not ring true in Java due to a process Geertz termed “agricultural involution” (1963). During the colonial period, there was an increase in the quantity of Indonesian agricultural produce demanded by the colony’s Dutch rulers. In tandem with this rise in demand was a rise in Indonesia’s local population. While these parallel trends resulted in more productive farms and an increase in the output per area, this did not translate to an increase in per capita output or income. This process of agricultural involution led to what Geertz termed “shared poverty” (1963). In more recent times, there has been a change in smallholder labour practices, with small-scale farming activities now being carried out by employed paid workers or through the use of sharing result contracts. Smallholders now also employ simple machineries in their farming activities. The sources of farmers’ households have also become more diverse. On top of the main cultivation activities, some additional income could also be sourced from livestock, gardening, as well as intercrop farming. Members of farming households could also find employment outside the agricultural sector i.e. by running a small shop from home, working in rural industry, and so on. After the growing and harvesting seasons, some members of smallholder families also become seasonal workers in the city. In areas where land is not fertile and agricultural earnings are low, there is a tendency for smallholders to migrate to the city permanently, only to return to their countryside annually or even more rarely. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Indonesia: Whither Involution, Demographics, and Development?

61

Figure 2.1  Percentage comparison of agriculture landholding in 2013

Source: Calculation from BPS – Statistics Indonesia, 2013

Smallholders in Indonesia Today Today, although it is not very lucrative, the agriculture sector is still important to households in Indonesia. According to the 2013 agricultural census (BPS-Statistics Indonesia 2013), there are a total of 26.14 million farming households in Indonesia. This makes up about 40% of the country’s 64.04 million households. The economic share of the agriculture sector in the same year was around 14% of the GDP. Thus, Indonesia’s farmers occupy a lower level of economic standing relative to employees in other sectors. About 13.47% of rural inhabitants are categorized as “poor” and about half (48.73%) of the nation’s poor were said to be working in agriculture in 2017 (BPS-Statistics Indonesia 2018). Currently, around 88% of Indonesian farmers cultivate relatively small areas of land measuring below 2 ha in total. About 56% or 14.25 million farming households consist of smallholders who cultivate land below 0.5 ha. Sustained growth in Indonesia’s population has also resulted in the considerable fragmentation of farmland as farming households continue the tradition of distributing their farmland to provide the younger generations with an inheritance. As farmland continues to fragment, some land plots become so small that they are no longer economically viable. For rice fields in Java, the minimum size of farmland needed to achieve an economical yield is about 0.2 ha to 0.3 ha. As such, whenever necessary, farming families A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

62 

Holi Bina Wijaya

Figure 2.2  Comparison of smallholders between Java and other islands 2013

Java Island

Other Islands

0.8% 11.8% 22.6%

34.1%

Under 0.5 ha 0.5 to 3 ha

76.6%

54.0%

Over 3 ha

Source: Calculation from BPS – Statistics Indonesia, 2013

that have inherited fragmented land will sell land that measures less than 0.3 ha. However, this means that some farmer families no longer own land of their own to cultivate. Typically, these landless farmers end up working for other farmers, venturing into small businesses outside of village agriculture, or migrating to the city to find work. In 2013, the total number of agricultural landholdings in Indonesia was distributed fairly evenly between Java (51%) and the other Indonesian islands (49%). However, between these two geographical regions, there is still a significant difference in average farm plot size. About 76.6% of farmers in Java are smallholders who own land under 0.5 ha. In the outer islands, farmers typically work on larger plots of land, with 54% of farmers cultivating land between 0.5 ha to 3 ha. Only about a third of farmers in the outer Java islands are smallholders with land under 0.5 ha. This difference in the distribution of landholding size between Java and the outer islands is linked to the higher population density in Java, which has given rise to greater rates of land fragmentation. Despite the smaller size of landholdings in Java, farmland in Java is more productive than that of the outer islands. Due to the presence of volcanic ash, the land in Java tends to be more fertile. Java also possesses better irrigation and agricultural support infrastructure, a higher number of workers, and enjoys better access to both agricultural technology and the market. On average, rice farming in Java is more productive. The industry produces about 5.9 tonnes of rice per hectare compared to the outer islands, which produce about 4.4 tonnes of rice per hectare. Having said that, Java’s agricultural sector only contributes to about 34% of the national agricultural GDP. Despite better infrastructure, land on A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Indonesia: Whither Involution, Demographics, and Development?

63

Figure 2.3  The Percentages Landholding Sizes Changes in Java

Source: Calculation from Booth, 1989; BPS – Statistics Indonesia, 2013

Java is scarce and there is considerable room for improving the agricultural infrastructure on the outer islands. The number of farming households in Indonesia has been declining in recent times. From 2003 to 2013, the number of such households decreased by 16.3%, while the number of smallholders decreased by 25%. This points to the general decline in agricultural activities in rural areas. The fact that the number of smallholders has decreased at a faster rate may indicate that many smallholders have either shifted towards off-farm income-generating activities or have converted their farmland to serve non-agricultural uses, or a combination of both. During the century between 1903 and 2003, there had been an increasing trend in the percentage share of smallholder landholdings under 0.5 ha in Indonesia. The following decade, however, saw a decreasing trend in these percentages. Meanwhile the number of farmers with slightly larger plots of land measuring between 0.5 ha to 3 ha or more, began to rise after the year 2003. Taken together, the change in the composition of landholdings and the decrease in the total number of landholdings could be indicative of changes and progress in Indonesia’s agricultural system and rural economy. Research by Lowder et al. suggests that between 1960 to 2000, in most low- and lower-middle-income countries the average farm size decreased, whereas average farm sizes increased in upper-middle-income countries (Lowder, Skoet and Raney 2016). In recent decades, Indonesia’s national GDP per capita has been increasing exponentially, from just USD 56.5 in 1967 to USD 3,346 in 2015, with USD 10,517 in purchasing power parity (PPP) value. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

64 

Holi Bina Wijaya

Figure 2.4  Agriculture land in Indonesia 1961-2013

Source: Calculation from FAO, 2016

On the whole, agricultural land area in Indonesia has increased from around 38.6 million ha in 1961 to 57 million ha in 2013. Although the amount of agricultural land available in Indonesia remained relatively stagnant during the 1960s, the amount of land used for agriculture in the country rose in the year 1985 due to the implementation of a national programme for agricultural development. In this period, Indonesia also set in motion a transmigration programme to move Javanese and Balinese farmers to the outer islands, in efforts to boost the country’s agricultural productivity, to distribute more arable land to smallholders, as well as to distribute and boost the development of the outer Java islands. The programme allowed for the creation of more agricultural areas in Sumatera, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and Papua. Much of this additional agricultural land in the outer islands were developed into cash crop plantations. Many of these farms were established by local communities or private businesses. Other portions of arable land were developed by Javanese farmers opening up new lands through the transmigration programme, which have been utilized as both private and community farms for the growing of seasonal agricultural crops.

Processes of Transformation and Persistence Agrarian conditions in Indonesia have undergone several stages of progress. The current conditions of smallholder life are the product of historical agricultural and social systems. Some of the key historical periods that A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Indonesia: Whither Involution, Demographics, and Development?

65

have had the biggest impact on smallholders include the pre-colonial era, the colonial period, the early years of independence, the era of the Green Revolution, and the latest trends in rural transformation. Indonesia is a country made up of rich islands. Located in the tropics, these islands experience a high concentration of rainfall and contain many rivers and water resources. This natural environment facilitated the agricultural activity which then became the base for the development and progress of human life and civilization on that land. The island of Java has a high level of volcanic activity and an abundance of water resources which sustains better agricultural conditions, especially for the production of food crops. As a result of these favourable environmental conditions, the island today boasts a high population and is well-developed. In the pre-colonial era, the kingdoms in Java were mostly dependent on agriculture, especially wet-rice cultivation. Wet-rice cultivation provided higher calorie yields and a higher quantity of food products which supported the dense populations and agricultural industries of Java and Bali (Drakeley 2005). Comparatively, the outer islands had less activity, a smaller population, and enjoyed less progress in agriculture. The colonial era in Indonesia began in the sixteenth century when expeditions from Europe competed for spices which were deemed valuable commodities. The main colonial influence in Indonesia was the Dutch. The Dutch colonized the country for about three and a half centuries, with an interregnum of English rule from 1811 to 1816. Although the British ruled the colony for only five years, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, the representative of the English in Java, established some important and impactful agricultural policies in that short period. He introduced the liberal system into Java’s agricultural landscape. With this system in place, farmers were free to cultivate their land without having to pay land rent. The colonial administration ruled that it had the sovereign right to own all Indonesian land. The administrationowned land was rented out to each village head, who distributed the land to villagers for them to use and farm on. The village head then had to collect the land rent to be paid to the colonial government. The cost of the rent varied based on the land type and the field productivity of wet or dry farms. The rent ranged from the price of one half of the harvesting products for productive wet-land farms, to a one-fourth share for dry farms (Van Niel 1964). After 1816, the British handed the colony back to the Dutch. Due to the decreasing prices of commodity products and the high cost of war, the Dutch colonial government implemented the “Cultuurstelsel” or the cultivation system in Indonesia in 1830. Through this policy, the Dutch aimed to transfer agricultural products in their colonies so as to increase their value in the A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

66 

Holi Bina Wijaya

international export market and receive a higher profit. The system forced Indonesian farmers to plant cash crops such as sugar, coffee, tobacco, indigo, and pepper for the Dutch to export. The cultivation system required one fifth of local farms to be used in the planting of these cash crops, as a form of land tax owed to the Dutch colonial government. On top of this, farmers were required to perform 60 days of work in kind on government-owned farms. The system was successful in generating the surplus profit necessary for the Dutch colonial government to cover all of their debt and even contributed to the economic development of the Netherlands. At the same time, the cultivation system left the colonial peasants in Indonesia in a state of economic depression. Peasants struggled to meet the tax requirements that took up a significant amount of their farmland and available working time. Initially, this system was intended to change the mode of collected colonial payment from cash payments to payments in the form of land and labour. In reality, however, local village administrators were still demanding tribute from their villagers. This tribute took the form of a share of export crops or as labour performed on export crop land. Due to this double burden faced by peasants and the resulting decrease in the domestic production of food crops, villagers were forced to loan money at an overpriced rate, trapping them in permanent debt cycles. The cultivation system also contributed to famine in Java in the mid-nineteenth century (Drakeley 2005). Yew-Foong (2009) illustrates how the transformation undergone by peasant societies in colonial times may be catalysed by processes of colonialism and capitalism. Geertz (1963) also posited that the workings of the colonial capitalist economy effectively crippled the local indigenous economy and created an involutionary pattern. The Dutch cultivation system forced farmers to put their land and labour towards the cultivation of their own crops as well as the cash crops demanded by the colonial administration. This resulted in agricultural complications which hampered the development of the farmers’ local economies. Under these conditions, the Javanese remained in a state of shared poverty in which the conditions of the peasant economy stagnated in spite of structural transformations (Geertz 1963; Yew-Foong 2009). By 1860, the cultivation system was gradually terminated as a result of internal criticisms. The Agrarian Law legislated by the colonial establishment in 1870 enabled foreigners to lease Indonesian land for up to 70 years. This law became the platform through which private enterprises in the Netherlands started plantation businesses and free trade in place of the previous cultivation system. The reforms mainly served to establish A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Indonesia: Whither Involution, Demographics, and Development?

67

the commercial interest in the export crops. Although the obligation on farmers to produce export crops was abolished, the land tax still remained a requirement. The peasants still had a need for cash incomes, which forced them to f ind employment as wage labourers or farm cash crops for the open market. The Coolie Ordinance in 1880 facilitated private businesses’ access to local farm labour for a long period of time. Thousands of Javanese in this time were sent to private plantations in Sumatera as contract coolies for periods of at least ten years at a time, in very poor working conditions. In 1945, Indonesia declared independence. An important regulation made in that time relating to agriculture and smallholders is paragraph three of Article 33 in Indonesia’s Constitution. According to this Article, the earth/ land, and water – all natural resources contained in Indonesia – may be controlled by the state and utilized for the welfare of the people (Indonesia 1945). The country experienced a radical socio-political shift from the status of colony to an independent state which privileged freedom and a spirit of welfare. The main challenges during this period comprised the suitability of infrastructure and human resources, as well as the development of institutions, and last but not least, governance. After gaining independence, the country was focused on establishing an administration, dealing with existing conflicts, and establishing an appropriate development system. The focus on national agricultural development arose just after the establishment of the new order government regime at the close of the 1960s. A centralized national development initiative had been established through Rencana Pembangunan Lima Tahun (REPELITA), a five-year development programme which listed agricultural development to be one of its primary goals. This programme ran parallel to the green revolution movement in which intensive agricultural development was observed on an international scale. The agricultural development in this era mainly involved a programme of intensification, which encompassed the establishment of agricultural infrastructure, agricultural extension, the promotion of the use of high yielding seed varieties, the provision of farming input packages, and the implementation of the trade policy regime which supported food price stability (World Bank 1992). Barlow and Condie noted that, between 1960 and 1980, there was a change in agricultural smallholding practices across ASEAN countries, including Indonesia. This entailed a shift from labour-intensive subsistence farming to farming which employed new technologies of capital input technologies i.e. fertilizers, agrochemicals, as well as machinery (Barlow and Condie, 1986). The programme promoted A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

68 

Holi Bina Wijaya

the practice of intensive modern farming to foster higher productivity in agriculture and greater self-sufficiency. Through this policy, the mechanization of land cultivation, intensive fertilization, pest control, and the use of quality seeds was encouraged to facilitate higher productivity farming. The government also provided support through subsidy packages and the establishment of institutions and infrastructure to promote agricultural development. The peak of this intensive agriculture programme was reached in the mid-1980s when Indonesia managed to attain self-sufficiency in rice agriculture (Van der Eng 1996). Fuglie (2004) noted that agricultural productivity in Indonesia stagnated in 1990, after two decades of rapid growth. It was also highlighted that there was a faster rate of input growth compared to agricultural output (Fuglie 2004). This indicates the dominant role of public spending and policy in agricultural growth, which also ran the risk of creating dependency on the state in the agricultural sector. The farming intensification programme mainly benefited large scale farmers, due to the increasing wages of workers, shifts in agricultural employment, and concentration of land ownership (Van der Eng 1996). As shown by prevailing statistical data and research conducted by Panuju et al. (2013), the average size of farmland in Indonesia has increased since the 2000s. Manning (1988) also noted that the green revolution programme in Indonesia resulted in an increase in public spending on agriculture, which raised the standard of living of many poor villagers. Social differentiation may have also occurred, but there is not much evidence to show that economic polarization had become a general trend in rural Java (Manning 1988). More recently, market forces seem to have become an influential force in the lives of small-scale farmers. Farmers were shown to have made rational decisions in both the farming system and market, besides contributing to an improvement in rural incomes and welfare (Van der Eng 1996). Li (2014) in her study on the indigenous Lauje highlanders of Sulawesi illustrates how indigenous farmers adapted to economic changes through the planting of more productive crops. This eventually led to the individualization of their land rights under the sway of an increasingly neoliberal regime of property relations. The native people lost control over their collective traditional land and went on to establish capitalist relations with rules of competition and profit (Li 2014). A transmigration programme was implemented to address the problem of Java’s dense population. This programme served to move smallholders from populous areas in Java and Bali to other less developed areas in the outer A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Indonesia: Whither Involution, Demographics, and Development?

69

islands in order to promote the distribution of agricultural development and provide appropriate farmland to the migrant farmers. This policy was formalized with the legislation of law no. 3 in 1972. In the new farming areas, farmers were provided with at least 2 ha of farm and yard land. In many cases, yard land was an additional 0.5 ha away from the farmland. As of 2012, the programme has created farming opportunities for 2.2 million households in 3,425 villages. Some of these villages have even become the new centres of districts and provinces. Having said that, the programme faced several challenges due to land infertility in some of the selected relocation sites, lack of infrastructure which inhibited access to some of these sites, as well as other problems arising from mismanagement. The effort to relocate Javanese farmers to other areas in Indonesia actually had its beginnings in the colonial era, when the Dutch government attempted to supply the outer Java islands with plantation workers. The first wave of migrant farmers from Java to Sumatera began relocating in 1905. The programme was continued by the government of independent Indonesia, which reached a peak in migration numbers during REPELITA III (1979 to 1984) with about 535,000 families having been relocated in that time. The transmigration programme has received criticism due to effects such as deforestation and a perceived dilution of culture in the recipient islands (Fearnside 1997). In more recent times, the migration of farm workers has also been sponsored by private companies and communities developing plantations in the outer islands, especially in Sumatera and Kalimantan. In 1986, the Indonesian government developed another transmigration programme which aimed to support the cash crop plantations in the outer islands. The programme was called Perusahaan Inti Rakyat which translated to “Community Core Company”. Smallholder participants were provided farmland for the cultivation of cash crops for large plantation estates plasma. The farmers received 2 ha of land for farming and 0.5 ha for housing and yard land. The state or private plantation company functioned as the inti (“core”) of the main plantation and processed the produce. Effectively, all the cash crop products from plasma farmers were collected to supply the inti or core company production. The inti-plasma plantation mechanism has been referred to as the Nucleus Estates and Smallholders scheme (Gatto, Wollni, and Qaim 2015). The Nucleus Estates and Smallholders scheme is ongoing and is now mainly employed in oil palm plantations. The oil palm plantation area in Indonesia reached 14 million ha in 2017.1 About 1

https://www.bps.go.id/linkTableDinamis/view/id/838 (Accessed November 2018). A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

70 

Holi Bina Wijaya

4.756 million ha (34%) of oil palm plantations are farmed by smallholders, with companies cultivating the rest of the plantation areas (Ministry of Agriculture Indonesia 2017). With regards to the Nucleus Estates and Smallholders scheme, Gatto et al. (2015) reported that the conflict of land rights and detail contracts were commonplace, especially for members of autochthonous communities involved in this programme. These local farmers have to arrange for land title administration by themselves, which is costly and requires some time to process. As a result, these locals tend to attain agricultural development at a slower pace. In general, socio-economic factors and development policies are key factors affecting the development of plantation farmers (Gatto et al. 2015). Anggraini and Grundmann (2013) found that in some cases the expansion of oil palm plantations by smallholders was achieved through the conversion of forests and arable land. As a result of the state’s inability to control plantation expansion, some of these instances of land conversion involved smallholder collaboration with smaller companies. From 1998 to 1999, Indonesia faced an economic crisis. This was followed by a reformation effort to decentralize the government system and further democratize the political system. These reforms brought about some challenges. The long history of centralized governance in Indonesia left the local government system and officers unprepared to face the changes brought about by the reforms (Vickers 2013). Local systems and officials also lacked the competency to manage the new local development challenges they were faced with. According to the World Bank, the Indonesian government’s effectiveness had been limited by the inadequacy and lack of accountability of national and local public officers, who in some cases fail to adequately address local needs (World Bank 2010). This state of affairs has been thought to have resulted from Indonesia’s decentralization process. In addition, the stability of the intensive farming programme during Indonesia’s centralized regime led to the dependency of the rural agricultural sector on the state, which only further complicated Indonesia’s attempts to move towards decentralization. In the decentralization era, some agricultural support systems failed due to the varying competencies of different local governments. While these conditions were challenging for farmers and made it more difficult for them to carry out their agricultural practices, opportunities were also presented for farmers to solve local issues more independently. While not all were successful in managing the challenges which came with decentralization, many rural success stories depicted the rise of local leaders and champions who were able to unify local resources and stakeholders, as well as the emergence of entrepreneurship and useful innovations. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Indonesia: Whither Involution, Demographics, and Development?

71

Farming labour systems also underwent some transformations in the course of Indonesia’s development. In the 1970s and 1980s, the traditional Bawon system that was driven by community social bonds changed in the face of increasing commercialization. Instead of privileging community ties, the system became more market-oriented. Having said that, it should be acknowledged that farmers still prefer to forge patron-client relationships with their workers in order to encourage and maintain high-quality work performance (Susilowati 2005). Rustinsyah (2015), in her research on subsidized fertilizer distribution in Pelem Village (Pare Regency, East Java), suggested that the success of the agricultural development programme may be attributable to the existence of social capital during its implementation. The smallholder farming system in Indonesia is currently still based on labour-intensive farming. Between 2001 and 2010, the use of mechanical power in the field averaged at about 0.31 hp/ha (Paman et al. 2014). Annually, rice farming used an average of 83.26 man-days/ha and 7 machine-days/ha. Farmers started using simple machines in order to save on labour, time, and cost (Paman et al. 2014). Some farming machinery such as hand tractors, threshing machines, and mobile rice mills, had replaced the buffalo and cows which were used to support agricultural activities in the past. As farming activities are generally small in scale, the move towards fully mechanized agriculture has been difficult (Panuju et al. 2013). The most recent legislative act which has had a direct impact on smallholders is the village law 6/2014, a law which provides villages with more autonomy to manage their development. This is, in fact, in line with the spirit of government decentralization reforms in Indonesia which started in 1999. The Village Law assigns villages the authority to manage people’s interests, village institutions, and funding resources to further development and improve villagers’ quality. The law also promotes the involvement of residents in the management of village development (Indonesia 2014). Antlöv et al. (2016) noted that village governance was transformed: villages had more authority to make high-level decisions; there was a greater appreciation of cultural diversity and local aspirations; and village heads were partnered with village representative boards (Badan Permusyawaratan Desa-BPD) to achieve greater balance of power and democracy in village politics. Aside from greater autonomy, the villages also received greater support in terms of funding. Before the Village Law was legislated, villages derived state funding primarily from their local governments. With the implementation of the Village Law, however, at least 10% of village funding is now sourced A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

72 

Holi Bina Wijaya

through tax retributions (which create revenue for local governments) and national balance transfers. There has been a significant increase in village development funding from about 4.6 trillion rupiah in 2005 to about 30 trillion rupiah in 2015 (BPS-Statistics Indonesia, 2016). The large size and high growth rate of Indonesia’s population has put pressure on available farmland and the distribution of rural resources. With increases in family size and no subsequent increases in farmland size, land becomes progressively fragmented through inheritance, resulting in a decrease in the average size of plots. The average smallholder in Indonesia works with a limited amount of land. For many, their land plots have decreased to the minimum size required for subsistence farming. This tends to encourage farmers to transfer either the ownership of their properties or change the way they use their land. At least 67% of land converted in West Java Province from 2000 to 2002 has been comprised of rice fields (Irawan 2011). The repurposing of agricultural or rural lands for the development of urban spaces also typically takes place at the urban periphery. For instance, Firman (1997) noted how much of the prime agricultural land from the urban periphery of the northern region of West Java is being transformed into large new towns and industrial estates.

Issues Facing Smallholders Today The issues faced by smallholders in Indonesia mostly stem from the smallscale farmers’ limited capacity to improve their situation or manage the external pressures which come from dynamic socio-economic and political forces. Consequently, the socio-economic and living standards of smallholders become compromised, with many small-scale farmers either living in poverty or becoming vulnerable to exploitation. The current state of affairs facing Indonesia’s smallholders is the result of long-term processes which have led to long-term challenges that have passed from generation to generation. Many smallholders are mired in a historically and politically rooted cycle of poverty. Transformations in the social and economic environments of smallholders have motivated them to become more independent and become more adept at tackling the issues they face. Today, the increasing commercialization of farming has urged smallholders to engage in more efficient farming practices. The biggest challenge farmers face is the gap between the present demands of the farming industry and their capacity to meet these demands. Farm workers’ wages are increasing due to economic progress and the A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Indonesia: Whither Involution, Demographics, and Development?

73

trend of commercialization in agriculture. However, farming practices in Indonesia still tend to be labour intensive and do not utilize much agricultural machinery (Paman et. al 2014; Panuju et al. 2013). On top of this, the current average national household size in Indonesia has decreased to just 3.9 persons per household.2 The two major constraints on adopting labour-saving technologies have been a combination of large amounts of available cheap labour and low levels of capital available for farmers to invest in such technologies. The underdeveloped state of smallholders has raised fresh concerns about how smallholders may be better and more appropriately supported and empowered. History has shown that being of low economic standing exposes smallholders to a higher risk of being exploited by more powerful players. For instance, the cultivation system implemented by the Dutch in the colonial era resulted in the exploitation of smallholders who were forced to cultivate cash crops for their colonial rulers. In modern times, some private-sector oil palm plantations have collaborated with smallholders to convert forest areas into plantation zones and thus have placed smallholders at risk of being exploitated in their relationship with larger economic players. Smallholders also face the problem of being over-dependent on state support. Although the agricultural development programme implemented by the Indonesian government has promoted higher productivity farming, it has also allowed farmers to become heavily reliant on state support. While reliance on state support is observed in many places across the globe, in Indonesia this reliance has been seen as particularly dysfunctional due to poor state capacity. For example, dependency has inevitably led to problems in situations where the government has either failed to anticipate problems like pest attacks or implemented incompatible policies. Some earlier regulations from the centralized government era have also served to dissuade farmers from attempting to improve upon their own farming activities. The recent development policies and regulations in Indonesia (i.e. the local government law, village law, and the farmers empowerment and protection law), however, are more aligned with the spirit of decentralization and have been more accommodating to local interests. That said, the successful implementation of these policies require villagers and smallholders to be more competent as farmers and more willing to be involved in processes of agricultural and rural development. The main challenge facing smallholders on this front is their low economic standing. 2

https://www.bps.go.id/linkTableDinamis/view/id/849 (Accessed November 2018). A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

74 

Holi Bina Wijaya

In the nearly two decades of the post-New Order era (i.e. since 1998-1999), farmers have had to meet the challenge of a radically transformed political economy in Indonesia. The prospects of a more open society and economy have devolved more independence but also more responsibility to localities and individual farmers. Some entrepreneurial farmers have been able to take advantage of this situation, but others with low levels of financial and human capital have struggled to adjust to the situation in which the central state is less present in directing development. Devolution of policymaking to provincial and local government levels has also met with mixed results, with such devolution often bearing down on local government officials who have been relatively unprepared to take up the challenge. It may, however, be too early to judge the overall effects of the devolution and opening up of the political economy as the past two decades have been an uneven, transitional period in this regard. New economic developments and growth in both rural and urban sectors present smallholders with more opportunities and means to be actively involved in this transformation process, with smallholders now even having the option of branching out into off-farm economic activities. More economically lucrative avenues of employment tempt some farmers to leave the rice farming industry for good or at least diversify their activities to include off-farm work. In some cases, farmers work as seasonal or even permanent employees, either in the city or abroad. The transformation of smallholder practices has also had an impact on village land use, with some rice fields having been converted into industrial zones, residential areas, or areas which serve some other function. Thus, on the whole, the general village living environment has become subjected to wide-ranging change.

Future Prospects of Smallholders in Indonesia The prospects of smallholders in Indonesia are strongly influenced by village and rural development policy, as well as local economic growth rates. Indonesia has been through several stages of transformation which have shaped the trajectory of agricultural and rural development. Governmental decentralization in particular has had a big impact on smallholder prospects as this has led to greater authority being ascribed to local governments to manage rural development and other local issues. Antlöv et al. (2016) described this change as being “nothing less than a quiet revolution in countryside”. The new administration headed by President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo launched the “Nawa Cita” development priority agenda in 2015. One of the A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

75

Indonesia: Whither Involution, Demographics, and Development?

key points of this agenda is the development of Indonesia from its periphery and the strengthening of its villages. This national policy was supported by a substantial budget allocated to both villages as well as development support programmes. In line with the Law of Village 6/2014 (Indonesia 2014), this new policy allocates a larger developmental budget and greater authority to villages as autonomous entities, to plan and carry out local development programmes. Villages are expected to receive more funding for development in the future. According to the World Bank, the total amount of transfers to villages could increase by as much as three times in 2019. Table 2.1 Public funding transfer to village in medium term (IDR trillions, unless otherwise indicated) Villages budget components

Calculation base

National budget transfer (Dana Desa)

10% of regional transfers 10% of fiscal balance funds net of special allocation fund (DAK) 10% of district taxes and levies

District budget

Total Transfer Average-sized village (IDR billion)

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

N/A

20.8

47.7

81.2

103.8

111.8

12.6

34.2

37.6

42.3

55.9

60.3

4.2

4.1

4.3

4.9

5.7

6.4

16.8

59.1

89.5

128.4

165.4

178.5

0.8

1.2

1.7

2.2

2.4

Source: World Bank, 2015

More autonomy in managing development and increased funding for villages could create more opportunities for the improvement of village conditions, especially in terms of providing basic infrastructure and public facilities which can improve the quality of basic services in rural areas. Public spending on villages could also provide more employment and expand local economic activities. With the success of the programme’s implementation comes a large responsibility on the part of development providers to meet the interests of a newly empowered rural community. As Antlöv et al. suggest, national policies will need to complement the improved performance of the rural population in order to actualize their A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

76 

Holi Bina Wijaya

capacity to function as a self-governing community (2016). The efforts to develop villages are aligned with the National Law no. 4 on the Village that was approved in 2014. The Law provides a legal platform for increasing the developmental autonomy of villages (Indonesia 2014). However, villages are required to have strategic and annual development plans before they can acquire access to this budget. Another significant factor influencing the future prospects of smallholders is the action of external markets and technologies on rural areas. In contemporary Indonesia, information and communication technologies have become part of rural life. Upgrades to electrical infrastructures in rural areas have enabled modern devices such as televisions, mobile phones, and other household appliances to become part of smallholder lives in rural areas. These appliances are now commonplace and accessible to smallholder households. Farmers’ lifestyles have been affected by improvements to communication and increased transparency in the dissemination of information. Worldviews that had previously been traditional and insular are now slowly shifting to become more open and innovative. One set of future challenges smallholders will have to negotiate involves the influx of eternal values, activities, and agents – which could either open up more opportunities for improvement or very quickly result in exploitation and competition pressure. Physical rural transformations, especially in Java and some other peripheral areas, will also have an impact on smallholder activities and living conditions. For example, land conversion and urbanization in Java as well as growth in plantation agriculture in the regions of Sumatera, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and Papua in particular, will come to pose specific challenges to local smallholders and test their ability to adapt to change. At present, smallholders have experienced an improvement in their general socio-economic position. More specifically, their economic standing has risen and they have witnessed the modernization of rural social conditions. Improved access to information and technology together with developments in rural infrastructure have broadened the knowledge and perspectives of rural peasants, equipping them with the tools to embrace new opportunities and achieve a higher standard of living. Unfortunately, despite there being some positive changes, the agricultural sector in Indonesia still is not as profitable as non-agricultural sectors and the practice of urban activities. The underdevelopment of smallholders, in relation to other occupational groups in Indonesia’s villages, is therefore a particularly persistent problem. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Indonesia: Whither Involution, Demographics, and Development?

77

References Anggraini, E., and P. Grundmann (2013) “Transactions in the supply chain of oil palm fruits and their relevance for land conversion in smallholdings in Indonesia”, Journal of Environment & Development 22(4): 391-410. Antlöv, H., A. Wetterberg and L. Dharmawan (2016) “Village governance, community life, and the 2014 Village Law in Indonesia”, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 52(2): 161-183. Barlow, C. and C. Condie (1986) “Changing economic relationships in Southeast Asian agriculture and their implications for small farmers”, Outlook on Agriculture 15(4): 167-178. Boeke, J.H. (1953) Economics and Economic Policy of Dual Societies: As Exemplified by Indonesia. Haarlem: H.D. Tjeenk Willink & Zoon N.V. Booth, A. (1989) “Indonesian agricultural development in comparative perspective”, World Development 17(8): 1235-1254. BPS-Statistics Indonesia (2013) Laporan hasil sensus pertanian 2013. Badan Pusat Statistik (Vol. 1). Jakarta: Badan Pusat Statistik. BPS-Statistics Indonesia (2016) Realisasi Penerimaan dan Pengeluaran Pemerintah Desa Seluruh Indonesia 2008-2015. Jakarta: Badan Pusat Statistik. BPS-Statistics Indonesia (2018) Statistical Yearbook of Indonesia 2018. Jakarta: Badan Pusat Statistik. Drakeley, S. (2005) The History of Indonesia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. FAO (2016) FAOSTAT. Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. Retrieved from www.fao.org/faostat/en/#compare (Accessed December 2016) Fearnside, P.M. (1997) “Transmigration in Indonesia: Lessons from its environmental and social impacts”, Environmental Management 21(4): 553-570. Firman, T. (1997) “Land conversion and urban development in the northern region of West Java, Indonesia”, Urban Studies 34(7): 1027-1046. Fuglie, K.O. (2004) “Productivity growth in Indonesian agriculture, 1961-2000”, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 40(2): 209-225. Gatto, M., M. Wollni, and M. Qaim (2015) “Oil palm boom and land-use dynamics in Indonesia: The role of policies and socioeconomic factors”, Land Use Policy 46: 292-303. Geertz, C. (1963) Agricultural Involution: The Process of Ecological Change. Berkeley/ Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press. Gordon, A. (1992) “The poverty of involution: A critique of Geertz’ pseudo-history”, Journal of Contemporary Asia 22(4): 490-513. Indonesia (1945) Constitution of Indonesia. Under C for Constitution? See comment 2. Indonesia (2013) Law of Farmers Empowerment and Protection, Pub. L. no. 19. Indonesia (2014) Law of Village, Pub. L. no. 6. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

78 

Holi Bina Wijaya

Irawan, B. (2011) “Konversi Lahan Sawah di Jawa Barat: Kecenderungan dan Pengaruhnya terhadap Produksi Padi Sawah (Rice field conversion in West Java: their trend and effect on rice field production)”. In: S.M. Pasaribu, H.P. Saliem, H. Soeparno, E. Pasandaran, and F. Kasryno (Eds.), “Konversi dan Fragmentasi Lahan Ancaman terhadap Kemandirian Pangan (Land conversion and fragmentation threats to food independence)”, (1st ed., pp. 125-148). Bogor: IPB Press. Li, T.M. (2014) Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on and Indigenour Frontier. Durham, NC/ London: Duke University Press. Lowder, S.K., J. Skoet and T. Raney (2016) “The number, size, and distribution of farms, smallholder farms, and family farms worldwide”, World Development 87: 16-29. Manning, C. (1988) “Rural employment creation in Java: Lessons from the Green Revolution and the oil boom”, Population and Development Review 14(1): 47-49. Ministry of Agriculture Indonesia (2017) Tree Crop Estate Statistics of Indonesia 2015-2017. Jakarta: Ministry of Agriculture Indonesia. Paman, U., S. Inaba, and S. Uchida (2014) “The mechanization of small-scale rice farming: Labor requirements and costs”, Engineering in Agriculture, Environment and Food 7(3): 122-126. Panuju, D.R., K. Mizuno, and B.H. Trisasongko (2013) “The dynamics of rice production in Indonesia 1961-2009”, Journal of the Saudi Society of Agricultural Sciences 12(1): 27-37. Rustinsyah, initial? (2015) “Social capital and implementation of subsidized fertilizer programme for small farmers : A case study in rural Java , Indonesia”, International Journal of Rural Management 2(1): 25-39. Susilowati, S.H. (2005) “Gejala pergeseran kelembagaan upah pada pertanian padi sawah (Indication of a shift in wage institutions in lowland rice farming)”, Forum Penelitian Agro Ekonomi 23(1): 48-60. Van der Eng, P. (1996) Agricultural Growth in Indonesia: Productivity Change and Policy Impact since 1880. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press Ltd. Van Niel, R. (1964) “The function of land rent under the cultivation system in Java”, The Journal of Asian Studies 23(3): 357-375. Vickers, A. (2013) A History of Modern Indonesia (2nd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press. White, B. (1983). Agricultural Involution and Its Critics: Twenty Years after Clifford Geertz. ISS Working Paper Series no. 6. The Hague: International Institute of Social Studies. World Bank (1992) Indonesia: Agricultural Transformation Challenges and Opportunities. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank (2010) Completing Decentralization. Indonesia Rising: Policy Priorities for 2010 and Beyond. Washington, DC: World Bank. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Indonesia: Whither Involution, Demographics, and Development?

79

World Bank (2015) Indonesia Economic Quarterly: Reforming amid Uncertainty. Washington, DC: World Bank. Yew-Foong, H. (2009) “The (un)changing world of peasants: Two perspectives”, Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 24(1): 18-31.

About the Author Holi Bina Wijaya is a researcher and lecturer at Diponegoro University (Urban and Regional Planning Department) Semarang, Indonesia. His academic interests and research expertise primarily include local economic and rural development, as well as the transformation of smallholders and micro/small enterprises in rural Indonesia.

A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

3

Japan: Government Interventions and Part-time Family Farming Gen Shoji, Kunimitsu Yoshida, and Satoshi Yokoyama

Abstract This chapter reviews pertinent issues facing Japanese smallholders and explores the role of small-scale farming households in contemporary Japan. Here, the influences of agricultural policy and technological innovations on smallholders are considered alongside reviews of key regional differences in Japanese agriculture, based on geographical terrain, management scale and labour force organization. Research reveals that the small-scale nature of household farms, ageing, and a lack of successors are some of the major factors – among others – threatening the persistence of smallholder agriculture in Japan. Keywords: ageing, depopulation, Gentan Seisaku (Acreage Reduction Policy), industrialization, Japan, part-time family farming, rice farming

According to the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries, Japan’s self-sufficiency in grains stands at only 29% because of wheat and feed grain imports. Despite this deficiency, the self-sufficiency rate of rice maintains at 95%. Part-time family farms continue to play a large role in rice production. The 2010 World Census of Agriculture and Forestry in Japan reports that the average paddy-holding size of Japanese farming households which produce rice was only 1.43 ha. Thus, the farm size of most Japanese farming households is small-scale. In this chapter we highlight the particular issues faced by Japanese smallholders and clarify their socio-economic and cultural position in Japan. The position of smallholder family farms has been strongly shaped by government policies over more than fifty years, since the postwar period.

Thompson, Eric, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen (eds), Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789462988170/ch03 A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

82 

Gen Shoji, Kunimitsu Yoshida, and Satoshi Yokoyama

During the war, the Staple Food Control Law of 1942 was enacted to solve serious food shortages and increase farmers’ motivation to produce more rice. Essentially, the government would purchase rice at the highest price from the producers (the producers’ rice price) and sell it at the cheapest price to the consumers (consumers’ rice price). As a result of the law, rice production was greatly increased as intended and Japan was able to successfully solve its food shortage. In the postwar period, the government passed the Agricultural Basic Law of 1961, “Jiritsu Keiei no Ikusei” (Nurturing Viable Farms) with its primary objective of accomplishing the modernization of agriculture. At the time the Agricultural Basic Law was enacted, income disparities between urban and rural areas as well as the agricultural and industrial sectors had been exacerbated by the advancement of urbanization and industrialization during the postwar period of high economic growth (Tashiro 1999). In order to achieve a reduction of these income disparities, this law tried to induce the enlargement of farmland size through processes of land consolidation. This was done in an effort to curb migration rates from rural to urban areas by incentivizing farmers with increased land. Rural to urban migration rates were extremely high during this period, although in traditional fashion the eldest sons of Japanese farm households did not tend to migrate, for rural tradition marked them as the inheritor and successor of the farmland. The duty of his household was to tend the land and pass it on as ancestral land to his descendants. After the 1960s, however, the rice stocks of the Japanese government increased excessively and Japan was faced with the opposite problem from the food shortage of the war and immediate postwar years. The consumption of rice in Japan started to stagnate as economic growth promoted the diversification of dietary habits and a general shift from rice-based consumption to a diet of varied vegetables, fruits, and animal products. To deal with the surplus of rice, the “Gentan Seisaku” (Acreage Reduction Policy) was enacted and implemented beginning in 1970. This sought to reduce rice production by adjusting the production quota for farmers and reducing the total acreage under production across all of Japan. Thereafter, it proved difficult for farmers to increase their income only through agricultural activities and incentivized them to engage more substantially in off-farm activities. Consequently, the structural change in agriculture expected by the Agricultural Basic Law (1961) did not proceed in the direction of the enlargement of farmland size or “nurturing viable farms” but saw an increasing commonality of stable “Kengyō Nōka” (part-time farms). In addition, the A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Japan: Government Interventions and Part-time Family Farming

83

Staple Food Control Law was abolished in 1995 and replaced by the Law for Stabilization of Supply/Demand and Price of Staple Food. After enforcing the new law, producers had no obligation to sell rice to the government and could sell rice to anyone. This was done in a bid to improve the competitiveness of small-scale farmers by removing protectionist measures in order to prepare Japan for the lifting of the ban on importing rice from abroad. In recent years, the challenges that have to be considered by agricultural management entities have become more complex in nature. This is primarily owing to the decrease and stagnation of agricultural prices, as well as increases in production costs due to the rising costs of agricultural materials and fuel prices, the diversification of consumer needs, and growing interests in food safety. In 1999, the Food, Agriculture, and Rural Areas Basic Law took the place of the Agricultural Basic Law, effectively replacing the primary objective of agricultural policy to “nurtur[e] viable farms” with “Koritsuteki katsu Anteiteki na Nogyo-keiei” (efficient and stable farm management) instead. Through the enforcement of this law, Japanese agricultural policy shifted in the direction of securing a stable supply of food, realizing a new agricultural structure to enlarge farmland size, harmonizing food production with environmental conservation, as well as the maintenance and development of rural areas (Tashiro 1999).

What Is a Smallholder in Japan? “By small peasant we mean here the owners or tenant – particularly the former – of a patch of land no bigger, as a rule, than he and his family can till, and no smaller than can sustain the family” (Engels 1894). The definition of the smallholder by Engels in the nineteenth century – in the context of France and Germany – has been widely accepted in the field of agricultural economics in Japan (Shogenji 2014). Yet, we see in Japan something of a conundrum putting various aspects of this definition in conflict with each other. The definition focuses on three things: the size of the landholding relative to the ability of a family-unit to cultivate the land and for the size of the holding to sustain that family unit. We find in Japan a situation in which the size of holdings in most areas of Japan – outside of Hokkaido – are sub-optimum for sustaining a family without a significant off-farm income. While Engels’ definition was imagined in the context of subsistence peasant agriculture, contemporary Japan’s agricultural sector is dominated by part-time family farming and a family-unit organized around complimentary on-farm and off-farm economic activity known as A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

84 

Gen Shoji, Kunimitsu Yoshida, and Satoshi Yokoyama

the “san-chan nogyo” or “three-chan farm”, in which a male, husband’s offfarm income supplements the farming activity of his wife and parents – the three “chan”: okā-chan (mother/wife), ojī-chan (grandfather), and obā-chan (grandmother). In Japan, attention to smallholder farming has tended to focus on such a family unit, rather than specifically or exclusively on farm size. Nevertheless, the concept of the Japanese smallholder is related to the standard landholding size, due to the effects of land reform policies enacted in postwar Japan. After World War II, tenant farmers were allowed to own a small amount of farmland based on land reform implemented by the American postwar, martial-law administration known as General Headquarters (GHQ). The main aim of this reform was to narrow economic disparities between absentee landlords who owned farmland but did not engage in farming themselves and tenant farmers who handed over most of the crops grown to a landlord as tenant farm rent. The government set a limit on the amount of farmland each household could own, an amount defined by the total farmland one family could realistically cultivate as a household. To facilitate this, the government forcibly purchased farmland from the absentee landlords and then sold these to tenant farmers. Large landholdings of more than 12 ha in Hokkaido or 3 ha in prefectures excluding Hokkaido were purchased and redistributed in smaller tracts by the state. This led to the policy-driven outcome that smallholdings consisting of less than 3 ha of farmland became the norm throughout the country. At the same time, due to the advancement of industrialization from the post-World War II period until about the early 1970s, young men, with the exception of eldest sons inheriting farms from their primogenitors, migrated from agricultural communities to urban areas. After the late 1970s, industrial sectors that required unskilled labourers began to relocate to rural areas. As a result, many farmers started engaging in factory work in addition to keeping farmland. Moreover, agricultural labour within families consisted mainly of older persons (specifically ageing parents) and women as a result of predominantly male migration to urban regions, propelling the development of the “san-chan nōgyō” or the “three-chan family farm”. In addition, rice farming saw considerable labour savings through the improvement of the government-subsidized agricultural production base, mechanization, and the spread of agrochemicals. All of these contributed to the expansion of part-time farm households. Income of part-time farm households in general, therefore, relies not only on agricultural products but also government subsidies, off-farm activities, pensions, and other sources of A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Japan: Government Interventions and Part-time Family Farming

85

off-farm income. Thus, the farm management style of smallholders in Japan developed into Kengyō Kazoku Keiei (part-time family farming) (Tama 2005). Yet the concept of “smallholders” would appear to be defined primarily from the point of view of farm size. So far, academic fields including agricultural economics in Japan do not tend to define smallholders by farm size. Japanese agriculture is roughly divided into two types: intensive agriculture with large labour force inputs in small areas such as horticulture and dairy farming, and land-extensive agriculture such as paddy-field farming and upland farming, with smaller labour inputs into larger areas. Because the two agricultural management types are extremely different, it is not appropriate to make a general comparison between them. There is a large difference in annual working hours between land-extensive agriculture such as rice farming and other farming types. It is inevitable that farmers growing vegetables, fruit trees, and flowers in family farms will be much smaller in scale compared to extensive paddy rice farming, the demands of which necessitate a larger-scale operation. According to the 2010 World Census of Agriculture and Forestry in Japan, the number of agricultural management entities which consist of less than 1 ha of farmland, accounted for 55.5% of all farms. Many of these entities are rice farmers. As the government formulated agricultural policies based on the assumption that the main farm management style in Japan consists of a family unit, many policies were formulated with the intention to develop family farming. However, when importation of agricultural products increased due to regional integration under the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), strengthening the international competitiveness of Japan’s agriculture became a crucial issue. The trouble is that land-extensive agriculture, typified by small-scale rice farming, is not competitive in the international market. Taking these points into account, attention to smallholdings defined by farm size based on the size appropriate to that run by family-farm households would seem warranted, allowing us to compare smallholder trends in Japan with that of other Asian countries. One way we can define smallholders by size is by referring to the optimal scale for land-extensive agriculture. In 2011, the Farm Management Society of Japan conducted a symposium entitled “Farm size issue of farm management: Consideration of optimal scale in land-extensive agriculture”, where agronomists were invited to discuss what would be reasonable farm sizes for paddy-field farming, upland farming and dairy farming. In the special case of paddy-field farming managed by one set of agricultural machines and one operator, Akiyama (2011) reported that although rice production costs decrease with every unit expansion of the management scale, the A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

86 

Gen Shoji, Kunimitsu Yoshida, and Satoshi Yokoyama

scale economy curve nevertheless goes flat around 10 ha. This means that if farmers cultivate rice paddy fields of 10 ha or more, they will not be able to take advantage of scale without additional machines and workers. Therefore from an optimal scale perspective, it is worthwhile to consider whether Japanese smallholders could actually be defined by 10 ha of farm size. The average paddy field size in Hokkaido was around 9.2 ha in 2010 – a size large enough to enjoy the advantages of scale – whereas that of prefectures excluding Hokkaido only averaged around 1.1 ha. Due to the sheer difference in farm sizes between Hokkaido and the other prefectures, it seems necessary to have to consider these cases separately. However, if we fix a maximum upper limit of 10 ha of paddy field as the standard to qualify as a Japanese smallholder, about 89.1% of the commercial farm households which hold paddy fields in the prefectures excluding Hokkaido would then be classified as smallholders. While a ratio of about 90% seems rather large, the income data of farm households suggests that 10 ha might be a reasonable measure for defining smallholders. Generally, it is only possible for farmers to cover their household expenses if they hold more than 10 ha of rice-planted areas. Farmers who hold less than 10 ha of rice-planted areas cannot cover their household expenses if there is no additional off-farm income. In the case of farmers who hold less than 3 ha of rice-planted areas, household expenses are in deficit even with added input of off-farm income. Such households typically make up the deficit with pension incomes, given that the average farmer or farm family is or includes older members who have retired from other off-farm careers. If a smallholder is to be defined as someone who fully subsists from agricultural income, it is possible to set 10 ha of paddy field and lower as the qualifying measure for a smallholder in Japan. In addition, such a measure is consistent even when considering the lower limit of the optimal scale of rice production in Japan. However, the question now arises: What is the typical farm household in Japan? It is of little doubt that the part-time family farm which engages in offfarm activities is the most common form of farm household in Japan. There are few farm households that are able to cover their household expenses with income solely from agriculture. Farm households who hold more than 3 ha of rice-planted areas are able to make their living by combining their incomes from agriculture and off-farm activities, without resorting to pension income. Thus, although the farm size of 3 ha does not qualify as the optimal size for rice farming, it might nevertheless be a reasonable measure to set for defining Japanese smallholders, considering the current state of farm management in Japan. In the prefectures excluding Hokkaido, farm households which hold less than 3 ha account for 62.1%. Additionally, A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Japan: Government Interventions and Part-time Family Farming

87

the fact that the average paddy size of commercial farmers is about 2.1 ha is worthy of special mention. It may therefore be said that smallholders in Japan are defined as parttime family farmers who only own farmland of less than 3 ha. However, this definition of smallholders has not been completely discussed in relevant academic fields such as agricultural economics, farm management, rural sociology, and agricultural geography. Our portrayal of the part-time family farm as representative of smallholder agriculture is, in other words, inductive and based on numerical frequency calculated from statistical data, not the common theoretical frame of reference used in other fields such as agricultural economics. We see such part-time family farms in our ethnographic case study material on farm management by smallholders in Japan. For example, typical characteristics of Japanese smallholders’ farm management were found in our case study of the Zuiryu area of Hitachiōta city, Ibaraki prefecture, which is situated about 100 km northeast of Tokyo (Tabayashi et al. 1998). The shallow valley had become the site for the development of paddy fields and the flat plateau is dotted with various horticultural crops such as flowers and grapes. The Zuiryu area experienced urbanization after the 1970s at a comparable pace to other areas in the suburbs of Tokyo and enjoys relatively easy access to major commercial cities. Unsurprisingly, about 72% of farmers engage in constant off-farm activities. Their average farmland size is less than 1 ha and even full-time farmers in this area hold less than 2 ha of farmland because of labour shortages and the ageing of farmers. This type of small-scale polyculture-farming is not a special case of agricultural structure, but remains widely observed throughout Japan. We f ind similar structures, with important modif ications in different local contexts, across other field sites, including urban-fringe agriculture around Kanazawa City (Ishikawa Prefecture), upland orchard farming in Nagano Prefecture, and Iwate Prefecture plains in the Tohoku Region. Therefore, it would also be appropriate to use farm management structure as a framework for the characterization of Japanese smallholders, derived from a socio-economic and ethnographic perspective, rather than or in addition to sheer farm size, which other fields tend to focus on.

Smallholders in Japan Today Japanese agriculture, like that of most nations, is marked by a great deal of diversity, reflected in the different ways that farms, farmland, and farming A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

88 

Gen Shoji, Kunimitsu Yoshida, and Satoshi Yokoyama

Table 3.1 Working hours of the rice smallholder Agriculture parcipants

Agricultural working hours

of family labor

Female

of employee labor

Less than 0.5ha

1.90

471

454

Seniour Cizens 139 360

0.5ࠥ1.0ha

1.91

662

637

226

443

1.0ࠥ2.0ha

2.02

917

888

309

612

29

2.0ࠥ3.0ha

2.09

1,487

1,409

474

842

77

3.0ࠥ5.0ha

2.15

1,819

1,698

624

984

120

5.0ࠥ7.0ha

2.14

2,231

2,105

648

734

124

7.0ࠥ10.0ha

2.34

2,779

2,480

761

816

299

10.0ࠥ15.0ha

2.41

4,020

3,667

1,252

848

340

15.0ࠥ20.0ha

2.60

4,320

3,470

1,010

515

848

20.0ha more over

2.75

4,695

3,641

964

610

1,054

17 25

Unit: people, hours

Source: 2014 Total Agricultural Output and Agricultural Income Produced

households are classified, organized, and undertake production, including crops and processes. First, we see diverse classifications for land, based on use (e.g. farmlands, versus forests and residential use) and on geography: urban areas, plains, mountains, and intermediate-mountainous areas. Second, farms vary by farm size, composition, and the number of members participating in agriculture. Large farms have more participants but small farms account for more overall working hours, nationwide. There are also important gender differences in participation, with agriculture remaining a male-dominated sector both in terms of hours worked and the occupation of management positions. Third, there is also diversity in on-farm and off-farm income and a range in terms of how dependent farm households are on farm income. Again larger farms, which are a minority of all farms, tend to rely more exclusively on farm income, whilst smaller farms rely on a mix of on-farm and off-farm incomes, including the pension income of senior-citizen farmers and family members. Finally there is a diversity of crops and farming processes. Of Japan’s 377,900 km 2 total land area, 66.3% is classif ied as forest. Farmland accounts for 12.1%, while 3.1% is classified as residential land. Thus, it is evident that the greater part of Japan consists of forests. As a result, the indicators of forests and mountains are used for the regional classification of agriculture. Concretely speaking, the ratio of forest and the ratio of steep slope farmland are referred to as indicators for agricultural classifications. The urban indicator is also used: for example, the area of DID (Densely Inhabited Districts) and the degree of population density. Altogether, agricultural regions in Japan are classified as either “Urban area”, “Plain area”, “Intermediate-mountainous area” or “Mountainous area” according to these indicators. There is an order to this classification of agricultural regions, A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Japan: Government Interventions and Part-time Family Farming

89

moving from urban areas, mountainous areas, plain areas, and then finally to intermediate-mountainous areas. In terms of the distribution of farmland, the urban, plain, intermediate-mountainous and mountainous areas accounts for 15.2%, 46.7%, 27.9%, and 10.2% of national land, respectively. Here, we can see that most of Japan’s farmland has been cultivated in plain areas. However, this pattern of distribution does not hold across all of Japan’s regions but rather differs according to the prevailing geography. To officially be considered a farmer in a Japanese farming household, following official census and survey guidelines, a household member has to participate in farming for 60 days or more (two months) in a given year. Larger-scale farming households with larger areas of land have more members participating as farmers. Rice-farming households with 20 ha or more averaged 2.75 members participating in agriculture. By contrast, households with 0.5 ha or less had only 1.9 members officially participating in agriculture (i.e. working 60 days per year or more on agriculture). In addition, the distribution of annual working hours amongst members participating in agriculture differs depending on paddy field size. The average agricultural working hours of rice-farm households of less than 0.5 ha is 454 hours in one year (454/1.9 = 239 hours per participating member = approximately 5 hours per week), but the average annual working hours of agriculture of rice-farm households of 20.0 ha or more is 4,695 hours (4,695/2.75 = 1,707hrs/member = approximately 34 hours per week). This exponential increase in hours worked relative to farm size implies that larger farms are being worked more intensively and are more geared toward surplus and market production. It would be worth investigating further whether or not very small-scale operations (less than half a hectare with less than two members participating in agriculture) are more common for older farmers or farmers with substantial off-farm income. Statistics suggest that while farming on larger-scale rice farms is more intensive than that on smaller-scale farms, the smaller-scale farms account for more total working hours overall. For large-scale rice farms, the annual working hours of agriculture by employee labour are 1,054 hours and account for 22.4% of the total agricultural working hours per year on such farms. In contrast, family labour accounts for 96% or more of agricultural working hours for farm households with less than 2.0 ha. The labour contributions of senior citizens are especially important for small-scale farm households. In farm households with less than 0.5 ha, the total annual working hours of agriculture by senior citizens is 360 hours. The hours of labour input on small-scale farms accounts for 76.4% of total agricultural working hours. The ratio of agricultural participation per household does not differ greatly by gender, but overall and on average, men work more hours than women. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

90 

Gen Shoji, Kunimitsu Yoshida, and Satoshi Yokoyama

Gender participation is 0.95 females and 1.03 males per household – so only slightly more men than women. But agricultural working hours of male agricultural participants are 603 hours per year, as compared to 306 hours per year for female household members participating in agriculture. The ratio of overall of agricultural working hours for women is 20% to 35% overall versus 80% to 65% for men overall. Agricultural activities by female agricultural participants involve manual farm labour, keeping the books, and so on. In addition, farms managed by women are relatively rare (Saito 1997) as few woman own farmland; only 9% of all farmland is owned by women. Moreover, local agricultural commissions organized in each municipality in Japan are overwhelmingly led by men. The agricultural commission controls the buying, selling, lending, and borrowing of farmland. Only 5.7% of all committee members of agricultural commissions throughout Japan are women. Various region-based production areas for farm products have formed over time in Japan. For example, the Hokkaido region produces wheat and potato and the Hokkaido region accounts for 78.0% of all potato production in Japan. By contrast, the Aomori Prefecture in the Tohoku region is the biggest production area of apples, making up 57.3% of all apple production in Japan. Rice, however, consists of 54.0% of all farmland in Japan. Furthermore, 71.1% of Japanese farmers farm and sell rice. Almost all (99.9%) rice production in Japan consists of paddy or wet rice. Only 3,000 tons of upland (non-paddy) rice is produced per year. In the Tohoku and the Hokuriku regions, the proportion of paddy field to farmland is particularly high. These regions are famous production areas of rice, which consists of 41.5% of all their farm production. On the other hand, the productivity of agriculture is rather low in the Chugoku and the Shikoku regions due to extremely mountainous terrain. This has caused many farmers to retire during the 1960s and 1970s (Shinohara 1969; Sakaguchi 1974) and the abandonment of a large proportion of cultivated land.

Processes of Transformation and Persistence In postwar Japan, the fate of agriculture generally – and smallholders specifically – has been heavily influenced by government regulatory regimes and the dominant role of the Japan Agricultural Cooperative (JA). By and large, government policies have shaped the extent and structure of farming. The JA, which is largely controlled by the government, has been the primary instrument for organizing the production and distribution of agricultural products, especially rice. For more than a century, government interventions A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Japan: Government Interventions and Part-time Family Farming

91

have seen a number of waves of land reform and land rationalization, which have variously redistributed and consolidated land to greater or lesser degrees. Extensive mechanization, as well as the introduction of new rice breeds and other crops, have changed labour inputs, productivity, and profitability. And beginning in the 1960s and accelerating towards the present, rural depopulation and an ageing farming population have been major concerns for family and smallholder farming. The greatest changes in the amount of land used for agriculture in the past century took place around the 1920s, when agricultural land use was expanding. The amount of land used for agriculture plateaued by 1940 and decreased sharply as World War II intensified. The postwar years brought significant changes to agricultural policy, with the American GHQ administration introducing land reforms between 1947 and 1950. The reforms dismantled the feudalistic landownership system, which was seen as having been a contributor to rising militarism in the 1930s and before (Teruoka 2008a). Under GHQ reforms, farmland of more than 1 hectare owned by a single landlord was purchased by the government and sold to landless tenant farmers. Prior to revision of the Agricultural Land Law in 1962, tenant farmers could acquire up to a maximum of 3 hectares, or 12 hectares in Hokkaido. In the wake of GHQ land reforms, the number of self-employed farmers rose from 28% of all farmers to 55%, and the number of tenant farmers fell from 28% to 8%, leading to a dramatic rise in the number of independent small-scale farmers (Teruoka 2008a). A structure of few large-scale farmers and many small-scale farmers has persisted to the present day. While this structure remains a conspicuous feature of farming in Japan, a modest amount of land consolidation has occurred since the 1960s. In 1950, the average farm size managed per farmer was 0.73 hectares and 74.5% of farmers were managing less than 1 hectare of arable land. Only 0.5% of farmers were managing more than 3 hectares of arable land. The number of farms and the amount of agricultural land in Japan remained steady until 1960, after which both started to decrease. The decrease in the number of farmers occurred principally among small-scale farmers. Approximately 70% of farmers managing tracts of less than 1 hectare either expanded the scale of their farms or left farming altogether. Conversely since 1980, the number of mid- and large-scale farmers managing more than 3 hectares of land has increased. These farmers whose operations became mid- to large-scale of more than 3 hectares expanded their farms by purchasing or leasing farmland from the small-scale farmers with less than 3 hectares, who left farming during this period. The average amount of land managed per farmer grew from the 1980s onward, especially as the A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

92 

Gen Shoji, Kunimitsu Yoshida, and Satoshi Yokoyama

amount of leased land increased. Government policies also encouraged farmers to scale up their operations through the increased liberalization of rules around owning, operating, and leasing farmland (Shogenji 2006). At present, however, despite the growth of large-scale farmland management, small-scale farmers operating less than 3 hectares remain the large majority of farmers in Japan. Throughout the postwar period, and even before, Japanese agriculture has been shaped by intensive government regulations focused on production, distribution, imports, and exports. The distribution of agricultural products was restricted over a long period under the Staple Food Control Law, passed during World War II in 1942 but not repealed until 1995. The aim of the law was to regulate the distribution systems for the provision of foodstuffs (Hayashi 2008). Thus, until recently, the government directly controlled the distribution of agricultural products, particularly rice, wheat, and other staples and the import and export of such products. Even long after the war ended, high tariffs were placed on the import of rice and other agricultural products (Teruoka 2008b). When the Agricultural Basic Law was enacted in 1961 with the aim of increasing agricultural production (Teruoka 2008b), it was designed to redress the issue of income inequality between agricultural and urban production by restructuring small-scale family farming, encouraging petty farmers to give up their land and authorizing farmers to develop large-scale farm management businesses. The focus of these reforms was to improve the management and scale of agricultural systems and to increase agricultural income (Nagaoka et al. 1978). This elective expansion led to an increase in the production of fruits, vegetables, and livestock that were experiencing an increased demand and a reduction in the production of crops experiencing lower demand, as well as the rationalization of the production of agricultural products facing stiff competition from imports. Improving agriculturerelated structures related to both the size of farms and the modernization of farm management, in order to create independent management entities. Small-scale rice farming continued, however, despite the fact that most small family farms were shifting toward off-farm activities after the farmland reforms were implemented and few farmers developed commercial-scale management. The main reason why small-scale paddy cultivation continued was due to the implementation of government policies to adjust rice production, commonly known as acreage reduction policies. From 1967 onwards, rice went from shortages to surpluses as production increased and consumption declined (Teruoka 2008b). In 1970, the government implemented the Acreage Reduction Policy, designed to limit rice production by encouraging A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Japan: Government Interventions and Part-time Family Farming

93

rice farmers to grow different crops or leave fields fallow (Teruoka, 2008c). By growing different crops and leaving fields fallow, the acreage utilized for rice production was reduced and in return, farmers were paid a subsidy in accordance with their reduction. Despite the price of rice remaining low, subsidies provided to farmers to diversify crop production as part of the government’s Acreage Reduction Policy has encouraged small-scale farmers to keep farming their land (Yoshida 2012). These policies and subsidies made it profitable to engage in small-scale family farming but following the ratification of the Uruguay Round GATT Agreement, the 778% tariff on rice was dropped and replaced with a policy on minimum access rice imports (Teruoka 2003). In addition to a strong regulatory regime, Japanese agriculture has been dominated by the Japan Agricultural Cooperative or JA. The JA was established in 1947 after World War II out of two previously existing organizations. The first were the agricultural associations known as “No-kai”, established in 1881. As the political and economic standing of the landlord ownership system declined after the Russo-Japanese War, the No-kai agricultural associations were set up to free farmers from their previous dependency on bureaucratic intervention (Ushiyama 2008). Industrial cooperatives, first established in 1890, were the second organizational precursors to the JA. Industrial cooperatives were organized to represent groups of small farmers in hamlets in order to create economies of scale for distribution, establish credit cooperatives, and to expand their own market economies without relying on commercial financial capital. The merged No-kai and industrial cooperatives were restructured as the JA. The JA was established with the aim of improving the social and economic conditions of farmers through three primary means. The first involves “multiple-purpose” instructions for agricultural cooperatives on farming, supply of agricultural materials, marketing of agricultural products and et cetera. The second is that almost all farmers are members of the JA and use the JA’s extensive agriculturally related services. As of 2015, in order to qualify for membership of the organization, the applicant must either cultivate at least 0.1 hectare of farmland or spend at least 90 days of the year working on agricultural activities. But non-farmers can be “associate members” and also use the JA’s services. Third, the JA operates through a three-level (local, prefecture, and national) governance system. The local level cooperatives provide the most practical assistance to small-scale farming businesses, but they are integrated into an overall national system. There are approximately 700 regional cooperatives in Japan, which roughly conform to the size of a (sub-prefectural) municipality. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

94 

Gen Shoji, Kunimitsu Yoshida, and Satoshi Yokoyama

The JA’s activities can be categorized into three sections: farming, credit, and insurance. The farming section is related to rice-farming smallholders. This is one of the JA’s most important activities and enacts the regulatory function of the “Staple Food Control Law” (1942-1995). The national government used the JA to collect rice from farmers in order to efficiently implement the food control system. Rice farmers were required to sell rice to the JA. The JA manages large grain elevators, to which small farmers bring their products after harvest. The rice can be dried and stocked in the elevator and the government through the JA can control the distribution of rice and rice prices. Some rice farmers grow other crops for self-sufficiency; however, these are surplus crops for the farmer’s family. These surplus crops are sold at local farmers’ markets, some of which the JA manages. These markets primarily sell local foods and agricultural goods. Their activities support local food consumption and increase the farmers’ incomes. Other activities associated with farmers’ markets include retail shopping services (“A-coop”). The JA has also expanded into retail automobile sales for residents in rural areas. In the early twentieth century, land rationalization started to spread nationwide following the 1899 Arable Land Readjustment Act, which by 1905 had been implemented in 965 districts and across 30,241 hectares of land (Teruoka 2008a). The cost of implementing land rationalization was borne, in part, by the government. The prefectures bore 50% of the cost in 1906 and in 1908, the national treasury provided a 50% subsidy for each prefecture. This was then followed by the passing of the new Arable Land Readjustment Law in 1908, which focused primarily on drainage and irrigation work. After the work was completed, maintenance and control of the drainage and irrigation facilities became the responsibility of ordinary water supply cooperatives or the municipality under the purview of the Home Ministry. The next nationwide adjustment of land subdivisions took place as part of land improvement projects following the passing of the Land Improvement Law in 1949 (Teruoka 2008a). Plans were made to reclaim, develop, and improve the drainage of wetlands and turn them into dry paddy fields in order to relieve food shortages after the end of World War II. This included the large-scale reclamation of lakes and marshes such as Hachirōgata and Kahokugata. Furthermore, it was designed to rationalize the small-scale, dispersed farming system that had continued even after farmland reform. The land improvement projects (including land subdivision adjustments) during this time mainly took place in Northern Japan and Hokuriku where production output was low despite the fact that rice farming was the primary industry. Following the implementation of agricultural structural reform projects in 1962, the focus of most of the work shifted to mechanization (Teruoka A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Japan: Government Interventions and Part-time Family Farming

95

2008b). In practical terms, this meant a focus on land consolidation projects that restructured farmland from a petty-dispersed farming system to collectives divided into 30 acre divisions, which were large enough for viable mechanization. As a result, adjustments to land subdivisions primarily took place on the plains; the percentage of land subdivisions of at least 30 acres was 8% in 1968, 19% in 1974, and approximately 50% in 1990 (Teruoka 2008b). Although there were various financing systems in place to help farmers, the farmers still took on significant responsibility in implementing mechanization. As a result, the difference between part-time farmers and the few farmers who used the subsidies to modernize their farms and rationalize their economic management became increasingly evident. Large land subdivision adjustments continued to take place for each land subdivision of at least 1 hectare between 1990 and the present day (Isaka 1994; Hirota 1995). The main objective was to save labour and reduce production costs in order to allow farmers to continue their work on low-profit rice paddies as rice prices stagnated at low levels. This made it possible for only a very small number of farmers to manage vast tracts of farmland. Moreover, as the number of farmers continued to decrease, the number of people using farmland was accordingly limited. As farmers made use of subsidies such as those for structural improvement projects from the 1960s onwards, agricultural mechanization started to spread to every farm. The number of planting and harvesting machines owned by farmers increased from the 1970s. The spread of rice-planting machines was hastened by developments in seedling raising technology (Shimizu 2009). In the 1960s, the creation of technology to move a seedling bed directly from a seedling box, mould, or pot to the field made it possible to mechanize seedling planting. The first machine to assist with harvesting work was the reaper-binder, which arrived in the 1960s. However, the early reapers were not equipped to bind during the reaping phase and the combine harvester, since it was both small and able to reap and thresh, was seen as more desirable (Shimizu 2009). The combine harvester was used in areas with abundant rice paddies and large-scale rice paddy farming areas, while the reaper-binder was used in areas with a large amount of small-scale farmland, such as in the mountains (Shimizu 2009). The spread of these machines resulted in the total mechanization of rice paddy work in Japan (known as “a consistent system of mechanized work”) (Shimizu 2009). This change also drastically reduced the amount of labour needed to work a rice paddy. In 1955, it took just under 195 hours; in 1965, it took approximately 140 hours; then since the 1970s, it fell dramatically so that in 2000, only approximately 30 hours were needed (Tabayashi 2007). A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

96 

Gen Shoji, Kunimitsu Yoshida, and Satoshi Yokoyama

Changes to the popularity, profitability, and policies toward various crops has also had an impact on Japanese agriculture. From the 1960s, upland farms saw a fall in the production of grains such as wheat and beans. Orchard land was also affected by lower fruit prices and liberalization of imports (Kawakubo 2007). Starting in the 1970s, rice paddy fields were subject to production adjustments due to government policies. And the locations and yields of rice production have been influenced by the development of new rice varieties through selective breeding. One of the main reasons rice, which originally came from tropical and warm regions, spread to the extent it has across Japan, Northern Japan in particular, is selective breeding. The selective breeding of rice led to seeds that were resistant to the cold, allowing farmers in Northern Japan to increase their yields of rice to the same level as those in warmer regions (Ohno 1983). Until cold-resistant seeds were specially developed, one in five harvests would suffer from cold damage (Ohno 1983). Rikū No. 132, the most widely used breed by farmers at the time, produced a high yield and was resistant to blast disease but not cold temperatures. Fujisaka No. 5 was then developed in 1948, which was both resistant to the cold and produced a high yield, and thus became the most widely used breed across the farm belt of Northern Japan. During this time, these varieties were bred with a different variety that was stickier, with an amylose content of 15-20% (Fujimaki 2013). This was due to the Japanese people’s strong proclivity for sticky rice (Fujimaki 2013). Subsequently, in 1988, the goal changed to the “Development of New Types of Rice”, and this switch is credited for the spread of the Milky Queen, the Kirara 397, and the Yumepirika rice breeds commonly used today (Fujimaki 2013). In recent years, selective breeding has advanced to the direct sowing of corresponding breeds and direct sowing breeds have emerged that will ideally reduce production costs (Otake 2003). While the selective breeding of rice has been important, there has been little proactive drive to develop hybrid rice varieties in Japan. A test run of the F1 breed was carried out by an American firm in the 1980s (Kurihara and Ueda 1984). However, this did not lead to the introduction of hybrid rice varieties in Japan. It has been argued that this was partly due to the fact that higher yielding rice was not needed in a country already producing a surplus but also because the Japonica varieties preferred by the Japanese people were poor in hybrid vigour (Fujimaki 2013). The confluence of these factors has resulted in the carrying out of rice breeding in Japan by national and prefectural governments, rather than a monopoly of private rice breeders (Kashiwabara et al. 2013). A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Japan: Government Interventions and Part-time Family Farming

97

A final major factor affecting the persistence and transformation of smallholder agriculture since World War II has been the depopulation of rural areas and the ageing of farm labour, resulting in an expansion of part-time farmers. There were part-time farmers in Japan even before World War II. The number of full-time farmers fluctuated between 65% and 75% before the war. During the war, many men in Japan – farmers included – were sent to the front, which resulted in a drop in the number of full-time farmers to 41.6%. The decline in full-time farmers then continued from 1947 onwards. One of the main reasons for this decline after World War II was the income inequality between urban and rural areas. The labour force moved from primary industries such as agriculture to urban labour in secondary industries, like the manufacturing and tertiary industries such as retail sales and services. Initially, the movement in the labour force was constituted by migrant workers and an institutionalized system of labour market recruitment for recent school graduates (Yamaguchi 1998; Nakazawa 2015). Prior to the war, the continuation of the family farm and the management of farmland was traditionally the responsibility of the eldest son’s household. However, because the men in the family would search for migrant work and end up in off-farm activities, the responsibility for working the farm often fell on the shoulders of women and ageing parents. As a result, by the 1970s, most of the people working in agriculture were women. In addition to the eldest son, who in virtually all cases would search for nearby off-farm work, most farmers’ other children would head to large cities as well, where job opportunities were plentiful. The influx of workers in cities was particularly high throughout the 1970s. Meanwhile, from the late 1960s onwards, at a time of labour shortages in large cities and rapid rises in land prices, manufacturing began to see a regional dispersion particularly in the electrical machinery and equipment manufacturing industries, as well as in clothing and other textile manufacturing industries (Sueyoshi 1989). As manufacturing began to appear in or near farming villages the role of women in the labour force also shifted. In particular, women started to supplement their household incomes with the wages they earned from low-paid labour in the textile manufacturing industries (Sueyoshi 1991). The move of manufacturing industries into farming communities led to a rise in the number of locally available alternative job opportunities. So starting from the 1970s, the labour force in farming areas was less likely to leave the rural community and many people worked multiple jobs (Sekine 1998). However, in the next generation, the sons of part-time farmers born during this period started A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

98 

Gen Shoji, Kunimitsu Yoshida, and Satoshi Yokoyama

moving to urban areas immediately after graduating high school in search of stable employment. This was a major cause of the ageing of the agricultural labour force (Yoshida 2011). During and after the 1980s, the number of farmers and people employed in the farming industry continued to fall. But the number of full-time farmers remained largely stable. The reason for this trend was that male part-time farmers previously engaged primarily in off-farm activities were subject to compulsory retirement. After retirement they would then turn to full-time farming. Meanwhile, the employment avenues of the new generation at this time were different from those of their parents. In the 1960s and 1970s, factories had moved into farming communities, providing plentiful off-farm opportunities. However, many of the large corporations then moved their factories abroad to maintain cheap labour costs. Moreover, many of the younger generation were now graduating from high school. In farming communities, the only suitable employers for those who just graduated high school were the government and the JA (Sekine, 1998). Graduates who took one of these two routes of employment largely stayed in the farming regions and became weekend farmers, thus continuing to use their own farmland whilst drawing income from off-farm activities (Araki 1992). High-school graduates who did not become employed by the government or the JA moved to large cities such as Tokyo, in search of employment more suited to their academic qualifications.

Issues Facing Smallholders Today Under these conditions, the farming industry has continued to age. Especially during and after the 1980s, the proportion of senior citizens working in the farming industry has increased. In 2010, 51.6% of all people working in the farming industry were at least 60 years old. Given that only 30.7% of the total Japanese population was 60 years old or older, it is evident that ageing is a particularly acute problem in the farming industry. Part of the reason for this ageing phenomenon was that part-time farmers who had inherited their parents’ small-scale family farms started leaving the profession in the 1990s, a trend that continues to the present day (Tabayashi and Iguchi 2005). Since the 2000s, it has gradually become impossible to find farmers willing to take over the farmland left behind (Takada 2007; Teratoko 2009). With an insufficient number of people willing to take on the land, new initiatives have been established to prevent abandonment and disuse. Among other things, this has been seen as an opportunity to upgrade agricultural machinery to supplement ageing workers. Because the profits from rice A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

99

Japan: Government Interventions and Part-time Family Farming

Table 3.2 Composition of income according to area of paddy eld

Total income Less than 0.5ha 0.5䡚1.0ha 1.0䡚2.0ha 2.0䡚3.0ha 3.0䡚5.0ha 5.0䡚7.0ha 7.0䡚10.0ha 10.0䡚15.0ha 15.0䡚20.0ha 20.0ha and more

3,625 4,147 3,977 4,572 4,247 4,231 5,478 6,193 8,276 12,515

Income of Income of agriculture off-farm (A) (B) -154 -102 116 337 1,192 1,880 3,629 4,449 6,608 10,871

1,405 1,955 1,559 1,878 1,663 1,238 746 908 994 884

Pension (C)

Housekeeping expenses A/D*100 B/D*100 C/D*100 (D)

2,374 2,294 2,301 2,320 1,392 1,069 1,096 836 660 759

3,476 3,586 3,823 3,886 3,915 4,108 4,779 5,032 5,246 5,956

3.0 8.7 30.4 45.8 75.9 88.4 126.0 182.5

40.4 54.5 40.8 48.3 42.5 30.1 15.6 18.0 18.9 14.8

68.3 64.0 60.2 59.7 35.6 26.0 22.9 16.6 12.6 12.7

Unit: JYE 1,000, % Source: 2014 Total Agricultural Output and Agricultural Income Produced

paddies are so low, it is difficult for individual households to own their own agricultural machinery. As a solution, multiple farmers and associations share their agricultural machinery, leading to a rise in farm management associations in hamlets (group farming) (Shoji 2015). Initially, hamlets tended to be single units but recently, organizations of multiple hamlets have also sprung up (Ichikawa 2011). However, the agricultural labour force continues to age and it is possible that the land will be abandoned and fall into disuse in the future. At present, with the number of farmers gradually decreasing, JA employees now outnumber farmers in Japan (Godo 2006) and it is not possible to operate the JA through farming activities alone. Thus, the JA diversified to handle non-agricultural products such as the credit section (“JA Bank”) and mutual insurance section (“JA Kyosai”). The JA’s income is dependent on these sections. Based on the strength of the JA, small-scale farmers do not need to become larger-scale commercial enterprises but are able to persist because of the work of the JA in securing their retail channels and assisting with their distribution, credit, and insurance needs. So, while the JA continues to be of crucial significance to maintaining the existence of smallholder, family farming, the JA itself has become larger than the economic sector it serves. Because labour requirements of farming have reduced so drastically, farmers have been able to engage in off-farm activities as well. As a result, farmers were able to engage in off-farm activities and increase their incomes, which made it possible for them to purchase more machines. Farmers thus began owning their own equipment such as riceplanting machines and reaper-binders, further reducing labour time (Suzuki 1994). It should be noted that in addition to policies and higher incomes, one of the major A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

100 

Gen Shoji, Kunimitsu Yoshida, and Satoshi Yokoyama

factors behind the mechanization of agriculture was the steady formation of networks of small and medium manufacturers. The spread of agricultural machinery reduced the labour intensity of farm work but it also increased production costs. In 2012, the costs associated with agricultural machinery accounted for over 30% of the total production cost for rice, higher than any other costs (Yoshida 2015). As the market price of rice remains low, this perpetually high production cost has been a major factor in encouraging small-scale, part-time farmers to abandon the profession. The average area of farmer’s paddy fields has expanded, mirroring the decrease in the number of farmers. Still, the average paddy field area per farm is 1.27 ha. There are 84,434 farm households with less than 1 ha and 72.8% of all rice farm households have less than 1 ha. As outlined previously, one reasonable definition of a smallholder in Japan is the part-time family rice farm of less than 3 ha. 98% of farmers have less than 3 ha in prefectures excluding Hokkaido. The total income of a large-scale rice farmer is relatively high in Japan. Farmers of more than 20 ha receive an average total income of 12,515,000 yen. In contrast, farmers of less than 0.5 ha generate an average total income of 3,625,000 yen per year through farming. Because farmers of less than 0.5 ha need 3,476,000 yen for household expenses, on average, their total income exceeds their household expenses. However, farming is considered a low-income occupation and both off-farm income and the pension are important supplements for farmers in Japan. On the other hand, farmers of 15 ha or more can finance their household expenses through the income of agriculture alone. Yet, only 3,035 or 0.3% of all rice farmers cultivate 15 ha or more. Pension income in particular is important for smallholders in Japan, as the bulk of smallholder labour comes from senior citizens. The agricultural income of farmers owning and operating less than 1 ha are far below their household expenses. Smallholders make up for this deficit through off-farm income and pensions. Pension income is especially important for farmers of less than 2.0 ha. Their pensions make up 60% or more of their household expenses. In addition, a lot of senior citizens who receive the pension are starting to take up agriculture. A lot of farmers keep farming even though they are aged, especially in the Tohoku region, because, these farmers have low pensions which they supplement through farming. Thus both by way of pensioners becoming farmers and older farmers continuing farming to supplement low pensions, senior citizens have become the core labour force in Japanese agriculture (Uemura 2015). Important off-farm income opportunities can also vary by region. For instance, there are many part-time farming households whose off-farm income is 50% or more in both the Tohoku and the Hokuriku regions, which A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Japan: Government Interventions and Part-time Family Farming

101

mainly produce rice. Since the 1970s, with mechanization, many rice farmers in both of these regions have started to engage in off-farm activities. In the Hokuriku region, farmers found many opportunities for employment other than agriculture, because local industry developed rapidly in that region (Hosoyama 2004). On the other hand, such opportunities were few in the Tohoku region. Instead, many farmers in the Tohoku region left for Tokyo to find temporary work in winter. From the 1980s, manufacturing industries spread to Tohoku and other more rural areas. And farmers were able to start to engage in off-farm activities while remaining in the Tohoku region. Whether manufacturing and other off-farm employment will remain an option in the future, however, is unclear with the expansion and development of global manufacturing networks and the increasing globalization of trade. Finally, in addition to concerns over the abandonment of land due to lack of labour, ageing farmers and the inability of farm families to reproduce themselves, in some areas farmland is under pressure from alternative uses. This is particularly true of agricultural land in peri-urban regions. Throughout the latter twentieth century, the conversion of agricultural land to urban areas was observed on the periphery of many cities (Doi 1984; Kikuchi and Tsutsumi 1998). However, under the Agricultural Land Law and urban planning laws, the arbitrary conversion of farmland is not permitted, in order to limit urban sprawl. Official permission is required to authorize land-use conversion, thus slowing but not stopping the rate of change from agricultural to non-agricultural use of land around the fringes of large and medium-size cities.

Future Prospects of Smallholders in Japan The major trends outlined in this chapter illustrate that Japanese agriculture and the smallholder sector over the past century and particularly since World War II have been shaped by government policy, demographic trends, and global economic change. All three of these are likely to continue to be key factors in the fate of smallholder agriculture in Japan into the future. In recent years in particular, government policy and economic globalization have become closely linked. The Japanese government had wed itself to support of the multilateral, American-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), despite significant resistance from rural farmers, who saw global competition as a threat to their own welfare and livelihoods. The trend in Japanese policy directions, since at least the early 2000s, has been towards greater competitiveness and freer markets. For example, A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

102 

Gen Shoji, Kunimitsu Yoshida, and Satoshi Yokoyama

in 2013, the government announced that it will stop enforcing production adjustments altogether in 2018 – however, initial indications are that lifting production limits has not led to increased production. American abandonment of the TPP also puts the future direction of Japanese policy into question. Domestically, the greatest concern is with the ageing of the farming population – which is occurring faster even compared to the general ageing of the Japanese population. Japan has already reached a tipping point where fertility rates generally are not just below replacement level, but the population of Japan has already begun to decline. In the absence of a radical change in Japan’s long-standing reluctance to allow larger-scale immigration, labour in general (agricultural labour specifically) will be at a high premium in the foreseeable future. Through the late twentieth century and into the present, heavy mechanization of agricultural production methods has offset the high cost and general lack of agricultural labour. While government initiatives have sought to rationalize and consolidate farm management in general, the social and political centrality of small farmers has meant that through various policies, subsidy schemes and the operations of the JA, smallholder family farming has persisted in Japan, albeit dependent on significant off-farm and pension incomes. Whether or not this will continue over the next several decades is an open question. The severity of the ageing of the farming population seems likely only to increase. It is possible that retirement-into-farming may become a general and persistent trend, so that the current population of farmers in their 60s and 70s will be replaced by a new generation of senior citizen farmers, who are now approaching retirement age. At the same time, it is not clear whether younger generations will be as inclined to take up farming at retirement age. They may not have the ongoing ties to farming that the current generation has had through the “san-chan” family farm. There already seems to be a trend towards increasing amounts of abandoned and under-utilized farmland, and this seems likely to continue. An alternative possibility is that with the decline in the social and political centrality of smallholder farmers in Japan, various forms of land consolidation – which until the present have been halting – may start to become a stronger trend, with smaller numbers of larger farms increasingly becoming the norm. Both demographic and economic trends would suggest that as a likely possibility. However, at the same time Japan has a deeply rooted social, cultural, and political commitment to smallholder farming, which remains unlikely to disappear overnight. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Japan: Government Interventions and Part-time Family Farming

103

References Akiyama, M. (2011) “An analysis of farm size and scale merit in paddy field farming”, Nogyo Keiei Kenkyu (Japanese Journal of Farm Management) 49(4): 6-20. (in Japanese with English abstract) Araki, H. (1992) “The mechanism of agricultural continuance in Takamiya-cho, Hiroshima Prefecture: A village with an aged population”, Geographical Review of Japan Series A 65: 460-475. (in Japanese with English abstract) Araki, H. (2014) “Stable food supply and geography: A historical view of grain imports”, E-journal GEO 9: 239-267. (in Japanese with English abstract) Doi, H. (1984) “Land-use changes in the rural-urban fringe: A case study of Matsuyama City”, Japanese Journal of Human Geography 36: 1-21. (in Japanese with English abstract) Engels, F. (1984) The Peasant Question in France and Germany. https://www. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Engles_The_Peasant_Question_in_France_and_Germany.pdf (Accessed 19 December 2018). Fujimaki, H. (2013) “The trajectory and future of Japanese rice breeding”. In: Report of the Nippon Agricultural Research Institute, pp.49-99. (in Japanese) Godo, Y. (2006). Food and Agriculture in Japan: The Essence of Crisis. Tokyo: NTT Syuppan. Hayashi, Y. (2008) “The great depression through World War II”. In: S. Teruoka (ed.), Agriculture in the Modernization of Japan (1850-2000), pp.127-154. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers & Distribution. Hirota, J. (1995) “Farm layout planning in land consolidation including large-size lots”, Journal of the Agricultural Engineering Society, Japan 63(9): 925-930. (in Japanese) Hosoyama, T. (2004) “Nōchi-Chintaishaku no Chiikisa to Daikibo-Shakuchi-Keiei no Tenkai” (Regional differences in farm land leasing and the trend of large-scale tenant farming). Norin Toukei Kyokai. (in Japanese) Ichikawa, Y. (2011) “Form of a large cooperative farming group in a hilly and mountainous region: Case study of Iijima, Nagano Prefecture, Japan”, Geographical Review of Japan Series A 84: 324-344. (in Japanese with English abstract) Isaka, K. (1994) “Large-scale farm land consolidation project in Fukui Prefecture”, Journal of the Agricultural Engineering Society, Japan 62(6): 539-545. (in Japanese) Kashiwabara, M., T. Kubo, T. Komura, and T. Komari (2013) “Rice breeding programs of private companies in Japan and future challenges”, Breeding Research 15: 173-183. (in Japanese) Kawakubo, A. (2007) Changes and Reorganization of Japanese Citrus Fruits Producing Areas after World War II. Tokyo: Norin Toukei Kyokai. (in Japanese) A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

104 

Gen Shoji, Kunimitsu Yoshida, and Satoshi Yokoyama

Kikuchi, T. and J. Tsutsumi (1998) “Sustainability and changeability of agricultural land use in the peri-urban environment: A case study in a sericulture region in Maebashi City, Central Japan”, Quarterly Journal of Geography 50: 1-16. (in Japanese with English abstract) Kobayashi, T. (2013) “Chiiki Nōgyo Kōzō Hendōron: Saga Heiya to Uwaba-Daichi” (Change of Regional Agriculture: A Case Study on Saga Plain and Uwaba-Daichi in Saga Prefecture). Shōwa-dō. (in Japanese) Kurihara, M. and Y. Ueda (1984) Mystery Rice Targets for Japan: Hybrid Rice. Tokyo: NHK-syuppan. (in Japanese) Nagaoka, A., Y. Nakato, and F. Yamaguchi, eds. (1978) The Regional Structure of Japanese Agriculture. Tokyo: Taimeido. (in Japanese) Nakazawa, T. (2015) “Institutionalized labor market for new school graduates in a weaving industry locality in the era of high economic growth: Case of Katsuyama, Fukui Prefecture”, Geographical Review of Japan (ser. A) 88: 49-70. (in Japanese with English abstract) Ohno, T. (1983) Beginning to “Seeds War”: The Present and Perspective of Plant Industry between Japan and USA. Tokyo: Toyo-keizai-shinposya. Otake, N. (2003) “The establishment of regional farming after the introduction of paddy filed direct-seeding: Case studies of Taka Area, Haramachi-shi and Yagisawa Area, Aizutakada-machi in Fukushima Prefecture”, The New Geography 51(3): 1-27. (in Japanese with English abstract) Saito, K. (1997) “The theme of family farm by women’s view and the significance of family farm agreement”, Journal of Rural Studies 3(2): 22-34. (in Japanese with English abstract) Sakaguchi, K. (1974) “The mechanism of village desertion process: A case study of depopulation and farmland devastation of three deserted villages in Wachi, Kyoto Prefecture”, Geographical Review of Japan 47(1): 21-40. (in Japanese with English abstract) Sekine, R. (1998) “The maintenance of farm households by non-agricultural employment: A case study in Takasato-mura, Fukushima Prefecture, Northeastern Japan”, Japanese Journal of Human Geography 50: 529-549. (in Japanese with English abstract) Shimizu, K. (2009) “Regional development of mechanization of agriculture in Japan: A case study of paddy rice production”, Annals of Geography (Nihon University) 50: 53-65. (in Japanese) Shinohara, S. (1969) “A process of village transfiguration in the depopulation area: A case study of the middle and south-western districts in Sikoku Mountains”, Japanese Journal of Human Geography 21(5): 453-480. (in Japanese with English abstract) Shogenji, S. (2006) Reformation of Agricultural Policies in Japan. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. (in Japanese) A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Japan: Government Interventions and Part-time Family Farming

105

Shogenji, S. (2014) “Kibo-mondai to nōgyo-keitai no tasō-kōzō (The scale issue and multilayer structure of farm management)”. In: The Farm Management Society of Japan ed. “Nōgyo-Keiei no Kibo to Kigyō-Keitai: Nōgyo-Keiei in okeru Kihon-Mondai (Scale of farm management and types of enterprise: Basic issues of farm management)”, 131-138. Tokyo: Norin tokei Syuppan (Agriculture and Forestry Statistics Publishing Inc.) Shogenji, S. ed. (2002) The Basic Structure of Twenty-first Century Japanese Agriculture. Tokyo: Nōrin Tōkei Kyōkai. (in Japanese) Shoji, G. (2015) “Prevention mechanism of farmland abandonment in a mountain village in Nishi-Aizu Town”, Quarterly Journal of Geography 66: 284-297. (in Japanese with English abstract) Sueyoshi, K. (1989) “The development of electrical industry in Mogami District, Yamagata”, Annals of the Japan Association of Economic Geographers 35: 221-244. (in Japanese with English abstract) Sueyoshi, K. (1991) “Decentralization of apparel factories and changing characteristics of part-time farmers: a case study of Mogami Area”, Annals of the Japan Association of Economic Geographers 37: 61-83. (in Japanese with English abstract) Suzuki, Y. (1994) The Reformation of Rice Farming Areas. Tokyo: Taimeido. (in Japanese) Tabayashi, A. (2007) “Structural changes of agriculture and successor of farming in Japan”, Annals of the Japan Association of Economic Geographers 53: 3-25. (in Japanese with English abstract) Tabayashi, A. and A. Iguchi (2005) “Changing agriculture and farm successors in Japan”, Tsukuba Studies in Human Geography 29: 85-134. (in Japanese with English abstract) Tabayashi, A., Y. Lee, R. Takeda, S. Yokoyama, T. Kunisawa, Y. Okamoto, H. Saito, and K. Matsui (1998) “Hitachiōta-shi ni okeru kōgai-nōson no sonritsu-kiban (The basis for existence of rural areas in Hitachioota city)”, Chiiki Chōsa Hōkoku (Annals of Human and Regional Geography, the University of Tsukuba) 20: 115-163. (in Japanese) Takada, A. (2007) “Expansion of abandoned cultivated lands and its background in Kamiokudaira, Yoshii, Gunma Prefecture”, Geographical review of Japan (ser. A) 80: 155-177. (in Japanese with English abstract) Tama S. (2005) “Reconceptualization of the ‘farm household’: Japanese agriculture as a small-scale mode of production”, Sonraku Syakai Kenkyu (Journal of Rural Studies) 12(1): 1-10. (in Japanese with English abstract) Tashiro, S. (1999) “From the agricultural basic law to the forthcoming basic law concerning food, agriculture and rural areas”, Bulletin of the Faculty of Agriculture, Kagoshima University 49: 39-44. (in Japanese with English abstract) A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

106 

Gen Shoji, Kunimitsu Yoshida, and Satoshi Yokoyama

Teratoko, Y. (2009) “Expansion of abandoned cultivated land and related factors in a marginal hamlet in Minamata, Kumamoto Prefecture”, Geographical Review of Japan (ser. A) 82: 588-603. (in Japanese with English abstract) Teruoka, S. (2003) Japanese Agriculture in 150 Years: 1850 to 2000. Tokyo: Yuhikaku. (in Japanese) Teruoka, S. (2008a) “Reconstruction of Japanese capitalism and land reform under occupation”. In: S. Teruoka (ed.), Agriculture in the Modernization of Japan (1850-2000), pp. 155-179. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers & Distribution. Teruoka, S. (2008b) “Rapid economic growth: 1950s through the early 1970s”. In: S. Teruoka (ed.), Agriculture in the Modernization of Japan (1850-2000), pp.181-267. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers & Distribution. Teruoka, S. (2008c) “Japan’s emergence as a major economic power and a minor agricultural nation: 1970s to 2000”. In: S. Teruoka (ed.), Agriculture in the Modernization of Japan (1850-2000), pp.269-362. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers & Distribution. Uemura, M. (2015) “Agricultural potential amongst post-retirement farmers: A focus on local labour markets”, The Bulletin of Akita University Education and Human Studies, 70: 21-28. (in Japanese with English abstract) Ushiyama, K. (2008) “The establishment of Japanese capitalism: 1888 to World War 1”. In: S. Teruoka (ed.), Agriculture in the Modernization of Japan (1850-2000), pp.53-98. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers & Distribution. Yamaguchi, S. (1998) “Immigrants’ urban lives and their common-villagers’ association in the high-growth period: A case of Kagoshimaken-Eishikai in Amagasaki City”, Japanese Journal of Human Geography 50: 449-469. (in Japanese with English abstract) Yoshdia, K. (2013) “Analysis of stakeholders’ networks for the agricultural production in Mihara Plain, Awaji Island”, Journal of Rural Studies 39: 35-46. (in Japanese with English abstract) Yoshida, K. (2011) “Basis of maintaining farmland in hilly and mountainous areas: A case study of Miyajidake Town, Amakusa City, Kumamoto Prefecture”, Geographical Space 4: 97-110. (in Japanese) Yoshida, K. (2012) “Analysis of transferring farmland rights in terms of social relationships in intensive agricultural area: A case study of Kamihata Settlement, Minami Awaji City, Hyogo Prefecture”, Japanese Journal of Human Geography 64: 103-122. (in Japanese with English abstract) Yoshida, K. (2015) “The actor for maintaining farmland”. In: S. Managi (ed.), Economics of Agriculture, Foresttry and Fishery, pp. 108-128. Tokyo: Chuo-Keizai-Sya. (in Japanese)

A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Japan: Government Interventions and Part-time Family Farming

107

About the Authors Gen Shoji obtained his PhD at Tohoku University in Japan. His primary research interest concerns farmland use and management systems, particularly sustainable farmland use based on the establishment of farming groups. He is currently researching the decision-making processes of lending and borrowing farmland involved in the establishment of farming groups. Kunimitsu Yoshida is Associate Professor at Kanazawa University. He received his doctorate in Human Geography at the University of Tsukuba in 2011. His research interests include land use management in rural society, multiple livelihood strategies, cultural landscape, and rural geography. Satoshi Yokoyama is Professor in the Department of Geography at Nagoya University in Japan. His research interests lie in the field of human-nature interactions, particularly in land use change, natural resource use, and livelihood change. One of his most recent research interests is traditional fermented foods in the Himalayas and Southeast Asia region.

A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

4

Laos: Responding to Pressures and Opportunities Outhai Soukkhy and Robert Cole

Abstract A majority of the population of Laos continues to derive their livelihoods from smallholder farming, which remains the backbone of rural society both economically and culturally. Smallholder practices, together with related policy narratives, are profoundly influenced by Laos’ geography, commonly divided between upland and lowland spaces. Accelerating domestic and regional economic integration has altered rural life in diverse ways, particularly over the 2000s. These changes have not only widened opportunities for smallholders through access to markets and improved incomes, but also brought new risks of exclusion from land, exposure to competition, and declining landscape functions. This chapter considers the impacts of policies, resource, and market pressures that have driven both transformation and persistence of smallholder agriculture in Laos. Keywords: agricultural commercialization, ASEAN integration, concessions, Lao PDR, subsistence, swidden

Smallholder agriculture remains central to the livelihoods of most rural households in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR, hereafter Laos), though increasingly in combination with off-farm and non-farm activities as farm households respond to new pressures and opportunities. While the country’s rate of urban expansion is among the fastest in Southeast Asia (World Bank 2015), this is starting from a low base. Of Laos’ relatively sparse population of 7 million people, around two thirds live in rural areas, with 72% of the working population continuing to derive a livelihood, according to official data, from agriculture, forestry, and fishing (LSB 2015). Because of the predominance of small-scale farming in Laos, as well as the

Thompson, Eric, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen (eds), Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789462988170/ch04 A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

110 

Outhai Soukkhy and Robert Cole

Figure 4.1  Tending food crops for a nearby urban market

Source: Photo, Rob Cole

widely perceived low socio-economic status of smallholders and particularly the landless rural poor (Saykham 2013), agriculture and forestry have long been prioritized in state planning aimed at reducing rural poverty (MAF 2010). This agriculture- and smallholder-focused approach to addressing rural poverty is in line with much mainstream theory (Dercon 2013). By grounding approaches to poverty reduction in the pursuit of a transition from subsistence to commercially oriented production, Lao smallholders are subjected to both the enabling and constraining effects of state policies, international development practices, and heightened integration with and exposure to regional and global markets (Vandergeest 2003; Rigg 2005; Lagerqvist et al. 2014). Small-scale farming practices, and thus the areas and types of land cultivated by Lao smallholders, are at the outset profoundly influenced by the country’s geography, commonly divided into “upland” and “lowland” spaces in both state planning and development discourse. The regular starting point is that most wet-rice cultivation is undertaken in the more densely populated, flatter lowlands (where most political and economic infrastructure is also located), while swidden cultivation is mainly practised A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

L aos: Responding to Pressures and Opportunities

111

in the more remote, mountainous uplands (Rigg 2005). Nationally, permanent (i.e. “lowland”) agriculture has been estimated to occupy 29% of Laos’ 236,800 km2 territory but involves almost three quarters of the farming population, while swidden landscapes cover a similar area (28%), but engage less than 17% of the population (Messerli et al. 2009). Challenges of development and poverty alleviation in Laos are often considered by state and international organizations in terms of this distinction, focusing on the inaccessibility of large areas of the uplands, the predominance of ethnic minorities in these areas (often having large socio-economic disparities with the dominant Lao-Tai ethnic group), and their reliance on swidden cultivation (Rigg 2005; Heinimann et al. 2013). The position of smallholders in this geographical and discursive divide also has marked effects on how state policies have sought to engage and ultimately change small-scale farming practices according to national objectives – particularly through land programmes enacted since the 1990s (Ducourtieux et al. 2005; Lestrelin et al. 2012; Vandergeest 2003). Through these policy instruments, as part of the determined pursuit of intensification and commercialization of the agricultural sector, the state has sought to organize (and in some cases restrict) Lao smallholder practices, the effects of which are explored in the sections that follow. Reaching any kind of general portrayal of smallholders in Laos thus demands, as a starting point, a consideration of the variation in farm activities and land use practices between different locations, and how land access and use have been regulated to achieve policy objectives. Deep-seated simplifications ingrained in both state and international discourses regarding smallholder farming practices play an important role in creating the “problem” context that, in turn, shapes rural development policies in Laos.

What Is a Smallholder in Laos? Because of the diversity of farming systems, highly varied productivity of different land types, and the fragmented nature of land allocation in Laos, it is difficult to pin down an areal definition of the Lao smallholder. The Lao Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF) acknowledges the common definition of smallholder farms as those with less than 2 hectares of cropland, but emphasizes the significant variation in small-scale farming practices based on geographical location, labour structure, and access to irrigation, among other factors (MAF, 2010). The country’s Agricultural Development Strategy 2020, a key sector policy document, stresses that A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

112 

Outhai Soukkhy and Robert Cole

“a legally binding definition of ‘smallholder” is outstanding and urgently needed (…) since in the implementation of [agricultural policy], the status of ‘smallholder’ will also define access to smallholder farmer organisations, government support in the form of training, access to credit etc.” (ibid: vi). Despite the lack of a formal definition, recent agricultural statistics show that farm households with access to landholdings that are limited in their areal extent – in other words, smallholdings – remain the norm (Table 4.1). In the 2010/11 Lao Agricultural Census, 54% of farm households1 had holdings of less than 2 ha, though declining from 72% in the previous round in 1998/99. Households with 2 ha and over had increased in the same period from 27% to 46%, while national average holdings increased from 1.6 ha to 2.4 ha (Table 4.1, MAF, 2012).2 Average farm sizes in 2010/11 were largest in Savannakhet province (3.1 ha), a predominantly lowland area with the county’s highest concentration of wet-rice production; and smallest in Houaphan province (1.3 ha), where reliance on upland swidden cultivation remains high. Table 4.1 also demonstrates the increase in the farm population and agricultural land coverage over the 2000s – the latter expanding by 647,000 ha between the two censuses. In combination with economic and policy trends that restrict or exclude smallholders from accessing land (particularly relating to land allocation and concessions), this points to mounting pressure on the land supply, some of the effects of which are discussed below.

Lao Smallholders in Official and Everyday Language The common origins of the Lao and Thai languages are apparent in their many similarities, including in relation to agriculture. The official Lao term for “farmer” or “agriculturalist” is sao gasigone, while “smallholder” is sao gasigone kanad noi, which literally translates as “small-scale farmer”. In everyday usage, farmers are generally referred to as sao na literally paddy farmer), while “farming” is hed hai hed na, meaning to work (hed) swidden (hai) and paddy (na). Very similar terms are used in Northeast Thailand (which is ethnically Lao) and also have their direct equivalents in Thai. The 1 Rather than smallholders, the Lao Agricultural Census refers to the “farm population” and “farm household”, defining the latter as “a household engaged in agricultural production activities; that is, growing crops, raising livestock, or engaged in agriculture” (MAF 2012: 1). 2 Note that this rising trend may not necessarily reflect expanding holdings per household. Improving data capture in between the two surveys may play a role, while the same period has also seen a dramatic increase in large-scale land concessions. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

113

L aos: Responding to Pressures and Opportunities

Table 4.1  Comparison of 1998/99 and 2010/11 Agricultural Census Results Farm household characteristics

1998/99

2010/11

Farm households No. of households (‘000)

789

1,021

No. of farm households (‘000)

668

783

Farm households as per cent of all households (%)

84

77

Rural households as per cent of all households (%)

..

69

Farm population (‘000)

4,058

4,501

Average household size

6.1

5.7

Area of landholdings Area of agricultural land (‘000 ha)

976

1,623

Average area of holding (ha)

1.6

2.4

Farm household by area of holding (%) –  Less than 1 ha –  1-2 ha –  2 ha and over

36 36 27

22 32 46

Average parcel size (ha)

0.77

0.90

Area of agricultural land by main use (‘000 ha) Temporary crops

765

1,230

Left fallow

112

198

Permanent crops

81

168

Grazing land

18

26

Land Tenure Land tenure (% of land area) – Owned

97

93

– Other

3

7

Rice Cultivation Rice area planted by season (‘000 ha) –  Wet season lowland

481

714

–  Wet season upland

199

215

–  Dry season

56

57

Rice growers by season (‘000) –  Wet season lowland

419

535

–  Wet season upland

260

240

–  Dry season

93

87

Glutinous rice (% of rice area)

93

92

Improved varieties (% of growers)

30

41

Source: Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (2012) Lao Census of Agriculture 2010/11: Highlights. Vientiane: Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry of Lao PDR. p. ix A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

114 

Outhai Soukkhy and Robert Cole

upland-lowland distinction introduced above is reflected in generalized descriptions of farming practices, and also features in other principal ethnic languages spoken in Laos: in Khmu and Hmong, respectively, “tang reh” and “ua teb” refer to swidden, and “tang na” and “ua liaj” to paddy. Culturally, farmers are on the one hand considered the backbone of the country and accorded respect, as evidenced by common proverbs, such as sao gasigone lang su fa na su dtin: “the farmer faces the land with his back towards the sky”, which depicts the balance of rural life and the farmer’s symbiotic connection to the soil. On the other hand, rural life and populations are often chided as “out of date” with the rapid pace of development, market integration, and more consumer-focused cultural influences, such as foreign (particularly Thai) TV channels which are widely viewed throughout the country. Folk traditions are often infused with references to farming, including popular songs, of which dyen sabai sao na is among the most famous, literally translating to “cool farmer”, portraying the happiness of the self-sufficient farmer. Another common proverb depicting rural plenty is nai nam mii paa nai na mii khao: “there are fish in the river and rice in the paddy” (which again has its echo in Thai King Ramkhamhaeng’s inscription No. 1 of 1297). At the same time, life beyond the perceived fringes of urban modernity is commonly (and somewhat disapprovingly) branded as ban nork (meaning “of the countryside”, or literally “the village outside”). This negative pigeonholing of rural backwardness also filters into official perceptions and practices, based on notions of uneducated rural folk being incapable of participating in modern developmental and market environments (Rigg 2005; Singh 2012). From the policy perspective, this position is rooted in arguments that subsisting at the socio-political and geographical margins and clinging to the limited economic benefits of traditional upland livelihoods hampers the progress of rural development and poverty alleviation, as reflected in Laos’ 2004 Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper: “The uplands are locked in a vicious cycle of poverty (…) many villages are isolated and lack access to markets and services (…) shifting cultivation is widely practised. Subsistence farming is still the norm for most households, leaving little if anything for investment for a better future” (GoL, 2004, p. 129). We see in Lao official and popular discourses, therefore, a contradictory combination of lauding and celebration of the smallholder and rural life on the one hand, and their denigration on the other. In this regard, Laos is little different from the parallel discourses seen in other countries of the Asian region, except that in Laos these are applied to the majority of the population, rather than a minority. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

L aos: Responding to Pressures and Opportunities

115

Lao Smallholders and Changing Land Access In the absence of an official areal definition, it is perhaps more useful to examine the ways that patterns of land use and access are indirectly defined or limited by policies affecting smallholders. The need to end the “vicious cycle” described above – in which remote villages are perceived to be trapped in poverty by their own isolation and attachment to traditional practices – has been used to rationalize wide-ranging developmental approaches and land programmes in rural (particularly upland) areas of Laos for decades. Key emphases of these approaches have been on separating agricultural and forest lands, promoting permanent, commercial agriculture, and eradicating swidden practices (Castella et al. 2013). Far from a new debate, the latter objective extends from long-standing efforts on the part of governments and international organizations to “‘modernise’ the traditional practices of farmers in mountainous areas of Southeast Asia” (Fox 2000: p. 1), based on the lasting perception that swidden farming is unproductive and wasteful of natural resources (Évrard and Baird 2017). These efforts are intertwined with the perennial concerns of modern states to cultivate legibility and control over remote or “non-state” spaces, with associated aims to replace mobile or “illegible” ways of life such as swidden with sedentary livelihoods, that are also perceived to be more economically productive (Scott 1998, 2009). Policies enacted towards these ends in Laos have included extensive land-use planning and allocation drives, focal area development, village consolidation, and resettlement (Baird and Shoemaker 2007; Rigg 2005), with major implications for the populations concerned, and by extension the nature of smallholdings and small-scale farming practices. The parallel logics behind land-use planning and allocation have been to encourage investment in intensive agriculture by improving tenure security; foster the gradual replacement of swidden with permanent agriculture by restricting access to land (Manivong and Sophathilath 2009; Ducourtieux et al. 2005); and thereby solidify state claims to forests (Castella et al. 2013). A legal framework to underpin these objectives was largely set out during the 1990s, including categorization of agricultural and forest land, and capping land allocation at 22 ha per unit of labour, according to the productive capacity of the household (comprising 1 ha of swidden, 15 ha of pasture, and 3 ha each of commercial and orchard crops) (Ducourtieux et al. 2005). Importantly, land unused for three consecutive years is considered abandoned and returned to the village (ibid), with the functional implication of limiting swidden production to three plots in rotation. According to Manivong and Sophathilath (2009), the underlying intention was to allocate A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

116 

Outhai Soukkhy and Robert Cole

Figure 4.2  Teak planted on degraded upland

Source: Photo, Jonathan Rigg

three to five land parcels totalling 3-5 ha per household for agriculture production, though in reality this process has been fractured across several phases in different locations, and with varying degrees of support and influence from international projects. Statistics indicate the allocation of about 1.6 million hectares of agricultural land among almost 140,000 households in four provinces of Laos by 2006 (Manivong and Sophathilath 2009), suggesting significant variations from the 3-5 hectare target and actual areas allocated. Comparing the effects of land allocation in twelve villages in the mountainous and sparsely populated northern province of Phongsaly, where swidden is widely practised, Ducourtieux et al. (2005) observed a marked decline of fallow area, implying accelerated rotation, as well as increases in pasture, permanent crops, and restricted forest. The average farm size declined from 17 to 13 hectares in the process, with cultivated swiddens of 3 hectares per household on average (ibid). In the comparatively more densely populated Luang Prabang province, Lestrelin and Giordano (2007) observed that average agricultural land availability per household declined to 2.7 hectares after reclassification, highlighting the undermining impact on the swidden cycle (see below). This emphasizes a disjuncture between policies in theory, and policies in practice: while in theory households should have been allocated land sufficient to maintain productive and sustainable semi-subsistence farm systems, in practice many areas are lacking in land and farmers have found their allocations limited by a land/population squeeze. In conjunction with A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

L aos: Responding to Pressures and Opportunities

117

land allocation, focal area development and village consolidation have further sought to contribute to the stabilization of swidden and to strengthen socio-economic integration, by developing rural infrastructure and resettling remote villages to make them more accessible (Castella et al. 2013). Laos’ earlier cited 2004 Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper, though completed when these policies had been in effect for some time, demonstrates how they have been justified: For the most part, upland farmers continue their traditional ways and practices, and face many hardships. The area-based development (focal area) approach, which is at the basis of the Government’s rural development strategy, places a high priority on improved services, more sustainable land-use, and increased incomes among the rural poor. (GoL 2004: p. 26)

The ongoing prominence of these issues is clear in the eighth five-year National Socio-Economic Development Plan (NSEDP) for 2016-2020, which includes objectives to “agglomerate big villages into small towns in rural areas linked to production facilities in the local regions and territories; [and] resettle the displaced people by allocating new places to stay and permanent professions in a priority manner” (MPI 2016: p. 124). Over the past decade, studies have identified widespread negative consequences of resettlement however, not least a propensity for erosion of (particularly ethnic minority) social systems, livelihoods and cultures, as well as harmful health outcomes (Baird and Shoemaker 2007), a possibility that is acknowledged in the eighth NSEDP (MPI 2016: p. 126). Resettled groups often also find themselves in competition with existing local populations over available land, increasing pressure on resources. In Luang Prabang province, Lestrelin and Giordano observe that in combination, “population growth, resettlements and land use reclassification have engendered a tenfold increase in population density per unit of agricultural land over the last quarter century” (2007: p. 71). Similar processes of rapid change have taken place in various configurations throughout rural Laos, particularly in the uplands where village consolidation and focal area development have been most active, aiming to promote settled, permanent agriculture but often inadvertently driving heightened mobility due to scarce resources (Évrard and Goudineau 2004). Added to the uneven nature of land allocation and diverse livelihoods in different locations, this underlines the limitations of seeking a generalized, sedentary notion of smallholder farmers in Laos. Having said this, the pressures facing smallholders also point to a degree of convergence, with swidden essentially forcibly stabilized by the declining land supply and arrival of new markets for agricultural A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

118 

Outhai Soukkhy and Robert Cole

commodities. Meanwhile, a key consequence of blurred land categorization and tenure arrangements, coupled with the relocation of marginal rural communities, has been to clear the way for land-intensive investments courted by state policy, as explored further in the following sections.

Smallholders in Laos Today In parallel with, and often resulting from some of the policies introduced above, smallholder livelihoods in Laos have undergone significant changes during the 2000s. These trends can be further located within an ongoing shift from primarily subsistence to commercially oriented production, driven not only by policies but broader processes of market integration, with transformative effects on Laos’ rural economy. Market integration and economic change are in many ways interlinked with the resettlement of isolated upland communities, which has not only fostered their increasing assimilation within relations of commercial exchange, but opened wide areas of the countryside to large-scale land concessions and plantations. Only about 6% of surveyed farm households produced mainly for the market in 1998/99 data; by 2010/11 this had reached about 30% (MAF 2012), and has almost certainly continued to rise, not least because of the rapid expansion of contract farming in several provinces, as discussed below, together with shifts towards large-holdings in the form of land leases and concessions for monocrop plantations. The impacts of these changes on the squeeze on land described above have also driven more commercially oriented production, as land recovery has become progressively undermined. This is because, where traditional livelihoods are becoming increasingly unviable, changing production practices that respond to new market opportunities, and often involving continuous planting and rising use of chemical inputs, have incrementally taken their place. Over the 2000s, official data show that the number of farm households nationwide increased by about 115,000, while non-farm households increased by about 110,000, demonstrating the continuing reliance on agriculture, even in the face of significant pressures. Table 4.2 provides a comparison of farm households by province between the 1998/99 and 2010/11 agricultural censuses (MAF 2012). Vientiane capital is the only region with a declining number of farm households, while the most striking increase (44%) is seen in the neighbouring Vientiane province. The varying provincial rates of change may reflect the upheavals of internal migration and resettlement in relation to focal area development and village consolidation, reliable data for which are lacking but in the latter case estimated in the tens of thousands A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

119

L aos: Responding to Pressures and Opportunities

since the 1990s (Baird and Shoemaker 2007; Evrard and Goudineau 2004; EC 2011). In combination with out-migration to expanding urban centres (Bouté 2017) and neighbouring countries (Phouxay 2017), this may also explain wide variances in provincial population growth rates from 2005 to 2015, with markedly lower increases and sometimes depopulation in a number of (mostly northern) provinces (LSB 2015). Table 4.2 Number of farm households by province, 1998/99 and 2010/11 Province

North Phongsaly Luangnamtha Oudomxay Bokeo Luangprabang Huaphanh Xayabury Centre Vientiane Capital Xiengkhuang Vientiane Province Borikhamxay Khammuane Savanakhet Xaysomboon SR South Saravane Sekong Champasack Attapeu Lao PDR

Farm households (‘000) 1998/99

2010/11

238.4 24.4 19.8 33.4 18.81 55.7 36.9 49.4 293.5 48.6 28.1 43.7 26.5 43.6 95.4 7.6 136.0 41.3 9.7 70.2 14.8 668.0

288.9 28.4 26.2 44.6 24.8 59.5 42.3 63.1 336.4 42.8 36.2 62.7 35.0 51.1 108.6 .. 157.5 50.1 12.9 75.4 19.1 782.8

Change (%)

21% 16% 33% 34% 31% 7% 14% 28% 15% -12% 29% 44% 32% 17% 14% .. 16% 21% 32% 7% 29% 17%

Source: Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (2012) Lao Census of Agriculture 2010/11: Highlights. Vientiane: Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry of Lao PDR. p. 1

Focusing on rice production, Table 4.3 shows 2015 statistics by season for lowland (paddy) and upland (swidden) rice in different regions (Savannakhet and Luang Prabang provinces are highlighted as the highest producers of paddy and swidden rice, respectively). The difference in planted and harvested area indicates damage/losses over the cropping cycle, covering just over 20,000 ha in recorded data for the year. This underlines the vulnerability of rice production in Laos to various hazards, including pests and adverse climate A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

120 

Outhai Soukkhy and Robert Cole

conditions – particularly rainfall variability since, due to limited irrigation infrastructure, a large majority of rice cultivation remains rainfed (Saykham 2013). The predominance of rainfed cultivation is evident in the much smaller land area that also supports a dry-season crop, shown in Table 4.3. As well as providing further detail on the larger area and output for lowland rice overall, the data also identify significantly lower yields per hectare from swidden production, at less than half that of the paddy, on average. Depending on location and land access, farm households sometimes cultivate both paddy and swidden in combination, though in most Lao provinces a majority of farmers specialize in one or the other. In mountainous Luang Prabang for example, about 65% of producers in 2010/11 were fully engaged in swidden cultivation, while in the central province of Savannakhet, dominated by lowland plains, about 90% of producers cultivated paddy (MAF 2012).3 Table 4.3  Rice area, yield, and output in Laos by season and region, 2015 Season/region

Planted area (ha)

Harvested area (ha)

Average yield (ton)

Total output (ton)

Nationwide total Wet-season rice crop Dry-season rice crop Upland rice crop

984,932

965,152

4.25

4,102,000

769,193

755,243

4.45

3,357,640

99,019

99,018

5.25

520,000

116,720

110,891

2.02

224,360

Northern region 106,987

105,973

4.70

497,800

Central region

441,592

429,418

4.41

1,982,275

Savannakhet 200,050 province Southern region 220,614

200,050

4.32

863,890

219,852

4.40

967,565

Paddy rice only

Swidden rice only Northern region 87,676

82,874

2.01

166,567

Luang Prabang Province Central region

24,349

19,630

1.47

28,876

23,035

22,035

2.01

44,380

6,009

2.23

13,413

Southern region 6,009

Source: Compiled from Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (2016) Department of Agriculture Statistical Yearbook. Vientiane: Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry of the Lao PDR, Vientiane

3 For a detailed distribution of upland and lowland rice cropping systems in Laos, see: Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry 2012: p.3. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

L aos: Responding to Pressures and Opportunities

121

Rice, while still the principal smallholder crop in Laos overall, is unsurprisingly only part of the story. Farm households cultivate rice in combination with diverse productive activities according to (oftentimes differentiated) access to resources, including various cash crops, livestock, harvesting, and trading non-timber forest products, and increasingly off- or non-farm wage employment (Martin and Lorenzen 2016; Rigg 2005; Vongvisouk et al. 2014). The adoption of different forms of work by smallholders also varies greatly with location and the influence of new economic opportunities and demand structures, particularly those emerging from accelerating market integration both internally and within the wider economy of the Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS) and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Thus, while there is a tendency to pigeonhole farmers and households as being either settled or sedentary, upland or lowland, subsistence or commercialized, it is not uncommon for farmers to embrace quite different production systems, with different “logics”, and encompassing different agro-ecological zones. So, for example, today’s smallholder households might own lowland, wet-rice land farmed for own-consumption (i.e. subsistence); have access to upland plots planted to a cash crop such as maize or chilli, and allocated on the basis of local, usufruct rights; graze cattle across both village and public lands, which represent a store of capital to be sold when needs arise; and also collect non-timber forest products (NTFPs) from public lands, for both home consumption and sale (field research, Luang Prabang province, December 2016). This chapter now turns to the effects of intensification, commercialization and market integration on present trajectories of persistence and change among Lao smallholders, and the resulting issues and prospects that arise.

Commercialize and Intensify The marked difference in yields between wet and upland rice shown in Table 4.3 is one of a number of policy concerns behind the drive to commercialize and intensify agriculture in Laos, which has done much to shape the structural conditions to which smallholder livelihoods respond today. As can be said of many of its Southeast Asian neighbours, the key to rural development in the eyes of Lao policymakers has been agricultural modernization. In the lowlands, this has been the impetus behind large-scale irrigation pumping since the late 1990s, to enable dry-season rice cropping wherever water availability permits (Évrard and Baird 2017), although often facing operational problems relating to management and efficiency (MAF 2010). A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

122 

Outhai Soukkhy and Robert Cole

Continuous cropping enabled by irrigation has also required new farm inputs to maintain productivity, and encouraged adoption of mechanized ploughing (also freeing labour for off-farm activities), though fuel and input costs have indebted many farmers (Évrard and Baird 2017). The swidden cultivation that remains widely practised in the uplands is meanwhile considered contradictory to the modern agricultural sector idealized by the state (i.e. stable, intensive, and commercially oriented production), and commonly associated with weak productivity, persistent poverty, and environmental degradation (Baird and Shoemaker 2007; Hett et al. 2011; Hirsch 2000). This represents one position within the often observed bifurcated discourse on productivity and sustainability of upland livelihoods (Rigg 2005), the opposing position being that carefully managed swidden may be “ecologically appropriate, culturally suitable, and under certain circumstances the best means for preserving biodiversity” (Fox 2000: p. 1; see also Lamb 2011). Lived realities among smallholders are unlikely to fit neatly in either container (see the above example from Luang Prabang province, for instance); and when the economic, policy, and resource pressures described in the preceding sections force swidden onto smaller areas, reduced fallow periods and/or longer cropping durations tend to result, with negative implications for productivity and degradation (Barraclough and Ghimire 1995; Messerli et al. 2009). The underlying drivers of such pressures are rarely in the hands of smallholders, and more likely to result from the combination of policies and changing patterns of demand resulting from engagement with wider markets. Key agricultural policy objectives that are arguably instrumental in shaping smallholder livelihoods in Laos today include those relating to integration with regional markets and the state’s policy of “turning land into capital” (explored further below). The resulting rise of large-scale land concessions and various modes of contract farming have had far-reaching effects on smallholder farmers across many provinces of Laos. These effects have included further constraining land access in many instances, as well as oftentimes dramatically altering the ecological function of the land (such as through continuous monocropping and use of chemical inputs), and leading to further displacement of local populations and exposure of smallholders to market risks such as boom and bust cycles.

Land Concessions Fragmented efforts towards land allocation and titling, with an attached legal framework that retains all Laos’ territory as the property of the nation, mean A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

L aos: Responding to Pressures and Opportunities

123

that a significant degree of opacity remains in how land is allocated according to economic advantages (Dwyer and Ingalls 2015). Saykham (2013) notes that in reality many Lao smallholders continue to access some or all land for livelihood activities without official title, and thus have extremely limited legal protection for the land on which they cultivate crops, raise livestock, or gather NTFPs. Any land legally understood as public can be conceded to investors, presently a major source of government revenues in Laos, which is likely to increase with demand for agricultural commodities, energy, and minerals in global markets, and already frequently affects local livelihoods, as well as causing land conflicts between farmers and concessionaires (Saykham 2013). One important area of debate and indeterminacy within these broader processes is the degree to which access to land achieved on the basis of local norms is secure, given Laos’ ongoing market transition, the entry of new actors into rural contexts, and how this affects competition over and exploitation of resources (Rigg 2005). The rise of large-scale land concessions in Laos has been rationalized on the basis of the common policy trope of “turning land into capital”, through which the government aims to harness supposedly under-utilized resources more productively, attract investors, and boost economic growth. Turning land into capital is heavily associated with the economic integration and development of the countryside, commonly in the form of agribusiness plantations, but also large-scale infrastructure, which often requires relocation of local populations to make way for long-term foreign concessions (Dwyer 2011). Of the latter, the largest current project by a significant margin is a 5.8 billion dollar, 420 km railway linking China’s Yunnan province with the Lao capital, Vientiane (KPL 2017). Aside from relocating thousands of households out of the path of the railway, this vast construction effort will require numerous supporting services and suppliers of materials, in some cases also absorbing existing village land (see Figure 4.3). It is at the meeting point of fuzzy planning regimes, unclear notions of tenure, and state zeal for foreign concessions that the wider impacts of regional economic integration are writ large on the Lao landscape, one of the central tenets of the ASEAN’s economic policy being to open the way for transboundary investors (ASEAN 2008). One consequence of pursuing such investments has been that Laos, much like its “CLMV” neighbours of Cambodia, Myanmar, and Vietnam, has become a “resource frontier” for transnational capital (Barney 2009). Intra-regional investments in the CLMV grouping are significantly focused on land-intensive sectors, and thus a key factor in growing land insecurity, whether through appropriation in the form of concessions or engagement of farmers in contract and land-rental schemes (Scurrah and Hirsch 2015). A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

124 

Outhai Soukkhy and Robert Cole

Figure 4.3 Women gather wood on former village land , which has been developed as a Chinese-owned cement factory

Source: Photo, Rob Cole

In Laos, although the process of establishing concessions is often couched in terms of supporting agricultural modernization and productivity (ibid), the “hardware” of investment arrangements and regulatory architectures remains largely invisible (Dwyer 2015). While domestic land concessions may exceed foreign investments in number, the latter dwarf the former by area (Hett et al. 2015), and an increasingly favourable policy environment saw land lease transactions increase fifty-fold during the 2000s (for analysis of more than 2,500 investments covering over 1 million ha of Lao territory, see Schönweger et al. 2012). A growing body of literature identifies ways that marginal rural populations, especially minority groups, are being dispossessed of lands that previously supported their livelihoods as market access widens (Barney 2009; Kenney-Lazar 2010; Baird 2011). Transboundary investments originating in China and Vietnam in largescale rubber plantations, and their dismantlement of local land-access regimes, have been particularly prominent and well-studied in terms of recent impacts on Lao smallholders and patterns of social change among marginal groups (Kenney-Lazar 2012; Thongmanivong et al. 2009). At the A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

L aos: Responding to Pressures and Opportunities

125

upper end of the scale, one example is the tens of thousands of hectares in southern Laos granted to Vietnamese conglomerate HAGL Group for rubber, creating land conflicts in the process by subsuming village lands and clear-cutting community forests (Kenney-Lazar 2012; Ingalls et al. 2018). At the ostensibly lower end of the scale, the Lao-Chinese borderlands in Luang Namtha province are observed as a hotbed of acquisitions and trade in leased land among informal cross-border kinship networks and middlemen, which although smaller in area, aggregate to wide swathes of farmland and forests (Friis and Neilsen 2016; Lyttleton and Li 2017). In addition to plantations, land- and resource-focused foreign investments in Laos have included transport infrastructure in relation to ASEAN integration, mines, and widespread damming of Mekong tributaries, mostly involving Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese firms, often with poor environmental standards and/or a “willingness to avoid what they consider to be burdensome regulations” (Évrard and Baird 2017: p. 184). Simply by more commonly living in marginal areas, minorities tend to be most affected by these processes (Heinimann et al. 2013), by which land viewed as inefficiently used is reframed as “available” through the establishment of concessions (Dwyer 2015). Local and provincial level officials hold important roles in this process, sometimes determining the degree to which concessionaires, for example, can enter rural areas and access land, or otherwise being gatekeepers of the extent to which declared national policies filter to local reality (Baird 2011; Kenney-Lazar 2012). This includes the unevenness of village resettlement towards lowlands and roads, underpinning the commodification of land, in which Dwyer observes “a parallel effort (…) to maintain the population of the semi-remote uplands with groups who are seen by local officials as politically trustworthy” (2017: p. 197). Differing social and environmental impacts are widely observed to have resulted from plantation concessions throughout the country, including exclusion from arable, grazing, and forest lands and ecological damage resulting from unsustainable use of chemical inputs (Évrard and Baird 2017). Mounting criticism over such practices from diverse quarters, including at the National Assembly, resulted in a temporary moratorium on new concessions in 2007, and partial reallocation of the approval process under central control (ibid). There may be less scope for lands to be expropriated for agricultural concessions in areas typically farmed by the dominant lowland group, although this does not necessarily protect them against dispossession, as lands surrounding expanding urban centres are frequently reassigned for infrastructure and other development projects (e.g. Vientiane Times 2017a; 2017b). A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

126 

Outhai Soukkhy and Robert Cole

Contract Farming Transboundary contract farming effectively provides an alternative means for foreign investors to access agricultural land (and labour) in situations where smallholder production remains predominant or investors are otherwise unable to secure concessions. While not a new phenomenon for Laos, a variety of contract farming arrangements for annual cash crops rapidly expanded across the country during the 2000s, driven by rising demand in neighbouring markets (World Bank 2008). This demand is in turn rooted in sustained growth across the region over recent decades, that has seen many ASEAN countries achieve middle-income status, though often masking inequalities within and between them (Rigg 2016). Contract farming is considered potentially beneficial for smallholder incomes and productivity in developing countries, by enabling coordination between farmers and other actors in relation to production, processing, and marketing (Nguyen et al. 2015), to achieve economies of scale and overcome credit and other constraints. At the broader scale however, the present combination of concession policies and rise of contract farming arrangements positions Laos as a supplier of raw agricultural commodities for its more advanced ASEAN neighbours – in other words, absorbing their outsourced requirements for land-intensive production (Meyfroidt et al. 2010). This role of supplying bulk inputs for distant downstream industries has altered land-use and livelihood practices, and accelerated the penetration of commodity crops to marginal areas, with contract providers financing the means for farmers to convert to new practices and forming supply chain linkages. 4 Prominent contract, share-cropping and land-rental schemes in different provinces of Laos driven by transboundary demand include maize, banana, sugarcane, cassava, and rubber, often supplying specific neighbouring markets in Vietnam, China, and Thailand (Vongvisouk 2016; World Bank 2008; Friis and Neilsen 2016; Baird and Vue 2015; Scurrah and Hirsch 2015). In upland settings, a portion of households’ rice swiddens tends to be turned over to contract crops, though farmers commonly retain and prioritize limited rice production as the household’s main source of food (Cole and Rigg 2019). In some cases, paddy land is also converted to commodity crops, with consequences for the condition of the land that may prove difficult to reverse (see, for example, the case of banana in Luang Namtha province, Friis and Neilsen 2016). 4

Second author’s field notes, 2017. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

L aos: Responding to Pressures and Opportunities

127

Lao smallholders are frequently in weak positions in contract arrangements, being heavily dependent on economically superior investors for access to inputs, credit, and to arrange collection and transport of output to the wider supply chain, as well as to offer a fair price, and some degree of protection for future livelihoods5 (Vagneron and Kousonsavath 2015; Lyttleton and Li 2017). Contract arrangements are also influenced by localized political interactions among different actor groups, including ethnic minorities, some of whom may achieve better shares of profits and exercise greater agency, while other contracts take an altogether different shape with de facto landownership by investors and “concession-like wage labor” (Dwyer 2017: p. 197). The abandonment of traditional practices and heavy use of chemical inputs to maintain continuous cropping is meanwhile widely observed to be having deleterious impacts on land and water resources, which may prove irreversible, if not addressed (Friis and Neilsen 2016; LURAS 2016a; The Guardian 2017). The reduction of environmental and health impacts from chemical use, coupled with incomplete market and technological information, credit constraints, and the impacts of transboundary land investments, have been directly highlighted by smallholders’ priorities for stronger institutional support (SWGAB 2013). Responding to the everyday situations faced by smallholders engaged in contract farming may help to reduce land pressures, particularly by addressing their concerns over land-intensive concessions. With this said, recent observations point to a strong relationship between contract production arrangements and rapid conversion of swidden and fallow land, as well as primary and secondary forest, to monoculture commercial crops, presenting serious challenges to landscape sustainability (Vongvisouk et al. 2016; Ziegler et al. 2012). The fact that smallholders continue to engage in monoculture contract farming when this risks otherwise undermining their livelihoods highlights the limited alternative opportunities in remote rural locations, and high dependence on outsider traders and middlemen to access markets.

Processes of Transformation and Persistence Processes of transformation and persistence affecting Lao smallholders can be mostly linked in some way to wider processes of market and spatial 5 Ibid. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

128 

Outhai Soukkhy and Robert Cole

integration. The economic and policy trends that have brought about the rise of concessions and contract farming extend from a combination of Laos’ market reforms and the heightening connectivity among the GMS countries, with all of which Laos shares borders (Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, and the southwestern provinces of China), as well as the broader ASEAN region. Meanwhile, demographic trends in the form of a continuing youth bulge will dramatically alter Laos’ rural labour structure in the next ten to twenty years (see below). At the same time, new employment opportunities are arising with strengthened regional integration, and the inclination of new generations, educated in a way and to a degree that the last generation were not, to continue in agriculture may decline. That is certainly the lesson from other countries in the region, as other chapters in this book make clear, and there is little reason to think Laos will be very different in this regard. Together with increasing migration for non-farm employment, a steady increase in both the availability and attainment of secondary education is indicative of the changing age structure of smallholder households, as more children and youth stay in school for longer (LSB 2015). The remarkable spread of the two-wheeled hand tiller is an indication that labour shortages are taking hold in many areas, as well as widening accessibility of cheaper mechanized tools. With these changes in mind, the government is trying to support the maintenance of agricultural labour through vocational courses depending on local skill needs, as a way of remedying the possible decline in generational transfer of farming knowledge and responding to agrarian change. To this end, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry operates a network of agriculture and forestry colleges which enable students to specialize in agronomy, livestock, and fisheries, agribusiness or forestry, aiming to provide a skilled rural workforce to support Laos’ integrating economy and commercializing the agricultural sector (NAFC 2014). Vocational training is thus one example of how the state is actively supporting smallholder persistence. Another is through livestock extension and introducing pastures, which are focused on smallholder production, as opposed to driving expansion of larger livestock operations (which are considered not suitable to Laos’ topography). While these efforts to maintain a smallholder farm sector, improve outputs and boost incomes are having some effect, in most instances they may struggle to address the scissor effects of declining landholdings, loss of land productivity, rising needs, and often deteriorating terms of trade between farm and non-farm (Rigg et al. 2014). A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

L aos: Responding to Pressures and Opportunities

129

Figure 4.4 Students of Laos’ Northern Agriculture and Forestry College threshing rice

Source: Photo, Outhai Soukkhy

Processes of Integration The circumstances surrounding smallholder agriculture in Laos today are the product of a decades-long shift in policy, resulting in the present push for strengthened market integration with Laos’ immediate neighbours and the wider ASEAN region. Closely following the policy trajectory of its ally and oftentimes mentor, Vietnam, Laos’ nascent communist government pushed for comprehensive agricultural collectivization in the late 1970s, following the end of the Indochina conflicts (Evans 1988). Weak collective management, poor productivity and postwar economic turmoil meant that the ideologically driven collectivization programme was little more than a brief experiment however, and as the system began to unravel, the rural population quickly reverted to reliance on subsistence farming in the early 1980s (Evans 1995). Realizing that political isolation and state-controlled pricing and trade were suffocating Laos’ chances of economic growth, the government sought to reverse its position by launching the New Economic Mechanism reforms of the mid-1980s, to a great extent mirroring Vietnam’s Doi Moi renovation policies, and targeting market liberalization and foreign direct investment, much in line with the Washington Consensus agenda (Rigg 2005). A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

130 

Outhai Soukkhy and Robert Cole

Operating in concert with the parallel reforms underway in China and Vietnam, it is arguably the growth of the latter two economies, coupled with softening relations with Thailand, and the investment programmes particularly of the Asian Development Bank since the 1990s, that have established Laos’ economic position alongside its neighbours. The Greater Mekong Sub-region programme led by the Asian Development Bank in the early 1990s aimed to harness political rapprochement among the GMS countries, stimulate trade and improve regional competitiveness and specialization (Pholsena and Banomyong 2006). Major impacts of the programme for rural populations have been linked to market liberalization and investment in transport infrastructure. Chiming to a great extent with Laos’ domestic rural development policies, the integration focus of the GMS has been to “connect the rural poor to urban-centred services, jobs, and amenities; connect remote regions to the national (and wider) economy; and connect backward rural economies with the modernising urban core” (Rigg and Wittayapak 2009: p. 114). In Laos, regional integration has certainly been successful in opening rural places formerly cushioned from full exposure to global market forces, particular land-intensive investments as discussed above. All too often, however, this has been to the cost of smallholders’ declining access to livelihood resources, particularly land and forests, placing them in direct competition with the interests of transnational capital (Barney 2009). A further force of regional integration took effect at the beginning of 2016, in the form of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), with the aim of advancing a globally competitive and integrated single market and production base, founded on free movement of goods, services, capital, investment, and skilled labour (ASEAN 2008). While the enactment of the AEC is a staggered process (the CLMV bloc, for example, has certain delays on tariff reductions compared to the more advanced economies), its long-term implications are important to understanding possible development trajectories for Laos and its neighbours. While these processes outwardly offer new opportunities and respond to domestic policy aims to promote market-oriented agriculture and reduce poverty (MAF 2010), strengthening integration, widening access, and tightening competition will also amplify existing pressures on land and smallholder livelihoods as agricultural production becomes more regionalized. Amid the profusion of sector policy documents accompanying the enactment of the AEC, the “Vision and Strategic Plan for ASEAN Cooperation in Food, Agriculture and Forestry (2016-2025)” aims for: “A competitive, inclusive, resilient and sustainable Food, Agriculture, and Forestry (FAF) sector integrated with the A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

L aos: Responding to Pressures and Opportunities

131

global economy, based on a single market and production base contributing to food and nutrition security and prosperity in the ASEAN Community” (ASEAN, 2015). An acknowledgement is thus made of rural populations who continue to rely on these sectors for their livelihoods, while also pushing for heightened competition. Such competition will expose the smaller ASEAN economies, such as Laos, and smaller producers in general, to both the more sophisticated productive capabilities of their neighbours, and changing demand patterns for agricultural products and land resulting from their relative affluence (Razal et al. 2016; Rigg 2005; Ingalls et al. 2018). As regionalized production gains traction, if Laos continues to fulfil a mainly supply role in regional commodity markets, this will draw heavily on the country’s present main comparative advantage in this mode: the ability to absorb land-intensive production (Bourdet 2000). In December 2015, on the cusp of the AEC’s enactment, then Deputy Prime Minister Somsavath Lengsavad addressed a research forum on its implications,6 highlighting the vulnerability of family-based producers to the gathering forces of the regional market. Mr Somsavath stressed the low readiness of small-scale producers across the country for the AEC, suggesting the need for a strong economic “immune system” that could tolerate externally driven changes. The Deputy PM also candidly observed the low likelihood of complete removal of export barriers, citing protectionism in neighbouring agricultural processing industries7 that could further disadvantage contract farmers if they are not also afforded some form of protection through the AEC. A further dynamic of increasing regional connectivity has been to accelerate migration among the GMS countries, transforming rural social landscapes through “delocalisation of work, de-agrarianisation, livelihood diversification, household reconfiguration, and cultural re-identification” (Rigg and Wittayapak 2009; p. 92). The focus of the AEC in terms of mobility is firmly on facilitating movement of skilled professionals, as well as “temporary cross-border movement of natural persons and business visitors” engaged in investments and trade in goods and services (ASEAN 2016: p. 10-11). However, the great bulk of mobility within and from Laos, as well as in an intra-regional sense, takes the form of migrant labour, often responding to new opportunities created by regional integration. Migration for wage work is a commonly observed strategy for subsidising and spreading the risks of sub-livelihood smallholder farming (Rigg et 6 National University of Laos Science-Policy Forum, 16-17 December 2015. 7 Author’s notes from attendance at forum. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

132 

Outhai Soukkhy and Robert Cole

al. 2014; Winkels 2012). The diversified incomes made possible through periods of migration of some household members may also reduce reliance (and pressures) on land and forests in Laos (Manivong et al. 2014). Studies of labour migration in Laos point to a consistent preference for seasonal youth out-migration to Thailand, leaving for work during the dry season and returning to Laos according to the agricultural cycle and important family and cultural events (Molland 2017). Research in southern Laos shows the increasing importance of remittances to source households facing constrained access to land and forests, and declining returns to farming, while perceptions of modernity, independence, and changing aspirations are key motivations for Lao youth, particularly women (see also next section, Barney 2012; Estudillo et al. 2013; Manivong et al. 2014). Economic integration will affect rural labour and multilocality in Laos in diverse ways, potentially marking a gradual transition away from agriculture in contexts where migration for work becomes a more central and permanent fixture of rural livelihoods (Rigg 2005). The outcome of these concurrent processes of integration is two-fold. On the one hand, it is necessary to connect and understand smallholder conditions and decisions in the light of ongoing processes of marketization. At the same time, these processes often cross international frontiers, so what is happening in China, Thailand, and Vietnam also has a significant bearing on smallholders and smallholder production in Laos. Three rather different examples demonstrate this latter point. Shortages of farm labour in Thailand (in turn driven by widening economic opportunities for rural Thai) are enticing Lao migrants across the Mekong to fill the void, with knock-on implications for farming in Laos (Rungmanee 2014, 2016). In various provinces of Laos, Chinese and Vietnamese capital has spilled across borders in the guise of the large-scale rubber concessions mentioned above, simultaneously depriving smallholders of access to land while providing them with alternative (if precarious) income-earning opportunities (Baird 2011; Friis and Neilsen 2014). Finally, in Laos’ northeast borderland areas with Vietnam, smallholder maize production is closely connected to burgeoning demand for animal feeds to support Vietnam’s livestock industries (Vagneron and Kousonsavath 2015).8 The latter two examples demonstrate how strengthening commodity markets within the ASEAN bloc are driving landscape change, by displacing agricultural production from land-constrained countries such as Vietnam (which has tighter controls over conversion of forest) to Laos (Ingalls et 8

Author’s field notes. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

L aos: Responding to Pressures and Opportunities

133

al. 2018), whose limited remaining forest-agriculture frontiers continue to extend. This process by which changes in economic activity in one location (in this case the expansion of demand for agricultural commodities) can be seen reflected in landscape change and other impacts elsewhere is sometimes termed “telecoupling” or “teleconnection” (Baird and Fox 2015; Friis et al. 2016).

Issues Facing Smallholders Today In summarizing some of the issues explored in the preceding sections, Laos’ land and population resettlement programmes, in combination with pursuit of commercial, intensive agriculture and exploitation of resources, have in many ways succeeded in extending state control over the countryside and fostering more sedentary, market-oriented production. These trajectories have entailed significant and ongoing spatial reorganization, with certain positive development outcomes, although often alongside poor (particularly minority) populations “being progressively disenfranchised through various processes of government control and capital accumulation” (Évrard and Baird 2017, p. 189). Mounting land pressures and social differentiation have also resulted from these wider political and economic trends, linked not only to resettlement but also widening access to previously isolated regions of the country. As Laos has become increasingly integrated both internally and with its neighbours, those at a disadvantage (e.g. marginal smallholders with already limited access to land) may struggle to compete with others who are more readily able to harness new opportunities (Rigg 2005). For Lestrelin and Giordano, “these policies have reinforced the unbalanced power relationships between ‘lowlanders’ and ‘uplanders’”, by providing a conduit for tightening state management of upland resources and populations (2007: p. 73). The drive to concentrate and govern rural populations in reduced areas that separate them from multifunctional land uses is meanwhile argued to lead to a “land degradation trap”, characterized by unsustainably shortened fallow periods and overharvesting of local forest products (Castella et al. 2013). This is much in line with what Rigg terms “new poverty”, in which market integration and area-based development policies drive increasingly unsustainable practices and heightened competition, including via the physical relocation of people to lowland areas where land and other natural capital is already in use (2005). A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

134 

Outhai Soukkhy and Robert Cole

These processes fundamentally change the use of local resources, not only due to higher concentrations of people, but altered demand structures and more advanced exploitation methods (ibid). The radical spatial reorganization of the Lao population, together with demographic growth, is also altering the rural economy due to changing practices and locations of food production and consumption, shifts in the rural labour supply, and widening adoption of non-farm activities. If Laos’ ongoing integration with regional markets succeeds in fostering economic diversification to non-resource dependent sectors that can absorb more labour, this may yet ease pressures on land and induce broader transformations that gradually reduce reliance on natural capital. However, it is often problematic to consider such processes in an abstract way, which can mask not only the diversity of local conditions, but the potential for social upheavals and widening disparities that may result. Co-present with the directionality of agrarian change is urbanization, a topic that remains deeply understudied in Laos. A dramatic, though highly uneven, rise in urban affluence and changing patterns of consumption are radically reshaping Laos’ towns and cities, and aspirations among rural dwellers (particularly youth) to join them (see Vallard 2017). At national scale, these trends are widening the already significant disparities between urban and rural, lowland and upland, and migrants lacking the means to sustain themselves and their families in the countryside may often make the journey to Laos’ expanding urban centres with only hopes of finding work, finding minimal services to support them once they arrive. At the heart of this issue is the need for diversified employment opportunities in non-agricultural sectors, which remain severely limited in Laos compared to its neighbours. One would-be solution to creating employment is the recent heavy policy emphasis on Special Economic Zones (SEZs) – which although successful at attracting elite consumer outlets, such as casinos and golf courses, have to date brought fewer of the needed foreign-origin manufacturing investments they are intended to promote. While expansion of domestic industry is arguably central to moving away from overreliance on land- and resource-intensive sectors, limited skills and few opportunities for training continue to hinder the expansion of Laos’ nonagricultural labour force. A recent media report showed that just half of the almost 15,000 reported employees at Laos’ SEZs were Lao citizens (Vientiane Times 2017c). Lacking local employment, Thailand remains the tried and tested destination for labour migration among many unskilled Lao youth, especially young women (Estudillo et al. 2013), albeit often fraught with risk (Phouxay 2017). Above all, Laos’ demographic trajectory is fundamental to A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

L aos: Responding to Pressures and Opportunities

135

the present and future of the country’s smallholders. With some 59% of the Lao population under 25 years old (WHO online statistics), Laos is forecast to undergo a demographic dividend until approximately 2050 (Jones 2015), which will substantially alter the dynamics of rural labour in the decades ahead. Of great importance is the widely held aspiration among rural Lao youth to leave their farm origins behind in favour of moving to cities and an idealized modern consumer existence (Phouxay 2017; Vallard 2017). This is in line with broader observations that although smallholder agriculture remains the largest employer in the developing world, its continuation in the face of expanding large-scale industrial farms “assumes a generation of young rural men and women who want to be small farmers, while mounting evidence suggests that young people are uninterested in farming or in rural futures” (White 2012: p. 9). The reality, perhaps the world over, is that in the eyes of the young, farming is not “cool” (despite folk references to the contrary, such as the earlier mentioned popular Lao song), but a hard life “without an economic pay-off – and little room for career advancement” (Nierenberg and Small 2014: p. 1). Conversion to commodity crops among Lao smallholders may be contributing to such trends in certain circumstances, since they sometimes reduce labour requirements while also providing the needed cash for schooling and further education. Studies show that many Lao farmers hope their children will find different opportunities beyond the fields, while most youth equate a “better life” with wage employment, often aspiring to work for the government, though jobs remain limited (LURAS 2016b; Bartlett et al. 2017). Ambitions towards urban living and salaried work may nevertheless be cemented among the rising numbers of secondary school-age youth travelling beyond the boundaries of their natal village to undertake their studies. Despite the best efforts of government and international organizations to support the education of a new generation of Lao farmers, the gradual yet perhaps inexorable decline in rural labour raises questions over the generational transfer of skills among smallholders, and whether or not the door is being opened still wider for commercial agribusiness and other investors to acquire tracts of the Lao countryside.

Future Prospects of Smallholders in Laos The nature of farming in Laos has dramatically changed over the 2000s in many ways, sometimes to the benefit of smallholders (access to new markets and improved incomes, and the ability to invest profits in a better future), A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

136 

Outhai Soukkhy and Robert Cole

though often amplifying some existing risks and creating new ones (exclusion from land and resources, exposure to more aggressive competition, declining landscape functions). Despite the great changes underway in terms of production, traditional practices are retained in many locations, and even where commodity crops have come to dominate the landscape it is common for upland households to keep some areas under swidden rice cultivation. Equally, while demographic trends suggest a changing agrarian future for Laos, the majority of the rural population remains predominantly engaged in agriculture. The story of Lao smallholders continues, for now, to be one of persistence in response to emerging pressures and opportunities. While the influence of regional integration over agricultural policies and practices is likely to increase, the greatest risks faced by Lao smallholders are also the most difficult and complex to respond to at both household and policy levels. Like many developing countries, Laos is highly vulnerable to climate change, while also being in a weak position in terms of resilience and adaptive capacity (World Bank 2011). Historic data and projections show upward trajectories in rainfall, temperature, instances of flooding, and drought in Laos, predicted to continue intensifying and becoming more variable, and potentially accompanied by increasing pest outbreaks (Russell et al. 2015). Perhaps the most critical hazards to Lao smallholders are those posed by changes in water availability and rainfall intensity. Laos is a comparatively water abundant country, although with 80% of river flow occurring during the rainy season (World Bank 2011), the agricultural sector in general and rainfed rice in particular are precariously reliant on consistent rainfall during the wet months from June to October (Vongmany 2018). Increasing flood and drought intensity will thus place ever-higher demands on water storage and transfer (Russell et al. 2015). Responding to these challenges will necessitate a combination of flow (shorter-term, lower cost investments, such as alternative rice varieties) and stock (longer-term, higher cost investments, such as climate resilient infrastructure) adaptation measures, requiring significant public funding and long-term adaptive planning (Vongmany 2018). The need to respond to climate change in an integrated way that combines mitigation and adaptation measures has been argued for some time (Klein et al. 2007), particularly in relation to the land-use sector, in which preserving and managing forests has multiple roles in both aspects (though in practice with major challenges in terms of coordination between sectors [Di Gregorio et al. 2015]). Laos has potential to leverage its forests in this way, with foreseeable benefits to smallholders who also depend on forests for a variety of ecosystem services A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

L aos: Responding to Pressures and Opportunities

137

at different scales. Efforts to maintain forests and forest land in Laos face powerful competing objectives towards harnessing their economic value, however (Cole et al. 2017), not least those emerging from the country’s ongoing drive for growth and market integration, and enabled by the policy-driven rural transformations depicted above. These competing objectives play out in the form of policy-practice gaps and “selective implementation” (Singh 2012: 8), and malleable claims to land and forests according to potential revenues from exploitation of resources (Dwyer and Ingalls 2015). How well concerns for both smallholder futures and wider sustainability will be met alongside entrenched policy emphasis and elite interests towards maximizing immediate gains from land- and resource-intensive sectors remains to be seen.

References Association of Southeast Asian Nations (2008) ASEAN Economic Community Blueprint. Jakarta: ASEAN Secretariat. Association of Southeast Asian Nations (2015) Vision and Strategic Plan for ASEAN Cooperation in Food, Agriculture and Forestry. Makati City: ASEAN Ministers of Agriculture. Association of Southeast Asian Nations (2016) ASEAN Economic Community Blueprint 2025. Jakarta: ASEAN Secretariat. Baird, I.G. (2011) “Turning land into capital, turning people into labour: Primitive accumulation and the arrival of large-scale economic land concessions in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic”, New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry 5(1): 10-26. Baird, I.G. and J. Fox (2015) “How land concessions affect places elsewhere: Telecoupling, political ecology, and large-scale plantations in Southern Laos and Northeastern Cambodia”, Land 4: 436-453. Baird, I. G. and B. Shoemaker (2007) “Unsettling experiences: Internal resettlement and international aid agencies in Laos”, Development and Change 38(5): 865-888. Baird, I.G. and P. Vue (2015) “The ties that bind: The role of Hmong social networks in developing small-scale rubber cultivation in Laos”, Mobilities 12(1): 136-154. Barney, K. (2009) “Laos and the making of a ‘relational’ resource frontier”, The Geographical Journal 175: 146-159. Barney, K. (2012) “Land, livelihoods, and remittances”, Critical Asian Studies 44: 57-83. Barraclough, S.L. and K.B. Ghimire (1995) Forests and Livelihoods: The Social Dynamics of Deforestation in Developing Countries. London: Palgrave/UNRISD. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

138 

Outhai Soukkhy and Robert Cole

Bartlett, A., S. Moungkhounsavath, and B. Phimmavong (2017) “Promoting agricultural entrepreneurship in Laos”, Rural 21: The International Journal for Rural Development 51(3): 32-33. Bourdet, Y. (2000) The Economics of Transition in Laos: From Socialism to ASEAN Integration. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Bouté, V. (2017) “Reaching the cities: New forms of network and social differentiation in Northern Laos”. In: V. Bouté and V. Pholsena (eds.), Changing Lives in Laos: Society, Politics and Culture in a Post-Socialist State. Singapore: NUS Press. Castella, J.-C., G. Lestrelin, C. Hett, J. Bourgoin, Y.R. Fitriana, A. Heinimann, and J.L. Pfund (2013) “Effects of landscape segregation on livelihood vulnerability: Moving from extensive shifting cultivation to rotational agriculture and natural forests in northern Laos”, Human Ecology 41: 63-76. Cole, R., G. Wong, M. Brockhaus, M. Moeliono, and M. Kallio (2017) “Objectives, ownership and engagement in Lao PDR’s REDD+ policy landscape”, Geoforum 83: 91-100. Cole, R. and J. Rigg (2019) “Lao peasants on the move: Pathways of agrarian change in Laos”, The Journal of Australian Anthropology 30(2): 1-21. Dercon, S. (2013) “Agriculture and development: revisiting the policy narratives”, Agricultural Economics 44: 183-187. Di Gregorio, M., D.R. Nurrochmat, L. Fatorelli, E. Pramova, I.M. Sari, B. Locatelli, and M. Brockhaus (2015) Integrating Mitigation and Adaptation in Climate and Land Use Policies in Indonesia: A Policy Document Analysis. Sustainability Research Institute Paper No. 90. Leeds: University of Leeds. Ducourtieux, O., J.R. Laffort, and S. Sacklokham (2005) “Land policy and farming practices in Laos”, Development and Change 36(3): 499-526. Dwyer, M.B. (2011) Territorial Affairs: Turning Battlefields into Marketplaces in Postwar Laos. PhD thesis. University of California, Berkeley. Dwyer, M.B. (2015) Trying to Follow the Money: Possibilities and Limits of Investor Transparency in Southeast Asia’s Rush for “Available” Land. Working Paper 177. Bogor: CIFOR. Dwyer, M.B. (2017) “The new ‘new battlef ield’: Capitalizing security in Laos’ agribusiness landscape”. In: V. Bouté and V. Pholsena (eds.), Changing Lives in Laos: Society, Politics and Culture in a Post-Socialist State. Singapore: NUS Press. Dwyer, M.B. and M. Ingalls (2015) REDD+ at the Crossroads: Choices and Tradeoffs for 2015-2020 in Laos. Working Paper 179. Bogor: CIFOR. Estudillo, J.P., Y. Mano, and S. Seng-Arloun (2013) “Job choice of three generations in rural Laos”, The Journal of Development Studies 49(7): 991-1009. European Commission (2011) Resettlement in Laos: Final report. Torino: SOGES. Evans, G. (1988) Agrarian Change in Communist Laos. Occasional paper No. 85. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

L aos: Responding to Pressures and Opportunities

139

Evans, G. (1995) Lao Peasants under Socialism and Post-Socialism. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books. Évrard, O. and I.G. Baird (2017) “The political ecology of upland/lowland relationships in Laos since 1975”. In: V. Bouté and V. Pholsena (eds.), Changing Lives in Laos: Society, Politics and Culture in a Post-Socialist State. Singapore: NUS Press. Évrard, O. and Y. Goudineau (2004) “Planned resettlement, unexpected migrations and cultural trauma in Laos”, Development and Change 35(5): 937-962. Fox, J. (2000) “How blaming ‘slash and burn’ farmers is deforesting mainland Southeast Asia”, Asia Pacific Issues 47. Hawaii: East-West Center. Friis, C. and J.Ø. Nielsen (2014) “Exploring the potential of the telecoupling framework for understanding land change”, THESys Discussion Paper. Berlin: Humboldt-Universität. Friis, C. and J.Ø. Neilsen (2016) “Small-scale land acquisitions, large-scale implications: Exploring the case of Chinese banana investments in northern Laos”, Land Use Policy 57: 117-129. Friis, C., J.Ø. Nielsen, I. Otero, H. Haberl, J. Niewöhner, and P. Hostert (2016) “From teleconnection to telecoupling: taking stock of an emerging framework in land system science”, Journal of Land Use Science 11(2): 131-153. Government of Lao PDR (2004) National Growth and Poverty Eradication Strategy. Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper. Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund. Heinimann, A., C. Hett, K. Hurni, P. Messerli, M. Epprecht, L. Jørgensen, and T. Breu (2013) “Socio-economic perspectives on shifting cultivation landscapes in Northern Laos”, Human Ecology 41(1): 51-62. Hett, C., J.C. Castella, A. Heinimann, P. Messerli, and J.L. Pfund (2011) “A landscape mosaics approach for characterizing swidden systems from a REDD+ perspective”, Applied Geography 32: 608-618. Hett, C., V. Nanhthavong, T. Saphangthong, G.R. Robles, K. Phouangphet, W. Speller, P. Messerli, M. Epprecht, and A. Heinimann (2015) “Land deals in Laos: First insights from a new nationwide initiative to assess the quality of investments in land”, Paper presented at Chiang Mai University, 5-6 June 2015. Hirsch, P. (2000) “Underlying causes of deforestation in the Mekong region”, Report presented at regional workshop on Forest Management Strategies in the Mekong Region, Vientiane: National University of Laos. Hirsch, P. and N. Scurrah (2015) The Political Economy of Land Governance in the Mekong Region. Vientiane: Mekong Region Land Governance (MRLG). Ingalls, M.L., P. Meyfroidt, P.X. To, M. Kenney-Lazar, and M. Epprecht (2018) “The transboundary displacement of deforestation under REDD+: Problematic intersections between the trade of forest-risk commodities and land grabbing in the Mekong region”, Global Environmental Change 50: 255-267. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

140 

Outhai Soukkhy and Robert Cole

Jones, G.W. (2015) Population and Development in Lao PDR. Vientiane: United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Kenney-Lazar, M. (2010) Land Concessions, Land Tenure, and Livelihood Change: Plantation Development in Attapeu Province, Southern Laos. Working Paper. Vientiane: National University of Laos. Kenney-Lazar, M. (2012) “Plantation rubber, land grabbing and social-property transformation in southern Laos”, Journal of Peasant Studies 39(3-4): 1017-1037. Klein, R.J.T., S. Huq, F. Denton, T.E. Downing, R.G. Richels, J.B. Robinson, and F.L. Toth (2007) “Inter-relationships between adaptation and mitigation”. In: M.L. Parry, O.F. Canziani, J.P. Palutikof, P.J. van der Linden and C.E. Hanson (eds.), Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. KPL News (2017) “Laos-China railway confirmed to be completed by end of 2021”. http://kpl.gov.la/En/Detail.aspx?id=30635 (Accessed 27 December 2017). Lamb, D. (2011) Regreening the Bare Hills: Tropical Forest Restoration in the AsiaPacific Region. City: Springer. Lagerqvist, Y.F., L. Woollacott, A. Phasouysaingam, and S. Souliyavong (2014) “Resource development and the perpetuation of poverty in rural Laos”, Australian Geographer 45(3): 407-417. Lao Statistical Bureau (2015) The Fourth Population and Housing Census. Vientiane: Government of Lao PDR. Lao Upland Rural Advisory Service (2016a) The Toxic Landscape, Discussion Paper. Vientiane: Lao Upland Rural Advisory Service. Lao Upland Rural Advisory Service (2016b) “The next generation of farmers in Laos”, Conference paper. Mekong Extension Learning Alliance, June 2016, Yangon. Lestrelin, G., J.C. Castella, and J. Bourgoin (2012) “Territorialising sustainable development: The politics of land-use planning in Laos”, Journal of Contemporary Asia 42(4): 581-602. Lestrelin, G. and M. Giordano (2007) “Upland development policy, livelihood change and land degradation: Interactions from a Laotian village”, Land Degradation and Development 18: 55-76. Lyttleton, C. and Y. Li (2017) “Rubber’s affective economies: Seeding a social landscape in Northwest Laos”. In: V. Bouté and V. Pholsena (eds.), Changing Lives in Laos: Society, Politics and Culture in a Post-Socialist State. Singapore: NUS Press. Manivong, K. and P. Sophathilath (2009) Land Use Planning and Land Allocation in the Upland of Northern Laos: Process Evaluation and Impacts. Singapore: Economy and Environment Program for Southeast Asia Secretariat. Manivong, V., R. Cramb, and J. Newby (2014) “Rice and remittances: Crop intensif ication versus labour migration in Southern Laos”, Human Ecology 42: 367-379. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

L aos: Responding to Pressures and Opportunities

141

Martin, S.M. and K. Lorenzen (2016) “Livelihood diversification in rural Laos”, World Development 83: 231-243. Messerli, P., A. Heinimann, and M. Epprecht (2009) “Finding homogeneity in heterogeneity: A new approach to quantifying landscape mosaics developed for the Lao PDR”, Human Ecology 37(3): 291-304. Meyfroidt, P., T.K. Rudel, and E.F. Lambin (2010) “Forest transitions, trade, and the global displacement of land use”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 107(49): 20917-20922. Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (2010) Strategy for Agricultural Development 2011 to 2020. Vientiane: Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry of Lao PDR. Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (2012) Lao Census of Agriculture 2010/11: Highlights. Vientiane: Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry of Lao PDR. Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (2016) Department of Agriculture Statistical Yearbook. Vientiane: Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry of the Lao PDR. Ministry of Planning and Investment (2016). Eighth Five-Year National Socioeconomic Development Plan VIII (2016-2020). Vientiane: Ministry of Planning and Investment of Lao PDR. Molland, S. (2017) “Migration and mobility in Laos”. In: V. Bouté and V. Pholsena (eds.), Changing Lives in Laos: Society, politics and culture in a post-socialist state. Singapore: NUS Press. Nguyen, A.T., J. Dzator, and A. Nadolny (2015) “Does contract farming improve productivity and income of farmers? A review of theory and evidence”, Journal of Developing Areas 49(6): 531-538. Nierenberg, D. and S. Small (2014) “Making agriculture ‘cool’ for youth”, African Journal of Food, Agriculture, Nutrition and Development 14(5): 1-4. Northern Agriculture and Forestry College (2014) Prospectus. Luang Prabang: Northern Agriculture and Forestry College of Lao PDR. Pholsena, V. and R. Banomyong (2006) Laos: From Buffer State to Crossroads? Chiang Mai: Mekong Press. Phouxay, K. (2017) “Patterns and consequences of undocumented migration from Lao PDR to Thailand”. In: V. Bouté and V. Pholsena (eds.), Changing Lives in Laos: Society, Politics and Culture in a Post-Socialist State. Singapore: NUS Press. Razal, A.R., A.F.F. Firmalino, and M.C.S. Guerrero (2015) Impact of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) on Social Forestry and Forestry Products Trade. Jakarta: ASEAN Social Forestry Network Non-Timber Forest Products Exchange Programme. Rigg, J. (2005) Living with Transition in Laos: Market Integration in Southeast Asia. London/ New York: Routledge. Rigg, J. (2016) Challenging Southeast Asian Development: The Shadows of Success. London/ New York: Routledge. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

142 

Outhai Soukkhy and Robert Cole

Rigg, J., B. Promphaking, and A. Le Mare (2014) “Personalizing the middle-income trap: An inter-generational migrant view from rural Thailand”, World Development 59: 184-198. Rigg, J. and C. Wittayapak (2009) “Spatial integration and human transformations in the Greater Mekong subregion”. In: Y. Huang and A.M. Bocchi (eds.), Reshaping Economic Geography in East Asia. Washington, DC: World Bank. Rungmanee, S. (2014) “The dynamic pathways of agrarian transformation in the northeastern Thai-Lao borderlands”, Australian Geographer 45: 341-354. Rungmanee, S. (2016) “Unravelling the dynamics of border crossing and rural-torural-to-urban mobility in the northeastern Thai-Lao borderlands”, Population, Space and Place 22: 693-704. Russell, A.J.M., J. Foppes, D.C. Behr, S. Ketphanh, and S. Rafanoharana (2015) How Forests Enhance Resilience to Climate Change: The Case of Smallholder Agriculture in Lao PDR. Washington, DC: Program on Forests (PROFOR). Saykham, V. (2013) Conceptual Framework on Risk and Vulnerability and Situational Analysis of the National Policy Environment in Lao PDR (Unpublished Report). Vientiane: National Economic Research Institute, Ministry of Planning and Investment of the Lao PDR. Scott, J.C. (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, J.C. (2009) The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scurrah, N. and P. Hirsch (2015) Foreign Direct Investment and Land Access: Extended Synopsis. Chiang Mai: The Regional Centre for Social Science and Sustainable Development, Chiang Mai University. Schönweger, O., A. Heinimann, M. Epprecht, J. Lu, and P. Thalongsengchanh (2012) Concessions and Leases in the Lao PDR: Taking Stock of Land Investments. Bern: Centre for Development and Environment (CDE), University of Bern. Singh, S. (2012) Natural Potency and Political Power: Forests and State Authority in Contemporary Laos. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Sub-sector Working Group on Farmers and Agribusiness (2013) Farmer’s statement. Conference Proceedings: Farmer’s Conference on Commercial Agriculture. 19-20 June 2013, Luang Namtha, Lao PDR. The Guardian (2017) Cash and chemicals: banana boom a blessing and a curse. https:// membership.theguardian.com/membership-content?referringContent=news/ gallery/2017/may/16/cash-and-chemicals-banana-boom-a-blessing-and-a-curse (Accessed 14 June 2017). Thongmanivong, S., K. Phengsopha, H. Chantavong, M. Dwyer, and R. Oberndorf (2009) Concession or Cooperation? Impacts of Recent Rubber Investment on Land Tenure and Livelihoods: A case Study from Oudomxai Province, Lao PDR. Working A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

L aos: Responding to Pressures and Opportunities

143

Paper. Bangkok: Regional Community Forestry Training Centre for Asia and the Pacific (RECOFTC). Vagneron, I. and C. Kousonsavath (2015) Analyzing Cross-Border Maize Trade in Huaphanh Province, Lao PDR. Vientiane: Northern Uplands Development Program. Vallard, A. (2017) “Textiles economy in Laos: From the household to the world”. In: V. Bouté and V. Pholsena (eds.), Changing Lives in Laos: Society, Politics and Culture in a Post-Socialist State. Singapore: NUS Press. Vandergeest, P. (2003) “Land to some tillers: development-induced displacement in Laos”, International Social Science Journal 55(175): 47-56. Vientiane Times (2017a) “PM addresses troublesome impacts of development”, 29 April 2017 (Accessed 30 April 2017). Vientiane Times (2017b) “Government to get tough with dishonest land concession holders”, 28 April 2017 (Accessed 30 April 2017). Vientiane Times (2017c) “Government hopes SEZs will generate 4,150 jobs next year”, 20 September 2017 (Accessed 01 October 2017). Vongmany, O., K.N. Watanabe, T. Mizunoya, M. Kawase, A. Kikuchi, H. Yabar, Y. Higano, N. Sombounsack, and O. Phoumpakon (2018) “Sustainable water management under variable rainfall conditions in river communities of Champhone district, Savannakhet province, Lao PDR”, Journal of Sustainable Development 11(3): 108-122. Vongvisouk, T., O. Mertz, S. Thongmanivong, A. Heinimann, and K. Phanvilay (2014) “Shifting cultivation stability and change: Contrasting pathways of land use and livelihood change in Laos”, Applied Geography 46: 1-10. Vongvisouk, T., R.B. Broegaard, O. Mertz, and S. Thongmanivong (2016) “Rush for cash crops and forest protection: Neither land sparing nor land sharing”, Land Use Policy 55: 182-192. White, B. (2012) “Agriculture and the generation problem: Rural youth, employment and the future of farming”, IDS Bulletin 43(6): 9-19. Winkels, A. (2012) “Migration, social networks and risk”, Journal of Vietnamese Studies 7(4): 92-121. World Bank (2008) Lao People’s Democratic Republic: Policy, market, and agriculture transition in the Northern Uplands. Report. Vientaine: World Bank, Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry of Lao PDR, and Agence de Développement de France. World Bank (2011) Vulnerability, Risk Reduction and Adaptation to Climate Change. Climate Risk and Adaptation Country Profile, Lao PDR. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank (2015) East Asia’s Changing Urban Landscape: Measuring a Decade of Spatial Growth. Washington, DC: World Bank. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

144 

Outhai Soukkhy and Robert Cole

World Health Organization (2017) Lao People’s Democratic Republic Country Profile. www.wpro.who.int/laos/about/lao_country_profile/en/ (Accessed 1 October 2017). Ziegler, A.D., J. Phelps, J.Q. Yuen, E.L. Webb, D. Lawrence, J.M. Fox, T.B. Bruun, S.J. Leisz, C.M. Ryan, W. Dressler, O. Mertz, U. Pascual, C. Padoch, and L.P. Koh (2012) “Carbon outcomes of major land-cover transitions in SE Asia: Great uncertainties and REDD+ policy implications”, Global Change Biology 18: 3087-3099.

About the Authors Outhai Soukkhy is Deputy Director of the Northern Agriculture and Forestry College (NAFC) in Luang Prabang, Laos. An experienced farm consultant, his specialities include Agronomy, Livestock, Fishery, Agribusiness, and Forestry. He received his doctorate in Community Development in 2010 and holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Agronomy. Robert Cole is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. His PhD explores the transition from semisubsistence to commercial agriculture and resulting social change in the borderlands of northern Laos and Vietnam. Robert holds a master’s degree in Social Policy and Development from the London School of Economics.

A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

5

Malaysia: The State of/in Village Agriculture Ibrahim Ngah and Khairul Hisyam Kamarudin

Abstract The case of smallholder transformation in Malaysia represents a deliberate and deep government involvement and intervention in the agricultural sector as well as in the lives and livelihoods of rural smallholders. The technocratic approach of modernizing agriculture through in-situ development programmes and land reformation through FELDA schemes has successfully eradicated poverty among smallholders and improved their standard of living. New challenges for smallholders in sustaining production include the difficulties in hiring workers, the low prices of commodities, and the increased cost of inputs associated with Malaysia’s rapid pace of urbanization and intensified globalization. Prospects for smallholders include the diversif ication of crops and livelihoods, multifunctional rural practices, and continuing government support in addressing food security. Keywords: government intervention, Malaysia, pekebun kecil, smallholders, subsidies

The development of agricultural smallholdings in Malaysia remains important as an area of focus in Malaysian development policy. Common issues pertaining to smallholders in Malaysia have always related to the problems of underdevelopment and poverty. Most of the studies on small farmers or smallholders have focused on the issue of poverty among Malays (Thompson 2015; Buang 2007; Onn 1991; Omar 1986; Gibbons et al. 1980). Smallholders in Malaysia commonly include rice farmers, rubber tappers, coconut pickers, palm oil producers, fishermen, among others. Since Malaysia gained independence, problems of poverty have been a consistent

Thompson, Eric, Jonathan Rigg, and Jamie Gillen (eds), Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789462988170/ch05 A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

146 

Ibrahim Ngah and Khairul Hisyam Kamarudin

issue for the government to address. Government intervention reached its peak during the period of the New Economic Policy (1971-1990), when large-scale programmes tasked with the promotion of smallholders were formally established. At present, while government policy continues to focus on smallholders, the contributions of this sector to rural livelihoods have been declining drastically. The transformation of the agricultural smallholding sector since the early twentieth century has been due in large part to its integration into the global market – particularly since the introduction of rubber. Some other important factors have also included local socio-demographic, economic, and political processes. The introduction of the rubber economy in Malaysia began during the British colonization in the late nineteenth century, following the growth of industries utilizing rubber in Europe. Investment in large-scale rubber plantations was made largely by European merchant capitalists who had established trading in the Straits Settlements of Malaya (Penang, Malacca, Singapore). Many Chinese merchant capitalists were also involved in rubber plantations, albeit at a smaller scale. Rubber trees were planted in the western foothill zones, where land was suitable along both sides of railway lines and roads. Although indigenous Malay people and Indonesian immigrants who settled in villages were encouraged to cultivate food grains, many chose to participate in rubber cultivation. This was especially so in the first two decades of the twentieth century because of the promising returns from rubber when prices were high. The total acreage of rubber cultivated by Chinese capitalists as well as Malay and migrant smallholders was comparable to the total size of European plantations. Thus, out of the 1.8 million acres of land under rubber cultivation, 44% was owned by Chinese capitalists and other smallholders (see Ngah 1993). The persistence of smallholders owed to their flexibility in small-scale operations, in terms of working time and the use of family labour. This gave them some advantages which allowed them to survive during periods of low rubber prices. Differences in the integration of capitalist modes of production in Malaya led to a substantial dualism between the plantation sector and the traditional subsistence (or smallholder) sector (Onn 1991), as well as differentiation among peasants (see Halim 1980; De Koninck 1979). On one hand, the modern management of the plantation sector enabled it to sustain high productivity and respond quickly to various challenges stemming from economic, social, and ecological changes. On the other hand, peasant agriculture in the pre-capitalist period (prior to the twentieth century) was largely subsistence oriented and revolved around traditional mixed-economy methods of cultivation. Peasants themselves were often described by colonial officers as A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Malaysia: The State of/in Village Agriculture

147

contented, self-sufficient, and poor (Yusof 1986). Later, the green revolution further integrated the peasant community (socially and economically) into the broader national and international market system (De Koninck 1979). The consequence of these transitions were diverse and cannot be generalized across peasants who remained in their villages, migrants to the city, and migrants under resettlement schemes (see Ngah 2007). In the postwar period of the late 1940s through 1960s, under the antiCommunist “Emergency” period, almost all Chinese smallholders were relocated to towns. Meanwhile, Malaysian Indians have largely been involved as large-scale plantation labourers. Thus, the smallholder agriculturalist discussed in this chapter focuses primarily on the Malay-Malaysian population. We also focus primarily on peninsular Malaysia, unless otherwise noted, as the dynamics of the East Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah are very different in character and require a separate treatment.

What Is a Smallholder in Malaysia? The emergence of smallholder agriculture in Malaysia can be attributed primarily to long-standing family-farming and village-based practices of opening up and maintaining landholdings of around 1 to 2 hectares. Since independence, national government policies have also intervened to define smallholders in specific ways. These typically define smallholders as those owning land up to anywhere between 4 to 40 hectares. Specific Malay terms such as petani (farmer), peladang (one who works the field), pekebun (one who works the orchard), and peneroka (pioneer), can be used to denote smallholders. In more formal usage, the word kecil (small) is added to these terms (e.g. pekebun kecil or petani kecil).1 However, the much more popular term of reference for smallholders in Malaysia is rural villager or “orang kampung” (lit. village person). The term orang kampung connotes association to a livelihood involving small-scale farming and a variety of village labour (agricultural labourer, collecting of forest products, raising livestock, etc.). The agricultural productivity of “orang kampung” is generally low due to the use of traditional, less intensive farming practices and the smaller scale of their activities. Popular images of orang kampung can be found in a wide range of media from school textbooks to television dramas (Thompson 2007). In the 1960s, 1 The base words are tani (farm), ladang (field), kebun (orchard), teroka (to open up land); the prefix pe- means “one who does (this activity)”. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

148 

Ibrahim Ngah and Khairul Hisyam Kamarudin

classic Malay novels by Ahmad portraying rural scenes in Baling, Kedah describe peasants as poor, with only one or two relung (1.42 acres) of paddy land and living in places that lack facilities and infrastructure (Ahmad 2008). The orang kampung was also portrayed as humble and polite, having strong community ties, and living in harmony with nature. The villages in those days had clean running rivers and abundant forest resources, on which peasants depended for income. As Thompson (2007, 2015) argues, much of this image remains culturally and politically powerful while the underlying social reality of the village and orang kampung has in fact changed substantially in the decades since Ahmad’s writing. The term “smallholder” or related Malay terms such as “petani kecil” (small farmer) are much less common than “orang kampung”. According to Buang (2007), the term “small farmers” or “smallholders” emerged during the era of British occupation when the agricultural landscape was divided into two, namely: (1) smallholdings of indigenous2 farmers which served as a source of staple food for the population of Malaya, and (2) large holdings based on the “estate” or plantation system which cultivated coffee, sugar, black pepper, tobacco, and later rubber, which were largely owned and operated by European capitalists and newcomers from China. As Buang (2007) argues, small farmers represent an inferior and marginalized mode of production in the formation of social capitalism in the laissez-faire economy of the colonial period. More generally, smallholders tend to be defined by qualitative characteristics, such as their primary reliance on family labour, or at least on a small labour force that does not require bureaucratic management structures, as is the case with large holdings (Bissonnette and De Koninck 2015). At the same time, “smallholder” refers literally to the small size of farmers’ landholdings. However, quantifying the size of land considered “small” is very subjective. The traditional practices of land division in Malaysian villages provide some framework for defining the size of smallholdings. Traditionally, when farmers open or clear land for occupation and/or farming, the practice was to divide land into parcels of between 1 to 2 hectares. For instance, in Sabak Bernam, Selangor, the standard lot size of a rice field is 3 acres (1.2 hectares) (Ngah et al. 2013). Meanwhile, in Parit Tengah, Johor, 2 The word indigenous can be “Bumiputera”, “Malay” or both depending on context. The Bumiputera (son of the soil) covers a broader category of the natives in Malaysia including Malay and Orang Asli in Peninsular Malaysia and natives of Sabah and Sarawak. The Malay as defined under the Malaysian constitution is a person who professes the religion of Islam, habitually speaks the Malay language, and conforms to Malay custom. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

Malaysia: The State of/in Village Agriculture

149

the Indonesian migrants who opened the village divided up land parcels so that each person received five acres (approximately 2 hectares). Meanwhile, at Kampung Melayu Raya in Pontian, Johor, land parcels were divided into four acres for each person. Similar norms are applied in state and federal land schemes. Due to the limited availability of the state land, the size of land awarded to an individual applicant is less than 2 hectares according to current practices. For instance, the state government of Johor normally approves one hectare or less to each individual applicant and in Pahang, the state government normally approve land lots of 3 acres (1.2 hectares) to individual applicants. In a FELDA (Federal Land Development Agency) scheme, each settler household is given a piece of 4 hectare land to develop, with 2 hectares each for a husband and wife couple, which is considered to be the ideal size for individual smallholders.3 The income of the FELDA settlers from a landholding of that size is generally far above the national poverty line of RM 900 per household per month. Since the establishment of the Rubber Industry Smallholders Development Authority (from here on referred to as RISDA) and the Farmers Association Board (Lembaga Pertubuhan Peladang) in 1973, there were at least two official definitions of smallholders or farmers based on respective acts. The Rubber Industry Smallholders Development Authority Act 1972, defined estates as having “a total area of not less than 100 acres” and smallholders as owners or lawful occupiers of less than 100 acres. In the Farmer Organization Act 1973, farmers were defined as “any person who is a citizen of Malaysia, has attained the age of 18 years and – (a) is engaged in agricultural or livestock production; (b) whose income is derived from agricultural or livestock production; or (c) is in command of any of the factors of agricultural or livestock production”. According to the Rubber Industry Smallholders Development Authority Act 1972, there are several implications of official definitions of smallholders. Firstly, the programme to assist small farmers will only include those within the given definition, i.e. those with legal ownership of land area of any size less than 100 acres (40.5 hectares). Those without legal ownership of land are excluded from government grant schemes for smallholders. Thus, wealthy farmers reap the most benefits from the subsidy scheme provided by the government. Meanwhile, landless farmers and farm workers cannot benefit. Moreover, the definition creates a legal loophole for farm families who own more than 40.5 hectares or 100 acres to benefit from subsidy schemes, 3 Based on an interview with En Ishak b. Ali on 18 April 2016, a FELDA Officer of FELDA Johor Banru Regional office. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

150 

Ibrahim Ngah and Khairul Hisyam Kamarudin

as they can divide their land title into smaller parcels under the individual names of different family members. In essence, the RISDA definition of “smallholder” includes all but the largest, mainly corporate landholders, in the agricultural sector. The def inition of a farmer by the Farmers Association Board is also problematic as the definition is vague and open to various interpretations, where someone can be considered to be a farmer in general and so become a member, without being identified beforehand whether they are individual small farmers, large farmers, or companies. The act does not include farmers who do not possess land and those who are illegally occupying government land. The act also does not cover land under customary title such as Orang Asli (aboriginal) land and native customary reserve land for Sabah and Sarawak, which require further verifications from various departments and agencies.

Smallholders in Malaysia Today In 2014, agriculture contributed to 9.2% of GDP and 12% of total employment (EPU 2015) in Malaysian. Agriculture land covers about 24% of Malaysia’s total land area. Out of the total 6,934 thousand hectares of main crops that were cultivated in 2012, 35.8% were cultivated by smallholders and the remaining 64.2%, by plantation estates (Table 5.1). About 91% of land cultivated by plantation estates was made up of palm oil whereas the main crops cultivated by smallholders were rubber (40.1%), palm oil (27.9%), and paddy (24.7%). Comparing the changes in planted areas between 2006 and 2012, the plantation holding recorded an increase of 679.9 thousand hectares, and comprised 98.2% of the total increase. The increase in planted area under smallholders was 5.5 thousand hectares and comprised 0.8% of the total increase. There are two explanations for this pattern: firstly, estates were allocated more state land compared to individual applicants. Secondly, some land belonging to smallholders became abandoned due to factors such as the shortage of labour. The conversion of agricultural land converted to urban uses may also influence the changes of cultivated land. The conversion of land to urban uses was also more prominent in estate land located at urban fringes. Based on the Census of Smallholders undertaken by RISDA 2002, more than 95% of land lots owned by smallholders were less than 4 hectares and 67.7 % less than 2 hectares; most smallholders owned one lot each (Table 5.2). The Preliminary Census Report of Rubber and Oil Palm Smallholders A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

3710.3

3.1

5.9

3773.5

Coconut estate

Cocoa estate

Subtotal

A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

454.9

115.8

25.2

600.6

68.9

2474.9

6248.4

39.6

Oil palm

Coconut

Cocoa

Wetland paddy

Dryland paddy

Subtotal

Total

% of smallholders

38.9

6373.7

2479.7

70.1

604.1

23.8

116.8

470.2

1194.7

3894

4.2

2.4

3834.7

52.7

2007

39.2

6423.6

2519.2

60.5

595.9

17.3

109.2

540.2

1196.1

3904.4

3.6

2.2

3847.7

50.9

2008

36.4

6499.4

2363.3

66.4

608.5

15.6

98.4

609

965.4

4136.1

2.4

1.9

4082.1

49.7

2009

36.2

6672.6

2416.7

68.9

608.9

18.2

104

651.4

965.3

4255.9

1.9

1.7

4202.4

49.9

2010

Source: Malaysia Statistics Yearbook 2013: p. 107-108; Malaysia Statistics Yearbook 2010: p. 50-51

1209.5

Rubber

Smallholders

54.2

Oil Palm estate

2006

Year

Rubber estate

Estate

Types of holding

36.2

6828.1

2472.8

70.9

617

19.5

104.7

697.8

962.9

4355.3

1.4

1.7

4302.3

49.9

2011

Table 5.1 Planted areas of main crops in Malaysia according to types of holding 2006-2012

35.8

6932.8

2479.4

70.7

613.8

11

99.4

691.7

992.8

4453.4

0.7

1.6

4385.2

65.9

2012

100.0

2.9

24.7

0.4

4.0

27.9

40.1

100.0

0.0

0.0

98.5

1.5

2012 (%)

0.8

685.4

5.5

1.8

13.2

-14.2

-16.4

236.8

-215.7

679.9

-5.2

-1.5

674.9

11.7

Total land

0.2

2.6

2.2

-56.3

-14.2

52.1

-17.8

18.0

-88.1

-48.4

18.2

21.6

%

Changes 2006-2012

Malaysia: The State of/in Village Agriculture

151

152 

Ibrahim Ngah and Khairul Hisyam Kamarudin

published by RISDA (2013), indicated that there were 283,683 rubber smallholders and 154,090 oil palm smallholders in Malaysia respectively, making up a total of 437,773 smallholders.4 The average size of landholding for rubber smallholders, was 2.2 hectares. Gender-wise, 63% of rubber smallholders were male and 37% were female. The majority age group is comprised of those aged 50 and above (65.9%), followed by those below the age of 40 (about 15%). In terms of ethnic groupings, 61.8% of smallholders identified were Malays, while 19.1% were the Bumiputera (native groups) of Sabah and Sarawak, and 6.2% were Chinese. More than half (57.3%) earned less than RM 1000 per month; 85% are owner-cultivators and the other 15% are non-owner cultivators.5 On average, the size of oil palm smallholders’ holdings is 3.1 hectares. 73% of oil palm smallholders were male and 27% were female. Among the oil palm smallholders, 31.9% were more than 65 years of age, whereas 44.5% were between 50 and 64 years old and the remaining 9.8% were below 40 years old. A majority of oil palm smallholders were Malay (76.16%). The remaining smallholders were made of Bumiputera Sabah and Sarawak (14.2%) and Chinese (7.3%) smallholders. 55% were owner-cultivators while 41% were non owner-cultivators. The income earned is slightly better than that of rubber smallholders, with 70% earning more than RM 1000 per month. Smallholders can be broadly categorized into two categories (Nagia and Azmi 2012): firstly, the supported or “scheme” smallholders who are structurally bound by contract or credit agreement to a particular mill or agencies such as the Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) and the Federal Land Consolidation and Rehabilitation Authority (FELCRA). Although they have limited autonomy to choose which crop to develop, they are normally well organized, supervised in planting and crop management techniques, receive support in the form of seedlings, fertilizer, pesticides, and access to technical assistance or credit. The second group are independent smallholders who are self-organized, self-managed, and self-financed, and therefore can make decisions more freely with regard to the management and cultivation of crops. They are not contractually bound to any particular agencies or mill but tend to face disadvantages such as lower productivity 4 Based on discussion with the RISDA officer, the census only managed to cover approximately 75% of the rubber and palm oil smallholders due to the difficulty to reach the smallholders, on top of several refusals to cooperate, particularly from Chinese smallholders. 5 Compiling and comparing statistics of smallholders in Malaysia is particularly difficult because there are many agencies currently involved in managing smallholders and covering particular main sectors in agriculture, and each agency keeps different records of smallholders under their jurisdiction. A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

A msterdam U ni versi ty Pre ss

23,538

14,780

19,162

6,766

12,438

10,152

10,566

974

850

1,588

7,385

56

3,907

112,162

35.8

Johor

Kedah

Kelantan

Melaka

N. Sembilan

Pahang

Perak

Perlis

Pulau Pinang

Selangor

Terengganu

W. Persekutuan

No answer

Total

Percentage

31.9

100,052

3,481

30

4,995

2,704

507

695

16,005

12,172

8,485

3,920

10,639

13,158

23,261

1-