Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  For the landowner, leasehold rental has the advantage over jual janji that ownership of the land is retained even though use rights may be transferred for many years. For the small tenant, however, the effect is to price him out of the land rental market. A typical pajak contract (in 1979) involving, say, only 3 relong for six seasons (three years) would require raising anywhere from M$2,700 to M$4,000 in advance. As this represents two to three times the mean income of Muda peasants, it is far beyond the reach of the vast majority [Page 74] of small farmers in the region. Leasehold tenants are increasingly drawn from the ranks of the wealthy Malay landowners and Chinese businessmen armed with capital and machinery (tractors, combine-harvesters) and looking for profitable investment opportunities. They are willing to pay premium rents and prefer to rent large tracts of paddy land. What is emerging, then, is a rich, fully commercial tenant class whose entry into the rental market serves to displace small, capital-poor tenants.

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

  Mechanization

  Growing wet rice under traditional conditions can absorb an astounding amount of labor. Most of this labor is devoted to the four main stages of cultivation: land preparation, transplanting, reaping, and threshing. If hired labor is used, it is largely confined to these four operations, since other activities such as weeding or repairing bunds can be spread out conveniently and accomplished with family labor. Land-poor peasant households in Muda typically relied on just such wage labor opportunities to patch together their meager subsistence. The introduction of tractors for land preparation and combine-harvesters for reaping and threshing has thus effectively eliminated most of those opportunities; [Page 75] transplanting remains the only unmechanized farm operation that provides wage employment for poor households—and even it is now threatened.

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

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

  The consequences for income of combine-harvesting are especially applicable to households farming less than 2.8 acres (over 46 percent of Muda’s families) and wage laborers (7 percent). The former depended on paddy wage labor for at least one-fourth of their net income, while the latter were often totally dependent on it. Calculations based on the share of cutting (usually women’s work) and threshing (usually men’s work) in total hired labor and the intensity of combineharvester use suggest that the combines have cut paddy wage labor receipts by 44 percent.57 For the poorest class of small farmers, this represents a 15 percent [Page 76] loss of net income in the case of tenants and an 11 percent loss in the case of owner-operators. For full-time wage laborers, of course, the results are catastrophic and it is hard to imagine how they can survive as a class in the new circumstances. Combine-harvesting has meant, then, a loss of nearly half the wages previously received for paddy work by the poorer strata of Muda’s peasantry. The loss in the volume of work has by no means been compensated for by a rise in wage rates for the work still available.

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

  From Exploitation to Marginalization

  The impact of double-cropping has thus far been considered as if it were largely a matter of access to land, work, and wages. It is well worth pausing briefly to suggest its implications for class relations as well. What the transformations brought about by Muda’s green revolution have done is nearly to sever the bonds of economic interdependence betweeen agrarian classes. Prior to double-cropping and, to some extent, even until 1975, the land-rich class and the land-poor class of Muda were joined by an exchange of work and wages, cultivation and rents which, however exploitative, fused them together in the enterprise of rice farming. Rich landlords and farmers had more paddy fields than they could cultivate alone; they needed tenants, ploughing services, transplanters, reapers, and threshers. The land-poor and landless, having more labor than property, provided these services. Because of the labor peaks typical of rice cultivation, it was not uncommon for employers to help secure timely labor by modest gifts and loans or, in more general terms, to “cultivate” not only the land but also the poorer villagers whom they needed to make the land profitable.

  With mechanization, tenancy became an expensive luxury. Those tenants who remained, aside from close kin, were typically paying fixed market rents with [Page 77] no allowance for crop failures or were themselves large capitalist leaseholding tenants. More important, cultivation could now be undertaken largely independent of village labor. Except for transplanting and for those occasions when a plot that ripened early or lodged (was beaten flat by wind and/or rain) had to be harvested by hand, large farmers simply had little need to hire poor villagers. Thus, they had correspondingly little incentive to cultivate their goodwill. The linkage between classes has by no means totally disappeared, but there is little doubt that it is far more constricted than it was and that all indications point toward its eventual demise. If poor villagers were earlier tied to their richer employers by bonds of interdependence and exploitation, they now find themselves cut adrift and marginalized. If they are no longer exploited, if they are now “free,” this is the freedom of the unemployed, the redundant.

  Income

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

  The initial impact of double-cropping in Muda was to raise incomes on a broad front in both nominal and real terms. This gain, however, was at the expense of a much worse distribution of that income.59 Owner-tenants, the [Page 78] [Page 79] wealthiest’tenure category with by far the largest farm size, were the greatest gainers, improving their real income by 137 percent. The incomes of average tenants and average owner-operators grew by 72 and 89 percent respectively. By contrast, the gains of small tenants and owners (nearly half of Muda’
s farm households) were far more modest: 35 percent and 51 percent. Even the percentages are misleading here, given the different base incomes, for while the typical ownertenant gained M$2,577 in real income, the average small tenant gained only M$335: a ratio of 8 to 1. Both the gains in income and their maldistribution, it should be added, were not due solely to the production effects of doublecroppings. They were due as much to the doubling of farm-gate paddy prices in the worldwide economic crisis and inflation of 1973–74.60

  TABLE 3.4 • Family Income Comparisons for Different Tenure Groups and Farm—Size Categories in Muda, 1966, 1974, 1979

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

  The causes of this retreat across a broad front may be traced to three factors. First, the earlier increase in production brought about by double-cropping had leveled off and yields remained stagnant throughout this period. Second, paddy prices after 1974 were steady for the next five years.62 The cost of inputs to farmers, on the other hand, continued to rise as did the consumer price index (up 22 percent), thereby eroding the real incomes of all tenure categories. There [Page 80] is no doubt that declining farm incomes contributed to the January 1980 mass demonstration of paddy growers—the first in over fifteen years—in which thousands of peasants assembled in Alor Setar to demand an increase in paddy prices.

  The worsening trend in income distribution from 1966 to 1979 is captured in table 3.5 in comparisons in the net income of small farmers over time as a proportion of the net income of other tenure categories. All the disparities, it is clear, were essentially generated in the first stage of double-cropping. Ironically, the second stage arrested (but did not reverse) these new inequities, although at the cost of lower real incomes all around. Small tenants who had half the income of owner-tenants in 1966 now have roughly one-quarter of their income. To put it more accurately, those tenants who are lucky enough still to be tenants have slid to about one-fourth the income of owner-tenants. Small owner-operators, even more numerous, had over half the income of owner-tenants thirteen years ago and now have roughly one-third that income. The declining position of Muda’s small peasants is the result of their small farm size and of the direct and indirect effects of an irrigation scheme that disproportionately rewards the owners of scarce factors of production. They were poor to begin with; they remain poor; and they have grown relatively poorer. There is no need, on the basis of this data, to question the general assessment of the green revolution by Keith Griffin that “the changes which are at present occurring tend to increase relative inequality.”63

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

  The gulf separating the large, capitalist farmers who market most of the region’s rice and the mass of small peasants is now nearly an abyss, with the added (and related) humiliation that the former need seldom even hire the latter to help grow their crops. Taking 1966 as a point of comparison, it is still the case that a majority of Muda’s households are more prosperous than before. It is also the case that the distribution of income has worsened appreciably and that a substantial minority—perhaps 35–40 percent—have been left behind with very low incomes which, if they are not worse than a decade ago, are not appreciably better. Given the limited absorptive capacity of the wider economy, [Page 81] given the loss of wages to machines, and given the small plots cultivated by the poor strata, there is little likelihood that anything short of land reform could reverse their fortunes.64

  Poverty

  It is in the nature of large bureaucracies, of which the state is the outstanding example, to create a series of quantitative measures by which to define goals and to measure the extent to which they have been achieved. Thus it is that the human misery known as poverty is signified by numbers—a certain amount of cash per household, a certain number of calories ingested each day. While we shall have ample occasion later to explore the meaning of poverty—how it is experienced and understood-the gross numerical description of poverty does provide something of a baseline from which to begin.

  The figures presented in table 3.6 are based on the official poverty-line income and show how the income of various tenure groups has changed since 1966 in relation to that standard.

  The remarkable and sobering fact is that much of the gain made between 1966 and 1974 had been largely undone by 1979. Not even the initial boom in prices and production had raised small farmers, whether owners or tenants, above the poverty line, and by 1979 they were once again far below. Average tenants and owner-operators had improved their incomes appreciably but many, if not most, were still below poverty-line incomes. At a bare minimum there were 33,000 “officially” poor households in Muda in 1979.65 These households [Page 82] represent the intractable poverty problem of the region. They remain poor despite double-cropping, despite the fact that Muda is a privileged area in terms of soils, despite a dense network of institutions created to serve paddy farmers, despite government programs committed to eradicating poverty, despite recent increases in paddy price and fertilizer subsidies-in short, despite thirteen years of intensive agricultural development.

  TABLE 3.6 • Net Income of Various Tenure and Farm—Size Categories as Percentage of Rural Poverty—Line Income

  The fundamental problem, of course, lies in the inequities of landownership and farm size existing at the outset of the scheme. The gains from the new seeds, irrigation, and double-cropping are at best distributed in accordance with the control of productive assets. Small farmers simply did not have the land or capital that would have allowed them to raise their incomes dramatically. Longterm rentals, rising land prices, and the revocation of tenancies further limited their access to land. What they did have in abundance was labor. Before combine-harvesting, this asset was in large part responsible for raising their incomes. But the mechanization of harvesting together with rising production costs and consumer prices gradually eroded their modest gains.

  Institutional Access

  Along with the changes in production, farm size, tenure, and mechanization associated with the green revolution has come something of an institutional revolution as well. Nowhere is this more striking, as noted earlier, than in state control over water release and increasing participation in milling, marketing, credit provision, and fertilizer distribution. The main institutional vector of this transformation has been the Muda Agricultural Development Authority (MADA) and its twenty-seven local offices, each with its own Farmers’ Association (Persatuan Peladang). The main function of these local offices has been to distribute [Page 83] credit to its membership for tractor rental costs, fertilizer, pesticides, and transplanting. As many as 15,000 farmers (roughly 25 percent of the farm households) have benefited from these services. Far from remaining merely passive recipients of services, the Farmers’ Associations, both individually and collectively, have become active and vociferous spokesmen for the interests of paddy farmers. They have come to constitute the functional equivalent of a paddy producer’s lobby, which has consistently brought pressure to bear through annual resolutions, petitions, and delegations for changes in policy that would benefit their membership. The competitive political atmosphere, especially in Kedah, contributes to their influence, and all but one or two of the local bodies are controlled effectively by members of the ruling party.

  Nearly 40 percent of Muda’s farmers have at one time or another joined a Farmers’ Association, but this membership is by no means a cross-section of Muda’s peasantry. Table 3.7 reveals just how skewed participation is. Farmers cultivating less than 2.84 acres (4 relong) comprise nearly half the farm p
opulation but only 12.4 percent of Farmers’ Association members. At the other end

  TABLE 3.7 • Relationship of Distribution of Farm Sizes, Farmers’ Association Membership, and Production Credit Recipients

  of the scale, larger farmers planting 5.7 acres and above are only 23 percent of the farm population but make up fully 47 percent of the membership. The domination of these associations by well-to-do farmers is typical of most such bodies in the Third World.66 It has come about not so much because of any systematic official policy but rather from the policies pursued by their elected leadership.67

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  Credit distribution is even more skewed toward the well-to-do than membership. Large farmers operating more than 5.7 acres are less than 23 percent of the farm population, yet they constitute more than 60 percent of the credit recipients and of course a much higher share of the actual credit extended. Small farmers, who are nearly half Muda’s population, constitute a mere 6 percent of those who get subsidized credit. Those who are most in need of credit on easy terms are denied access, while those who could borrow from banks or finance inputs from their own savings are provided for in abundance. Increasing rates of delinquency in repayment, moreover, indicate that many large farmers have managed to turn the loans into outright subsidies.68 The accumulated bad debts have gone unprosecuted because the debtors, drawn largely from the ranks of local, ruling party stalwarts, are well-nigh untouchable. To this extent, MADA, the ruling party, and the Kedah state government are hostages to the interests of the relatively prosperous strata of farmers which the green revolution has helped create and solidify.