Persisting Peasants? A Political Economy of Agrarian Transitions in Indonesia

Abstract

In Indonesia, small-scale farmers persist in enormous numbers, contrary to longstanding beliefs that their demise is inevitable. Why does small-scale farming persist so pervasively in Indonesia? How do small-scale farmers persist? What are the political implications of their persistence? To address these questions, I draw on notions of ‘agrarian transition’. While recognising the concept as originally referring to the transition to capitalist agriculture, I reconceptualise it as a state guided process of capitalist development that involves the reduction of people persisting in, and feeling attachment with, agrarian communities to a small number in conjunction with a large expansion in the average size of the farmlands owned by those that remain. I undertake a political economy analysis of agrarian transition in Indonesia from the vantage of the state as well as from a rural community in East Java (‘Lone Teak’) where I conducted research for 18 months. To explain why small-scale farming persists, I begin by proposing that changes in the Indonesian state mean it no longer attempts to guide an agrarian transition. During the New Order era (1966-1998), with President Suharto acting autonomously at its apex, the state accommodated rural strongmen while pursuing policies aimed at the dissolution of the farming labour force. Nowadays, a less autonomous state accommodates vast numbers of rural households without seeking to direct people away from agricultural work and land. At both national and subnational levels, the state accommodates agrarian communities, especially their expanding middle classes and rural bureaucracy, with increasing amounts of patronage. Moreover, leading politicians advocate that people should continue in small-scale farming in the context of limited opportunities for permanent work beyond the countryside. To show how people persist in rural society, I draw on my ethnography of Lone Teak, a village surrounded by state forestland and in which an agricultural economy is dominant. Small-scale farming households’ persistence there often hinges on their negotiation of personal debts and access to state patronage and resources. Households navigating the fluctuating costs of agricultural production and uneven distribution of state resources take on debts that underpin rather than undermine their persistence in the community as they try to satisfy their aspirations. I thus argue that debt is critical to small-scale farming communities’ persistence, and their differentiation. To interpret the political implications of these dynamics of persistence, I examine how Lone Teak’s residents pressure the state and its officials to accommodate their expectations with regard to forestland access, crop inputs, and loans, to name a few resources upon which they depend to fulfil their goals. While state institutions, officials, and their policies are predominantly responsible for Indonesia’s agrarian ‘non transition’, small-scale farming communities and their moral economies help produce it, too. This situation, I explain, stems in part from Indonesia’s history of state formation, with its deep roots in the earlier transition to capitalist agriculture and the creation of a bureaucracy dependent on the rural economy. In the concluding chapter, I consider how this framework and study can be used to better understand the persistence of large numbers of small-scale farming communities elsewhere within Indonesia and in other countries in the context of late capitalism Show more