The Environmental and Social Costs of Improvement 43at maintaining a relatively equal distribution of wealth had broken down. A group
of landless had appeared. Those made wealthy were mainly the shopkeepers, who
were mestizos from outside the community. A few large farmers had appeared, uti-
lizing hired labour only during peak seasons and occasionally renting additional
land. About the only communal activity that remained was the cooperation for
fiesta celebrations. As Cynthia Hewitt de Alcantara (1976) noted, such integration
with the surrounding mestizo culture was no doubt inevitable, but ‘the way in
which it was enforced seriously damaged a tradition of economic and social democ-
racy, local self-government, and community service which should have been val-
ued at least as highly as material progress. More to the point, the modernization of
Potam undermined these attributes without really bringing material prosperity at
all – except to a very few.’
Social change in Indonesia
One of the earliest technological changes during rice modernization was the
replacement of the traditional ani-ani knife with sickles and scythes for harvesting
(Collier et al, 1973; KEPAS, 1984). By tradition, Javanese and Sundanese rice
farmers did not restrict anyone wishing to participate in the rice harvest. The har-
vesters were mostly women from their own and neighbouring villages. They used
the ani-ani, a small hand knife, to cut each stalk of rice separately. The rice sheaves
were carried to the owner’s house, where the harvester would receive a share of the
harvest. In this bawon system, the owner kept seven, eight or nine shares to one for
the harvester.
With the adoption of MVs with their short straw and simultaneity of matura-
tion, rice could be harvested much more quickly by sickle or scythe. Owners
increasingly adopted the new tebasan system of cash-and-carry for harvesting, in
which the standing rice crop was sold to a trader, who then arranged for harvest-
ing. With these changes, bands of men increasingly became itinerant harvesters
and opportunities for income generation for women fell. Many were entirely
excluded from the process of harvesting. In some parts of Java, there were 200 or
more women harvesting each hectare of rice in 1970. By 1990, they had been
replaced by 10–20 men (Salazar, 1992). At the Agro-Economic Survey at Bogor,
Collier and his colleagues calculated that women’s share of the harvest fell from 65
per cent in the 1920s to 37 per cent in the late 1970s (Collier et al, 1982).
But modern technologies have affected more than just women alone. The two-
wheeled tractor is now used extensively in land preparation, and water pumps and
tube wells have been introduced for irrigating rice. The potential impact of this
mechanization can be gauged by the calculation that if all these modern mechani-
zation techniques were introduced to Java, then over 3 billion person-hours of
labour would be lost (Collier et al, 1982). This is equivalent to 2 million full-time
employees or many more part-time workers.
In the early 1980s, Loekman Soetrisno and colleagues (1982) interviewed lan-
dless and nearly landless farmers in a well-irrigated and apparently prosperous