Miracle Seeds and Shattered Dreams in Java

The Green Revolution's ghost: Unruly subjects of participatory development in rural Indonesia

“…In Indonesia, as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the Green Revolution disproportionately benefited wealthier rural residents, who used the new technologies to increase production and shed traditional obligations to women and poorer neighbors, who were pushed onto more marginal land or off the land entirely (Franke 1974; Scott 1985; Stoler 1977; Winarto 2004:14). The resulting agrarian class differentiation, Gillian Hart et al (1989) argue, reflected the state's assiduous cultivation of patron–client networks rather than neutral interactions between technology, land, and capital.…”

“…16 16 The corporations involved included the Swiss company CIBA (Chemical Industries of Basel, Switzerland), the West German companies Hoeschst and A.H.T., Japan's Mitsubishi, and an Indonesian company named Coopa, which Richard W. Franke (1974) notes became embroiled in scandal because it was apparently owned by generals and siphoned off development monies without providing contracted services (also see Lansing 1991:112). …”

“…18 18 Facilitators were, perhaps unwittingly, reviving a village farming laboratory model the Sukarno administration had experimented with in the 1950s (Franke 1974:16). …”

The Philosophy of Shared Poverty: rethinking Agricultural Involution and the Culture of Geertz

“…Productive intensification was necessarily more capital-intensive in HYV seeds, pesticides, fertilizers, and herbicides which were not equally affordable to all. Referential credit arrangements and part or whole capital subsidies were awarded to the rich, while the poor, with less than total capital outlays, were rewarded with smaller harvests, increasing debts, and eventually turned into sharecroppers and/or day laborers (Franke 1974;Hinkson 1975). The promise of financial rewards was so great that even teachers, military men, and government officials bought or rented land and made 'rather large profits' (Husken 1979: 145).…”

“…Even if 'shared poverty, social elasticity, and cultural vagueness' ever existed, they gave way to real class divisions and open, bloody conflicts. Within two years of Al's publication upwards of half a million peasants and real or suspected supporters of land reform were killed by the functionaries of large landholding interests (Franke 1974: Lyon 1970Utrecht 1976: Wertheim 1969. Given the salience of land inequalities and class conflicts during this period, Geertz' portrayal of colonial and post-colonial Javanese experience as 'peculiarly passive' (AI:103) is just plain wrong.…”