Smallholders increase role in rubber production
JAKARTA (JP): Smallholders will continue dominating Indonesia's rubber production and exports in years to come, even without adequate support from the government.
Data from the Indonesian Rubber Association reveals that smallholders control 83 percent of Indonesia's total rubber areas of 3.45 million hectares, contributing 74 percent of the country's total annual rubber production of 1.5 million tons.
However, 85 percent of the smallholders' rubber plantation areas have never been involved in the government's smallholder development projects.
"The untouched plantations are like jungles, with annual yields of less than 600 kilograms per hectare (as compared with rubber estates' productivity of 1,400 kilograms per hectare)," the association's executive director, A.F.S. Budiman, said last week.
From the outset, there is a clear difference in the operation of rubber plantations by large estates and smallholders.
Smallholdings are operated in a semi-subsistence and capital- scare environment, where labor is used within the family's capacity. Meanwhile, large estates are managed as capitalist commercialized agriculture, with a rigid hierarchical management of labor.
Although rubber smallholders rarely get assistance from the government or any formal institution, they have been playing a dominant role in the country's rubber production and exports since Dutch colonial times, Budiman said.
The management of rubber plantations by smallholders was first introduced in Indonesia by traders and laborers who bought rubber seeds from plantations in Malaysia in 1908, five years after the establishment of the first rubber estate here.
The crop reached widespread adoption after the hike of rubber prices from 1909 to 1912. At that time, rubber spread over large areas, from Jambi to Palembang in South Sumatra, Java and some areas in Kalimantan.
In the beginning, the Dutch colonial government was not afraid of the rapid spread of smallholders. But after the fall of rubber prices in the early 1930s due to the world depression, the Dutch government tried to restrict the expansion of the smallholder sector by imposing a tax on their exports. However, this restriction had little impact, as farmers continued to plant rubber on the consideration that it could provide a relatively consistent cash income and a low-opportunity cost incorporated with other crops.
"The adoption of rubber cultivation by smallholders was really a self initiative of the peasants, without any assistance from the government or any formal institution," Budiman said.
During the post-independence period, especially from 1945 to 1950, many rubber estates and smallholding properties were neglected, sold or destroyed. As a result, rubber production decreased significantly.
This condition continued until the new Indonesian government nationalized all Dutch estates in 1957. However, political instability, mismanagement of plantations and the neglect of smallholders resulted in a decrease in rubber exports by 15 percent, from 1956 to 1965.
In that period, smallholders were not only neglected, but also disadvantaged. Rubber farmers, for instance, had to pay heavy taxes, 25 percent higher than rubber estates, even though the revenues from such taxes had little direct benefits for smallholders.
In the early years of the New Order administration, the government still paid more attention to state rubber plantations than to smallholders. The government started to develop state rubber plantations, especially those in North Sumatra, with the help of foreign loans, from the World Bank in particular.
In the early 1970s, the government expanded the World Bank's loans to the smallholding sector by establishing planting and replanting projects. By mid-1980s, however, it was already apparent that high-cost block planting projects had proven difficult to implement in the country and had benefited only a small fraction of rubber smallholders.
Budiman said Indonesia's smallholder rubber development efforts met with very limited successes. The smallholder development projects covered only 15 percent of the existing smallholder rubber acreage.
"The association is concerned about the supply prospect of smallholder rubber, which is the backbone of Indonesian rubber in the future," Budiman said.
He explained that the association has initiated cooperation with the regional office for Southeast Asia of the International Center for Research in Agroforestry, an affiliate of the Nairobi, Kenya-based Consultative Group on International Research.
The cooperation is aimed at developing ways to manage smallholders' rubber jungles, which normally have a low productivity level, into an agroforestry system that sustains both environmental conservation and rubber farmers' livelihood.
Under the cooperation, they are now working on pilot projects in Sanggau and Sintang, both in West Kalimantan, and Muara Bungo in Jambi. (rid)