Transforming the Indonesian uplands

Transforming the Indonesian uplands

At least 30 million people gain their livelihoods in Indonesia's
upland regions. Tania Li looks at developments there.

Upland farmers in Indonesia have been viewed variously as
innocent tribals, maintaining distinctive traditional ways of
life; as peasant farmers, albeit perhaps rather inefficient ones;
as destroyers of the environment and illegal squatters; and, more
recently, as expert environmentalists, holding the secret to
sustainability through their community-based resource management
systems.

Huge populations live in Indonesia's upland areas, dependent
upon fragile land and forest resources to which their
entitlements are generally insecure. Many have lived in upland
regions for generations, while others have migrated more recently
in search of land and livelihoods. Still others are attracted to
the uplands as frontiers for the extension of commodity
production, often on a large scale. Where they survive at all,
upland forests are treated by government and industry as a
harvestable resource, while environmentalists lobby for
conservation of forests to protect their biodiversity potential.

As these widely divergent perceptions indicate, there are at
least three potentially conflicting interests at work in modern
Indonesia's upland regions: environmental conservation, economic
development through export promotion, and increased farming
activity to meet local needs. Complex patterns of change are
being generated within the uplands, in response to, in spite of,
or simply on the margins of these externally driven agendas.
Transformations have resulted, in many cases, from the impact of
capitalized agriculture and changing state-society relations on
upland people. In lowland Indonesia during the late 1960s and
early 1970s, the widespread introduction of new strains of high-
yielding rice and new, industrially-manufactured chemical inputs
made possible extraordinary increases in food crop production;
the programs brought about equally extensive changes in lowland
politics and society. Access to green revolution technologies
required new and administratively expensive credit programs.
These often have worked to the advantage of middle and large-
scale farmers, thus enhancing rather than diminishing rural
inequality.

Similarly, efforts to maximize farm profits encouraged farmers
in many lowland regions to introduce new and more restrictive
forms of labor organization, which often affect poor women most
severely. The efficient distribution of inputs and the quick
marketing of harvests have required massive investments in the
construction and improvement of roads. This, in turn, has
facilitated the diffusion of new consumer goods, the movement
of investors into rural agriculture and the dissemination of new
lifestyles. Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, the success
of green revolution initiatives was accompanied by, and indeed
dependent upon, a significant expansion in state capacity. New
programs required government intervention into rural communities
on a scale and with a duration not previously seen in the
independence era.

Throughout the same period, upland areas in the hilly or
mountainous interiors of most of Indonesia's provinces were
undergoing economic, political and social changes of no less
significance. At least 30 million people gain their livelihoods
in upland regions through a mix of swidden farming, tree-crop
cultivation, forest extraction, fixed-field permanent
agriculture, and wage labor. As in the nearby lowlands, recent
years have witnessed road construction, crop intensification,
capital investment, deforestation and the movement of people and
ideas on a significant scale. These developments have transformed
the relationship of upland peoples to the environment, markets
and the state. In so doing, they have also opened the way for
fundamental changes in upland economy, polity and morality, as
rural people respond to new pressures and take advantage of new
opportunities.

Emphasizing current changes does not mean, however, that
isolated, "traditional" people are encountering the modern,
commercial world for the first time. Centuries of interaction
with lowlanders, with the state, and with national and
international markets have been central to the formation and
reformation of upland cultures and practices, and their very
identities as "communities". The majority of Indonesia's
agricultural exports (from the ancient spice trade crops to
modern era rubber, cocoa, coffee, cloves, cashews) have always
been derived from upland regions, where they are grown by
smallholder farmers as well as on plantations.

Ironically, just as the agrarian revolution in upland
agriculture is proceeding apace, it is being masked by two
external agendas, each with rather strong rhetoric. The
Indonesian state continues to see uplanders as backward
traditionalists, illegal squatters and agents of environmental
destruction. Counterposed to this view, many environmentalists
(Indonesian and foreign) argue that "traditional" uplanders are
archetypal ecological farmers and conservationists, seeking only
to preserve "their own" institutions and practices. Both parties
may overlook the extent to which uplanders have again
reformulated the image of themselves, and seek the benefits of
fuller citizenship. Their demands may include access to roads,
education and health facilities. They are also likely to include
demands for security of land tenure, and freedom from arbitrary
displacement in the wake of state projects designed to
"modernize" them.

For Indonesia, as a development-minded state, the portrayal of
uplanders as isolated and traditional raises the question: how
can these people be made modern? For many anthropologists, the
question has been: how can these unique and diverse ways of life
be preserved? For ecologists, the question has been: how can
these people gain more secure control over their resources, so
that they can continue to manage them wisely, and so that the
rest of the world can learn from their example? For applied
scientists, the questions have to do more with sustainable ways
to increase productivity and stabilize the agro-ecosystem.

A re-assessment of upland transformation must move beyond
these pre-established agendas, and ask more searching questions
about how contradictory pressures are experienced locally and how
they are worked out in the context of everyday lives and
practices. If we are able to rid ourselves of the image of
uplanders as innocents or as victims, and treat them seriously as
agents contributing to the making of history, the questions
become: What history is desired? How exactly is it being made?
Under what constellation of opportunities and constraints? What,
in short, are the processes through which agrarian change in the
uplands is occurring?

Dr. Tania Li is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at
Dalhousie University, Canada. She is a Research Fellow at the
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore.