Page 285 - Ranah Studi Agraria: Penguasaan Tanah dan Hubungan Agraris

Ranah Studi Agraria

equally distributed. As will be seen, today’s pattern of owner-
ship in the lowland Cirebon village is very skewed. The likely
explanation is that since individual land ownership rights as
stipulated by the Agrarian Law of 1960 are no longer subject

to communal restriction (such as prohibition of disposing of,
or handing over the land to others), land sale becomes more
common than before. It is likely that the larger farmers then
bought some lands from those new small landowners, thus
resulting in considerable land concentration.
This historical background described very briefly above
will be useful in looking at the present pattern of land tenure,
some problems of which cannot be explained satisfactorily
without taking this into account. It must be acknowledged,
however, that our understanding of land problems cannot be
separated from a broader analysis of relations in which the
problems of labor and village economic conditions would be
given greater attention. Since we believe that landownership
determines so many other features of agrarian society, howe-
ver, it seems appropriate to start with this subject.

2. Sawah Ownership

First of all, it should be noted that in this paper sawah
ownership rather than operational holdings (or cultivation),
is chosen as the basic unit of analysis for several reasons. First,
land ownership is relatively constant while operational hold-
ings are liable to change every season. Second, while opera-
tional holdings are of course required as the basic unit of farm
management analysis, the re-census data which form the ba-
sis of this report do not allow such an analysis (although culti-

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