Page 302 - Ranah Studi Agraria: Penguasaan Tanah dan Hubungan Agraris

Landownership Tenancy, and ...

D. Sawah Cultivation and Tenancy
At national level, the overall area of sawah cultivated is
important as it determines the so called “harvested area” (luas
panen) to ascertain national rice production. At the micro
level, farm size is also important when we want to analyze
farming enterprises through analysis such as “farm manage-
ment”, “factor shares”, and so on.
As mentioned earlier, since there is no data on yield or
income in the re-census, it is impossible to conduct such analy-
sis. Furthermore, given the data available, this report focuses
more on the characteristics and structure of communities
rather than on the detailed analysis of farming systems. For
this reason, being liable to change every season, area of sawah
cultivated is therefore considered as being not as relevant to
the analysis of structure as the problem of “access to land
through tenancy mechanism”. In short, sawah cultivated is
related to tenancy market. However, as a general overview, a
brief description of the distribution of sawah cultivated will be
also presented here in order to have some background to the
discussion of tenancy.

1. Distribution of Sawah Area Cultivated

One feature which characterizes agrarian structure in Java
is that farm sizes are very small. Data in Appendix Table 6.6.
clearly show that in the Wet Season 1982/1983, overall, the
average size was only 0.286 ha per household, or 0.416 ha per
cultivator. When we look at each village, one of the differences
between the lowland and upland is also indicated. While in the
lowland the average size per cultivator was around half a hec-

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