Page 305 - Ranah Studi Agraria: Penguasaan Tanah dan Hubungan Agraris

Ranah Studi Agraria

2. Sawah Cultivated and Sawah Owned
Leaving aside the question of yield, discussion of area of
sawah cultivated will be more meaningful if it is linked to the
problem of access to land. This would mean that it should be
linked to land ownership and tenancy.
It is well known that one of the characteristics of rural

Java is that pure owner operators are predominant (Sinaga
and White, 1979). The data collected in this re-census appear
to support this proposition. More than 60 percent of total
operators, or around 42 percent of total households were
owner operators in the wet season of a982/1983. As mentio-
ned earlier, cultivation area is liaible to change from season to
season however slightly. While in one season landowners may
either lease their lands out and become non operators, or culti-
vate larger areas than their own by leasing-in other’s land, or
simply cultivate only their own lands, in another season they
may change their decision. Land owners decisions, therefore,
will determine the landless households access to land for culti-
vation.
From a simple cross tabulation of sawah cultivated and
sawah owned, an attempt here is made to examine the prob-
able pattern of flow of the leasing in and out of land, and in
what classes of area owned would there be a cutting line (see
table 6.9. and Appendix-Table 6.7.). It appears that the above
mentioned proposition is here again supported. In most
classes of sawah owned, the proportion of households whose
cultivation areas belong to the same class as that of swah own-
ership, are close to, or above 50 percent (Table 6.9, column
1). Except for the landless (row-1), assuming that the figures in

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