Page 13 - Ranah Studi Agraria: Penguasaan Tanah dan Hubungan Agraris

Ranah Studi Agraria

The seven studies on land tenure and agrarian relations
by Gunawan Wiradi collected in this book were originally pub-
lished between 1972 and 1989, and are all based on field re-
search carried out during 1972–1983. This was the period of

Indonesia’s ‘green revolution’, a time in which Indonesia trans-
formed its smallholder rice economy from being the world’s
biggest rice importer to a situation of near self-sufficiency. All
the chapters in this book result from the work carried out by
Gunawan Wiradi as a staff member of the Agro Economic Survey
(Survei Agro Ekonomi—SAE), which at that time was the most
important source of information on the social and economic
impact of intensification in Indonesian smallholder rice farming.
In this introduction I will try to set the work of the SAE in
broader context and explain the important role it played in
furthering the understanding of—and debates about—pro-
cesses of agrarian change in Indonesia. I will try to trace the
evolution of studies based on SAE data from mainly descrip-
tive accounts of change to more analytically systematic at-
tempts to explain change, in which we can see the influence of
three main traditions: neo-populism, the neo-classical induced
institutional innovation theory, and political economy ap-
proaches. This includes some discussion of the role of the pres-

ence and influence of foreign sponsorship, foreign consultants 3
and visiting scholars during this period in the history of SAE, a
presence whose impact was often stimulating but perhaps not
always completely positive.

3 Including this author, who was assigned full-time to the SAE as
ADC Specialist from 1975 to 1980.

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