Page 28 - Ranah Studi Agraria: Penguasaan Tanah dan Hubungan Agraris

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the main factor in promoting inequality and class differentia-
tion, Hayami and his co-authors argued that the new techno-
logies can counteract the decreasing returns to labour rela-
tive to land, and consequent concentration of land, which

would otherwise follow from population pressure. In 1978, to
test these two contrasting paradigms Hayami and associates
undertook detailed re-studies of two SAE sample villages in
Subang (West Java), one technologically stagnant and the
other technologically progressive. In both villages, it was argu-
ed, the institutional changes in harvesting systems had func-
tioned to bring the implicit wage for harvesting down to the
level of the marginal productivity of labour, which is where
neoclassical theory predicts it ought to be; the “induced insti-
tutional innovation” of ceblokan or kedokan was interpreted
as a means of restoring equilibrium to the labour market. Based
on these findings and a parallel study in the Philppines, Hayami
and associates claimed a benevolent role for the ‘green revo-
lution’ technologies, and by implication for the international
agricultural research system which had developed and pro-
moted them; the same agricultural research system had also
provided support for Hayami’s research, as a project of the
Agricultural Economics Programme of the Internatioal Rice

Research Institute (Hayami and Hafid 1979; Hayami and
Kikuchi 1981). One evening in 1981, while drinking whisky with
Professor Hayami, I asked him why he was so keen to defend
the green revolution and counter the earlier conclusions of
the SAE researchers. He explained that his target was actually
left-wing students, scholars and activists in Japan, who were
critical of the green revolution and had used the Collier et al.

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