Page 33 - Ranah Studi Agraria: Penguasaan Tanah dan Hubungan Agraris

Ranah Studi Agraria

Around the time of the 1978 ‘Sumitro report’ on agrarian
problems in Indonesia and the participation of the Indone-
sian delegation in the FAO’s World Congress on Agrarian
Reform (1979) the SAE initiated a series of five research train-

ing workshops on ‘land tenure and agrarian relations’. Land
was also a core topic in the SAE-sponsored Workshop on Rural
Social Economic History (1979), to which Gunawan Wiradi
and I contributed a study of “Patterns of Land Control in the
Cimanuk River Basin” (White and Wiradi 1980, reproduced as
Chapter IV in the present volume). These experiences, and
the increasing authority of the SAE as a source of information
on land issues led to the initiative of a new collaboration between
the SAE and its original partner the Institute of Social Studies, in
a comparative study of agrarian reform and our subsequent
collaboration in the 1981 ‘Policy Workshop on Agrarian Re-
form in Comparative Perspective’. The report resulting from
this workshop (White and Wiradi 1984) is republished as a third
volume in this series of selected works of Gunawan Wiradi. 18
In all the work of the SAE during the period I have
described, from 1972 onwards we can feel the constant
presence of Gunawan Wiradi, ‘leading from behind’. His quiet
wisdom, knowledge, his historical perspective and his great

attention to detail and method, as exemplified in the chapters
collected in this book, have earned him the enduring respect
of all those interested in the struggle against agrarian poverty
and inequality in Indonesia.

18 This third volume translated into Indonesian with new title:
Reforma Agraria dalam Tinjauan Komparatif: Hasil Lokakarya Kebijakan
Reforma Agraria di Selabintana, 2009 (editor—Moh. Shohibuddin).

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