Page 366 - Ranah Studi Agraria: Penguasaan Tanah dan Hubungan Agraris

Agrarian and Nonagrarian Bases ...

lages. By this time virtually all paddy cultivators were using
modern rice varieties (MV hereafter), greatly increased in-
puts of chemical fertilizers and insecticides, and had achieved
impressive yield increases, suggesting that in these villages as

in the rest of Java Green Revolution production is now firmly
and successfully established after an initially shaky start. Com-
parison of these two studies therefore offers an unusual op-
portunity to examine changes in agrarian economy and agrar-
ian structure in the nine villages, during a period which has
seen profound changes not only in agricultural production
but also in state policies and in the organization of economic
and political life at the local and national levels. 1
Multiple-village resurveys of this kind have both advan-
tages and disadvantages compared to other types of research.
The inclusion of nine villages, scattered across the three prov-
inces of Java (see Map 1), permits us both to examine local
variations (which, as we will see, are considerable) and also to
draw some cautious conclusions about the general directions
of change. However, the use of material of this kind for analy-
sis of the processes and mechanisms of agrarian change pre-
sents many problems. First, neither the baseline nor the re-
survey studies were designed specifically for this purpose. The

baseline surveys consisted mainly of traditional farm mana-
gement questionnaires; the 1981 resurveys, carried out as part
of a series of Research Training Workshop on Land Tenure and
Agrarian Relations, come closer to what is needed but still

1 Cf. Hüsken and White in Hart et. al. Agrarian Transformations: Local
Processes and the State in Southeast Asia. Berkeley: Unfiversity of
California Press, 1989. Chapter 12.

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