Page 398 - Ranah Studi Agraria: Penguasaan Tanah dan Hubungan Agraris

Agrarian and Nonagrarian Bases ...

Table 7.11: 8.5 of households between them command 50 of
all farm incomes. In the sample villages a ‘poverty line’ income
(if defined as many authors have done as per-capita incomes
below 310 kg milled-rice equivalent per year) in 1981 amounted

to approximately Rp. 61,000 per capita or Rp. 180,000 per
household at prevailing local rice prices. As may be seen in
Table 7.11, the larger landowning households with more than
1.0 ha of sawah are the only group whose agricultural incomes
far surpass this level, providing a substantial surplus poten-
tially available for further expansion in agriculture or other
activities. On the other hand, while agriculture now provides
average incomes (in own-farm and wage income) only slightly
below ‘poverty line’ levels in the sample neighborhoods as a
whole, the 65 of households without land or with holdings less
than 0.25 ha command agricultural incomes so far below this
level that involvement in nonfarm activities is necessary as a
matter of survival.
With the decline of share tenancy and the growing ten-
dency for land lease transactions to occur between landown-
ing households, we can discern more clearly the emergence of
an elite group of prosperous larger farmers or more accurately
farm managers, sometimes supplementing their own holdings

with land lease and mortgage, who control a large part of land
and farm incomes and also provide the bulk of wage employ-
ment in what is primarily a wage-labor-based production sys-
tem. (As we have seen in Table 7.8, more than 80 of all prehar-
vest labor inputs in paddy production are made by hired la-
bor in most villages, and the proportion is of course still higher
for the larger farms.) Although there is some ‘horizontal’ wage

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