Papers (Part 1)

• Four Times “A Matter of Life or Death”: Contested Agricultural Development During Indonesia’s First Decade of Independence, 1945–1955 Sebastiaan Broere University of Amsterdam

  This paper traces the early postcolonial framing of agriculture as “a matter of life or death” to analyze the agro-developmentalist visions of four prominent Indonesian politicians, including the country’s first president. Sukarno’s famous 1952 speech, entitled A Matter of Life or Death, marks a milestone in the history of agricultural development in Indonesia. Delivered at the groundbreaking ceremony of the Agricultural Faculty of Universitas Indonesia in Bogor, Sukarno envisioned mechanization and agricultural intensification as foundational to turning the young country into an independent nation. The early 1950s, however, witnessed intense political debate on many issues, including agriculture. To examine several key positions, I engage the writings of Wisaksono Wirodihardjo, Sukarno, Mohammad Sardjan, and Sadjarwo. While all used the “a matter of life or death”-trope, their perspectives on what the “matter” exactly was varied considerably. To them, making Indonesia entailed different political and religious projects, which called for different types of agriculture that could only be realized through the production and dissemination of certain knowledges. By uncovering the connections between these three components (Indonesia-agriculture-knowledge), this paper examines the politics of knowledge behind the pathways to agricultural development that were proposed during the first decade of Indonesia’s independence.

• Software for Asia’s Green Revolution: The Agricultural Development Council, Art Mosher, and Getting Agriculture Moving Ben White International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague

  The mid-1960s were a crucial period when Southeast Asian agricultural development policy and research, influenced by cold war concerns, were shifting from politically difficult agrarian reform efforts to “green revolution” approaches to agricultural and small-farmer development. This paper explores the background, context, and influence of Arthur Mosher’s Getting Agriculture Moving: Essentials for Agricultural Development and Modernization (1966), the first book produced in the Agricultural Development Council’s Training Materials Programme. The Agricultural Development Council was founded by John D Rockefeller 3rd, whose Asian travel diaries document his overwhelming personal concern with three issues: population growth, food production, and communism. Mosher’s book devotes almost no attention to difficult issues of land reform and unequal distribution of land. Instead, it insists on the need to teach peasants to want more for themselves, to abandon collective habits, to get on with the “business” of farming and become “modern farmers” defined by their reliance on purchased inputs of seed, fertilizers, pesticides and equipment. More than 50,000 copies were distributed freely in most South and Southeast Asian countries, as well as translated versions in the major Asian languages. The book had an enormous influence, being at the time virtually the only widely available general book on agricultural and rural development.

• The BIMAS Project in Java, Indonesia, 1968–1970 Karin Bugow Jacobs University

  I argue that multinational corporations were important agents in the promotion of new practices and entities in the postcolonial agricultural development of Southeast Asia. Historians of development have mainly focused on “political” state-actors such as governments and their development agencies, international organizations and development banks, and non-state actors. The case of the Bimas Gotong Royong, a rice intensification scheme in Java, Indonesia, puts the spotlight on profit-oriented and technology-driven actors: multinational corporations. It exemplifies the close relationship between Suharto’s government and multinational corporations in enacting agricultural development between 1967 and 1969. In this project, Ciba-Geigy, a Swiss chemical corporation, received a mandate by the Indonesian government to introduce a “package” of products and practices for agricultural “modernization”, including large-scale aerial spraying of pesticides, the distribution of high-yielding seed varieties and fertilizers, and a training program for farmers. This case illustrates how the Indonesian government relied on multinational corporations in its efforts to increase food production and the close interaction between multinational corporations, governments, and the military. This paper discusses why a “public-private partnership” to increase Indonesia’s food production was favored over other pathways of development and the difficulties experienced by the government, the corporation, and the farmers.

Papers (Part 2)

• A Stalled Transition: Rethinking Rural Development in Myanmar’s Ayeyarwady Delta Through a Historical Food Regimes Frame Mark Vicol Wageningen University

  The contemporary policy narrative surrounding rural development in Myanmar’s Ayeyarwady Delta emphasizes the potential of smallholder inclusion in integrated agri-food value chains to achieve pro-poor growth. This paper challenges the appropriateness of this development model for the Ayeyarwady Delta. Assumptions of latent growth potential among a smallholder agricultural class fundamentally misinterpret the ways that farming is embedded within the Delta’s regional economy. Adopting a long historical perspective informed by the food regimes approach, we reveal a contemporary conjuncture in the Delta that signals a ‘stalled agrarian transition’. We argue that this is a path-dependent legacy of how the Delta’s place-embedded agricultural production systems have been successively incorporated into global circuits of food production and trade. These arrangements have left the Delta without a latent smallholder class ‘in waiting’ for development, meaning that policies that prioritize value chain development are unlikely to generate the type of pro-poor outcomes that are required to address the widespread poverty and food insecurity in the Delta. Instead, a rural development agenda for the Delta should focus on its actually-existing social and economic dynamics that are a legacy of its history.

• Global Value Chains and the State: Shifting Development Pathways in the Indonesian Coffee Sector Jeffrey Neilson University of Sydney

  The last thirty years has witnessed a significant shift in many sites across Southeast Asia away from a state-led agricultural development model towards what might be considered a value chain model of development. This is certainly true in commodity sectors such as coffee. While the crop was one of the first to be introduced to Java during the colonial period and so has a long and contentious history in the islands, it experienced a massive boom in the post-colonial era when the development of export crops was afforded strategic significance by the state. The period since the collapse of a quota regime in 1989, however, has been characterised by the general retreat of state involvement and the rising influence of global lead firms operating through global value chains. These private sector actors, and the broader industry platforms they have constructed, are now the leading source of technologies and extension support for farmers in the coffee sector. This paper will discuss the importance of this shift in influence over farm practices and reflect upon the implications for (contested) notions of rural and agricultural development in contemporary Southeast Asia.

• Technological Coloniality from Plantations to Budget Airlines in the Malay Archipelago Wei Yi Leow National University of Singapore

  Questioning the essence of technology penetrates beyond technical aspects to reveal socially constructed meanings arising from the creation and use of technology. Experts, owners and users, and conversely non-experts, non-owners and non-users, of technology develop social relations with one another on the basis of their access to, or mastery of, the technology in question. Unequal relations vis a vis technology produce power relations that are captured in narratives that deepen over time. In the colonial period, the perceived mastery of technology by Euro-Americans fed a particular narrative about the consequent alleged shortcomings of the ‘natives’ concerning the same technology. Such relations fed into the coloniality of power that held the Euro-Americans to be superior even to the present, nominally ‘post-colonial’ age. Two cases situated specifically in the Malay Archipelago, and more broadly in the Global South, illustrate the persistence of coloniality: the claim made by Boeing that Indonesian pilots and airlines were responsible for the 2019 crash of Lion Air Flight 610 in spite of design problems inherent in the 737 MAX aircraft, and the failure of the state-sponsored rubber research organisation in British Malaya from 1928 to 1946 to serve colonial subjects despite an avowed mission to do so.

Abstract

Keywords

• Agriculture
• Development
• Indonesia