Southeast Asian Rice Farming And Farmers In Transition

More than the Soil focuses on the social, cultural, economic and technological processes that have transformed rural areas of Southeast Asia. The underlying premise is that rural lives and livelihoods in this region have undergone fundamental change. No longer can we assume that rural livelihoods are founded on agriculture; nor can we assume that people envisage their futures in terms of farming. The inter-penetration of the rural and urban, and the degree to which rural people migrate between rural and urban areas, and shift from agriculture to non-agriculture, raises fundamental questions about how we conceptualise the rural Southeast Asia and the households to be found there.

Understanding the effects of both climate change and green growth policies on jobs and people is thus essential for making the transition in Southeast Asia an inclusive one. The study explores these issues, with emphasis on the potential effects on labour of an energy transition in Indonesia, and of a transition in the region’s agricultural sector, illustrated by a simulated conversion from conventional to organic rice farming.

Cambodia; Indonesia; Laos; Malaysia; Myanmar; Philippines; Thailand; Vietnam.

Since the 1960s, Southeast Asia's agricultural sector has experienced phenomenal growth, with increases in production linked to an energy-intensive capitalization of agriculture and the rapid development of agrifood systems and agribusiness. Agricultural intensification and territorial expansion have been key to this process, with expansion of areas under cultivation playing an unusually important role in the transformation of the countryside and livelihoods of its inhabitants. Borneo, with vast tracts of land not yet under crops, has been the epicenter of this expansion process, with rubber and oil palm acting as the spearhead. Indonesia's Kalimantan provinces and the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak have all undergone major changes but the time frames have varied, as have the crops involved. Agricultural expansion in Borneo is both an economic and a political process, and it has brought about profound socio-economic transformations, including deforestation, and development of communication networks. There has also been rapid population growth, much faster than in either Indonesia or Malaysia as a whole, with attendant pressures on employment, housing and social services. Until the end of the 20th century, agricultural expansion in Indonesia and Malaysia was largely state driven, with the goal of poverty reduction. Subsequently, as in Borneo, boom crop expansion has been taken over by private corporations that are driven by profit maximization rather than poverty reduction.

This appendix is a companion volume to the Rice Economy of Asia by Randolph Barker, Robert W. Herdt, with Beth Rose.