CHANGES IN COMMUNITY INSTITUTIONS AND INCOME DISTRIBUTION IN A WEST JAVA VILLAGE

This report analyzes the results of a household survey in Subang, a typical West Java rice village, to determine the causes of this disparity. The survey revealed a rapid decline in population growth, non-expansion of cultivable land, an expanding labor force, and a rise in landlordism. To determine the causal links between these phenomena, the village"s rice technology and harvesting systems were analyzed. It was found that the high susceptibility to insects and pests of the modern rice varieties introduced in the 1960"s has led 83% of farmers to return to traditional rice varieties and that modest increases in crop yields are due not to new varieties but to fertilizer subsidies. Recent changes in the rice harvesting system dramatically evidence another finding -- that manual labor has increased, but that the real wage rate has declined. The traditional bawon system of sharing harvest output widely in the community has been replaced by the ceblokan system in which participation in the harvest is limited to workers (often landless poor hired by the rich) who do extra work gratis. The ceblokan system can be considered an institutional innovation allowing employers to reduce the wage rate for harvesting to a level equal to the market wage rate in order to accomodate a more abundant labor supply. Although not all sense of moral continuity with the past was lost with the ceblokan system, e.g., widows were exempted from harrowing, the final picture of the village"s economy that emerges is a dismal one: modest crop growth, labor force increases against limited land resources, declines in real wages for land preparation and harvesting -- in short, a decreasing return to labor relative to land leading to a polarization in income distribution. This growing inequity, in the authors" view, is due to stagnating technology, namely, the failure to raise the relative productivity of labor by developing land-saving and labor-using technology. A 15-item bibliography (1925-80) is appended.