[Pen-l] rice

[Michael Perelman <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Toulmin, Stephen Edelston. 2001. Return to Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University 
Press).
60: He gives an extended quotation: "I have an anthropologist friend with a Dutch 
wife, and they do fieldwork on Bali. His main focus of research has been the system 
of water temples whose priests -- by tradition -- controlled the schedule for 
allocating irrigation water to the rice fields of different communes or individual 
farmers. For some 800 years, these temples were a feature of Balinese society; but 
when the Indonesian Islands came together politically, neither the Dutch colonial 
administration nor the central government of Indonesia recognized that water temples 
had any underlying economic significance: rather, they saw them as religious, and so 
cultural, monuments."
60: "In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the National Government of Indonesia decided 
to introduce to Bali, on a massive scale, new strains of a-called 'miracle rice' 
developed at the International Rice Institute in the Philippines. So, my friend 
points out:  "Balinese farmers were forbidden to plant native varieties of rice: 
instead, double cropping or triple cropping of IR 36 [or similar varieties] was 
mandated.  Farmers were instructed to abandon the traditional cropping patterns and 
plant high-yielding varieties as often as possible"."
60: "Along with this policy, the Asian Development Bank supported an engineering 
project on the basis of a report from economic consultants in Milan, Italy and 
Seoul, South Korea. From a purely technical and economic point of view, this 
engineering project was a strictly 'rational' recipe to increase rice production, 
and help to make Indonesia self-sufficient in rice, which was the prime aim of the 
policy."
60-1: "What happened? For two or three years the policy succeeded as forecast. The 
rice crop soared, and farmers put money in the bank. But, as the 1980s went along, 
the local authorities began to record explosions of insect pests, and infestation by 
funguses both old and new. Before long, the farmers of Bali were afflicted with all 
the Biblical plagues of Egypt: "By the mid-1980s, Balinese farmers had become locked 
into a struggle to stay one step ahead of the next pest, by planting the latest 
resistant variety of Green Revolution rice. Despite the cash profits from the new 
rice, many farmers began to press for a return to the older system of scheduling by 
the water temples, in the hope of cutting down the pest populations. Foreign 
consultants at the irrigation project, however, interpreted any proposal to return 
control of irrigation to the water temples as a product of religious conservatism 
and resistance to change. The answer to pests [they retorted] was pesticide, not the 
prayers of the priests. As one frustrated American irrigation engineer declared, 
'These people don't need a high priest, they need a hydrologist!""
225 n: "On the story of the Bali water temples, read J. Stephen Lansing's book, 
Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali 
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). See esp. pp. 113-115. A 
subsequent paper by Lansing and James Kremer, "Emergent Properties of Balinese Water 
Temple Networks: Coadaptation on a Rugged Fitness Landscape," in American 
Anthropologist (1993): pp. 97-114, analyzes the Water Temples "as a complex adaptive 
system" of the kind being studied at the Santa Fe Institute. Cf. Lucas Horst 
(Wageningen Agricultural University ), "Intervention in Irrigation Water Division 
Bali, Indonesia." His report gives a picture of the mistakes made in the Bali 
Irrigation Project. As he says, "The Italian and Korean consultants had no or little 
knowledge of the specific Bali-Subak irrigation"; they even described traditional 
irrigation procedures as making an arbitrary allocation of water to the farmers!



-- 
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
michaelperelman.wordpress.com
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