Peasant.blog

Origins of agrarianism in Southeast Asia

July 24, 2025

Colum Graham

What is agrarianism and where does it come from? Agrarianism involves a “faith in agricultural economics, an affirmation of rural communalism, and a conviction that farming was indispensable to those qualities that made the nation unique.” During the Cold War, this ideology became purposed towards anticommunist efforts. But it has earlier roots. In Japan, agrarianism appears to have become prominent towards the end of the 19th century. Such ideals became part of its imperialist expansion into rural regions of Northeast Asia in the build up to, and during, the Second World War.

But what about Southeast Asia?

Soon after the Second World War broke out in the Pacific in December 1941, Japan adopted a series of policies for what it called the Southern Areas. The Southern Areas were divided into two. Area A included the Dutch East Indies, British Malaya and Borneo, and the Philippines. Area B was comprised of French Indochina and Thailand. Places designated in Area A appeared the prime initial focus for resource extraction, especially oil, natural resources, and food.

Let’s consider Java as an example. For feeding the war machine, agricultural production on Java was crucial. Colonial forces implemented a neighbourhood system (tonarigumi) used in Japan to better mobilize people for production and monitor them for subversion. This system was utilized to coerce production and supply food, especially rice, for the war effort. The practical dimensions of agricultural extraction during the occupation is well-understood. The ideological dimension, to my eye, seems less so.

Recently I came across copies of Djawa Baroe (New Java), an Indonesian language Japanese propaganda magazine published during the War. There are numerous insightful articles and photos within its issues. I thought putting up images of some that seem relevant to agrarianism here could be worthwhile to keep myself posting.

Djawa Baroe, 1 August 1944, p.11.

This one of men standing atop mounds of rice is from the 1 August 1944 issue. At that time, Java was undergoing one of the worst famines of the 20th century (which receives comparatively little attention). A rough translation of the text reads:

Ever more results from production… With it, the peasants’ spirits were ignited. “Java’s Fortress of Struggle” fights hard to improve the Earth’s yield. Their faces continually shone with joy because their colonial toil was rewarded upon seeing rice mounds that were like mountains. Now it will be stored for the needs of the Army. With the concerted efforts of both men and women, their souls could be completely satisfied by selling the rice to the authorities. Only then will peasants’ triumphs in such struggles bring victory for Java’s war!

Although it may be the case agrarianism in Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia was prevalent before the Japanese occupation, the war was a critical period for state formation. Identifying Japan’s agrarianism during the occupation could be helpful to discern its influence relative to pre-occupation variants. Giving greater attention to ideologies concerning agriculture and rural life instilled during key junctures of state formation can also be useful for better understanding the long run consequences on countries’ agrarian politics and how, if necessary, to address them.

agrarianism, Java, peasants, Southeast Asia, World War Two
Elite land reform in Nepal

July 17, 2025

Colum Graham

For the past few months I have been busy so I did not post much.

_{Sunset in Tarai, 2018. Photo taken by Lakhindra (CC BY-SA 4.0)}

In aid of getting back into writing for this blog, I thought I may as well begin with a few observations stemming from a paper I recently read by Jacob Rinck titled ““Failed” Not Futile: Reassessing Nepal’s 1964 Land Reform” in the journal Studies In Nepali History And Society.

The paper interprets the broader consequences of the 1964 land reform (often otherwise considered to have failed in its stated objectives) and contextualizes it with a broad brush backdrop of more than a century of state-society relations. There is a significant amount of information sewn together in this work: from how a class of large landowners became largely autonomous of the state in the early 20th century (p.8) to potentially the first direct interactions between tenant-cultivators and officials as about protections the latter would afford the former in the mid 1960s (p.16).

It offers many insights into Nepali political history that could serve as a basis of discussion. But ones I most became intrigued by initially were the reform’s ceiling on the maximum amount of land for the Tarai region (the lowlands) and past scholars’ assessment of purported failure.

The 1964 reform program’s supposed failure was due to limited land redistribution. It was an elite instigated effort. King Mahendra‘s government’s reform placed a limit of 25 bigha (or 16.9 hectares, 1 bigha is equal to about 0.67 hectares) on holdings in the Tarai. It also placed a limit on the amount of a harvest landlords could claim from sharecroppers. The government only redistributed 22,000 of the 50,000 hectares initially acquired as part of the program to peasant families, and just 34,000 of a further 66,000 hectares in a subsequent effort in the 1970s (p.4).

In 1961-1962, more than half of Nepal’s landholdings were less than a half hectare in size, more than a third were between a half hectare and three, and less than ten percent were above three hectares (and as Rinck notes, in the Tarai region inequality is historically even more pronounced) (p.20). Rather than use a strategically ambiguous term such as “excessive” in the law so officials could use discretion in land acquisitions among smallholders, the ceiling had a specific number to target landowners with very large landholdings. As Rinck puts it, “the threat of land reform helped the palace to keep large landowners in line” (p.23).

In the Tarai region there were landholdings “running into the hundreds and even thousands of hectares” (p.20). Or in other words, the kind of landowners who could threaten the authority of the King just four years after he led a coup d’état. At the same time, elites with less than 17 hectares seemingly did not need to fear expropriation. Was the 1964 land reform thus an old divide and rule strategy couched in (then) new development terminology? One that would not encourage lesser landed elites to side with noble families with vast estates, as well as one to gain the fealty of those same noble families? Was it one mostly intended to support Mahendra’s consolidation of power?

The limited redistribution of land to peasant families may have been how the 1964 reform was assessed and remembered. But very usefully, Rinck’s paper moves beyond that and furthers understanding of the long-term consequences of the reform by tracing changing relations in Dhanusha (a district in Tarai) between landlords, tenants, and the state, along with the dissolution of local landed elites’ political power and the expansion of middle-peasants. The analysis concludes with numerous further questions for research.

Some additional questions I was left with include: 1) Were any (or even many) of the elites who were dispossessed supporters of deposed Prime Minister B.P. Koirala (who was from a landlord family and who won a landslide election in 1959)? 2) Could the 1964 reform be assessed as instigating numerous successful medium-scale land grabs? 3) Relatedly, with just 48 percent of lands acquired in over a decade of state expropriation from the mid 1960s and into the 1970s redistributed to peasant families, what happened to the rest (60,000 hectares)?

Unfortunately at the moment the journal is not easy to access. Hopefully ease of accessing the paper, and others in the journal’s many issues, will one day improve so readers will be prompted to generate and pursue their own.

1960s, history, land-reform, nepal, politics
For the sake of forests and the Gods podcast

July 17, 2025

Colum Graham

Recently I had the opportunity to speak to Wolfram Dressler about his new book, For the Sake of Forests and the Gods (Cornell University Press, 2025) on the New Books Network.

The book examines the impacts of religious and environmental non-governmental actors on the lives of highlanders on Palawan Island, the Philippines. The absence of the state in Palawan’s mountainous regions have meant that these non-governmental actors have been able to increasingly assume governmental authority. Dressler explores these actors’ emergence, goals, and practices in Palawan to reveal their influence on regulating agricultural cultivation, forests, customary objects, healthcare, and value systems.

Using a relational approach and based on more than two decades of experience in Palawan, Dressler explains the causes and consequences of converging religious and environmental nongovernmental reforms in indigenous upland spaces. The book aims to provoke us to critically reflect on the political consequences non-governmental actors have on upland peoples negotiating challenges of late capitalism, and advocates for indigenous communities to be able to do so on their own terms.

You can listen by clicking here!

agrarian-life, conservation, Palawan, Philippines, podcast
Smallholder trajectories

October 4, 2024

Colum Graham

An excellent and very useful new paper by Qian Forrest Zhang and Meiling Wu in the Journal of Peasant Studies details the dissolution of China’s smallholders in absolute terms. As Zhang and Wu argue, the exodus of over 200 million from farming across the nation over the last two decades represents quite likely the largest reduction of small-scale producers in human history. Where did they go? Stories about the struggles of rural migrants (nongmingong) have become frequent in English language media, and are a good place to start thinking about the types of mobility people experience.

China is also not alone in experiencing a relatively steep decline. Elsewhere in the Asia Pacific, though not to the same scale, Vietnam has also undergone a rapid reduction of smallholders over the same timeframe.

^{Photo by Danang DKW.}

But other countries have not experienced similarly. Though population growth in towns and cities means that postcolonial countries with large populations such as Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and the Philippines seem to have relatively declining numbers of small-scale farmers, absolute figures paint quite different trends. Despite the recent dramatic declines in China and Vietnam, the overall number of farmers across the world has actually increased from 652 million since mid-way through the last century. The FAO claims that in 2019 of the 1.23 billion people engaged “agrifood system” employment, there were 857 million people working in agricultural production worldwide, with the majority of them engaged in smallholder production in Asia.

There are political explanations for these differing trajectories. Beyond the observation that each country discussed here experiencing substantial reductions of agrarian labour have authoritarian regimes whereas those that have not are democracies (to say nothing of their democratic quality), addressing questions about why some have been able to pursue structural reform and others not must go deeper and address issues about resources, centralisation, decentralisation, legitimacy, ideology, and “capacity”. Could the constellation of political factors that enable the dissolution of small-scale farming (and the accompanying destructive social and ecological consequences), if directed differently, shape possibilities to fulfill goals for more desirable transitions?

agriculture, farmers, politics, sustainability, technology
Nominating Siri

October 3, 2024

Colum Graham

This video of agricultural workers somewhere on Java engaging in a pre harvest ritual prayer led by Google’s Siri went viral a couple of years ago on social media with tens of thousands of likes and many comments.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by 🇮🇩 #NewNormal 🧼🦠 (@ngakaksehat)

Comments often ranged from amusement to condescension about the apparent low level of Islamic knowledge held by laborers participating. For the latter, that Siri was leading the prayer suggested participants had a superficial understanding.

But as this recent fascinating paper by Aarti Sethi in American Ethnologist about cotton production, gender, and harvest rituals in Vidarbha, Central India suggests (among many other insights), harvest rituals are not necessarily linked to religious identity but are instead connected to labour relations. Where I did fieldwork in rural Indonesia that was certainly the case: people could internalize religious ideals that rejected such rituals but nevertheless participate in them.

Rather than reflect a lack of religious knowledge, nominating Siri to lead the prayer may more reflect the participants in that video, mostly middle aged, did not feel they were in a better position to do so. For instance, ritual prayer propitiations pre or post harvest are often undertaken by elderly men who have ceased to have desires that could undermine their integrity when making requests to the rice goddess Dewi Sri for success on behalf of the family or community. Already elderly, they have experienced life’s trials and tribulations and are meant to no longer have wants that could supersede a desire for the family’s wellbeing. Or in other words, desires that Dewi Sri could address at the expense of ensuring a good harvest for all. Siri, without any conceivable desires as the voice of a machine, could thus be the voice most suited to effectively negotiate on behalf of those present for a good result. Alternatively, a much simpler explanation could be that nominating Siri to lead the prayer was just a novelty for a spectacle.

Whatever the actual case may be, such changing dynamics of technology, spirituality, and generation in longstanding ritual practices are where new forms of agrarian differentiation can be seen. Such new forms of differentiation appear to be lost on those expressing condescension about a supposedly homogenous peasantry’s backwardness — itself a practice of long-term continuity.

agrarian-life, farming, festivals, god, google-siri, peasants, religion, spirituality, technology
First post

October 2, 2024

Colum Graham

“And in the absence of either compulsion or the chance of capitalist accumulation, there was no incentive to produce beyond the locally prevailing standards of subsistence and comfort. Beyond sufficiency in this respect, that is, there was no reason to increase the drudgery of agricultural production. The logic of this variant of peasant economy was worked out in convincing empirical detail by A.V. Chayanov, who, among other things, showed that when a family had more working members than nonworking dependents, it reduced its overall work effort once sufficiency was assured.

The important point for our purpose is that a peasantry – assuming that it has enough to meet its basic needs – will not automatically produce a surplus that elites might appropriate, but must be compelled to produce it.” – James C. Scott, Against the Grain, p.152.

Origins of agrarianism in Southeast Asia

Elite land reform in Nepal

For the sake of forests and the Gods podcast

Smallholder trajectories

Nominating Siri

First post