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A major constraint faced by the rural poor in Asia and the Pacific is access to land (Hossain, 2001). The majority of Asia's rural people have either no access to land or very limited access through cultivation agreements or access to microscopic parcels, usually less than a quarter of one hectare (Geertz, 1950; Hayami, 1972)1. In all cases they largely rely on selling family manpower, primarily as agricultural wage workers to provide or supplement income sources. However, neither small parcels of land nor standard agricultural wages permit the landless and small-scale farmers to save capital nor enter into an accumulation process. Any significant large-scale improvement in the situation of the rural poor, especially in the marginalized areas of less developed countries where agriculture still represents the main source of livelihood (Syed, 2003) is, therefore, directly dependent upon the possibility of changing the patterns of land access and labour remuneration. However, these patterns are determined by institutions embedded in the rural societies and changing them is, thus, principally a matter of institutional change.
However, institutions tend to become autonomous (Walliser, 1989). In an evolutionary society, the reasons why institutions emerge and their functions may change but the institutions themselves often linger or outlast them. In the Asian context, labour arrangements and tenure systems are not the exceptions to this rule. For instance, sharecropping agreements which traditionally divide the rice harvest between landlords and tenants on a 50:50 basis is acceptable when both are farmers and rely on agricultural production for the subsistence of their households. However, it is no longer appropriate for the development of competitive commercial agriculture when landlords have migrated to urban areas, making most of their living from non-agricultural activities. Investment in agricultural productivity is no longer the landlord's priority, and for tenants, it is not affordable. Yet the arrangement endures and agricultural development is trapped in an obsolete and counterproductive institutional design.
Institutions are also path dependent (North, 1990). This means that the existing pattern of behaviour influences the way new behaviour can develop and impedes change. As a result, the scope of alternative behaviour is limited and change becomes difficult to implement. The case of agricultural wages follows a similar trend. Wages paid to male agricultural workers throughout Asia are higher than those paid to female workers for the same amount of time, reflecting the social recognition given to the role and place women have in society and not the economic value of their actual work. Changing the relative levels of these gender-biased agricultural wages would require complete reconsideration of more fundamental values embedded in society as a whole. Similarly, it appears that, in terms of rice cultivation, wage levels are defined by employers at the local level using the traditional unhusked paddy market value as a reference. During the 1998-1999 Crisis in Indonesia, agricultural wages increased in concordance with the local price of paddy. This change, however, did not endure and wages rapidly dropped to the pre-crisis level after relative paddy prices had stabilized (Bourgeois, 1999). This increase was not the result of negotiations, but a tacit adjustment to cope with an exceptional event using an existing implicit rule.
Limited access to land and low wages, in marginal areas where alternative employment opportunities are scarce, contribute to the perpetuation of poverty amongst the rural poor. However, this situation also serves the interest of better-off groups for whom the permanency of an abundant underpaid labour force becomes a factor of competitiveness and enrichment. The "poverty trap" so often denounced as the reason why the Poor remain poor cannot function alone; it has to be permanently reset.
This is the major reason why agrarian institutions are so difficult to modify. It is said that institutional change is more likely to take place when expected benefits outweigh the cost of change and when there are powerful stakeholders supporting them (Feeny, 1988). In the case of wages and tenure agreements no such conditions exist at the local level. To modify these arrangements in favour of the Poor means a change in wealth redistribution. The share of land rent received by landowners will decrease; and the benefits of employing agricultural workers will be reduced. As owners and employers are usually influential and powerful people, it is unusual to expect these changes to occur at the local level. The status quo is maintained because the situation of the rural poor in the agricultural sector does not enable them to call for these changes (Brinkerhoff and Goldsmith, 1992). The prospects for institutional change to occur through pressure from interest groups (here the rural poor) or for reasons of expected benefits are very small. Conversely, powerful groups of stakeholders see these changes as likely to bring disadvantages to them and therefore contribute passively, or worse still actively bolster the institutional trap.
Under such conditions it is easy to understand why, with few exceptions, government policies in Asia and the Pacific allegedly targeting rural poverty alleviation mostly consist of patchy poverty reduction programmes and systematic capitalistic investment in the industrial cultivation of export crops (usually tree crops) rather than on changing agrarian structures. This choice leads to a growingly dualistic rural sector with a large number of people living on the remnants of a growth that does not reach them while a few others usurp the lion's share.
1 See also CGPRT Flash Volume 2, No. 7 July 2004, p.1.
Written by Robin Bourgeois, IS/DB Programme Leader, UNESCAP-CAPSA, Bogor, Indonesia.
(References available upon request) |
