ABSTRACT
The export of this commodity became considerable during the last decade of the nineteenth century, and with the steep rise in the European demand for vegetable oil in subsequent years it grew rapidly. Between 1900and 1913 the export of copra from the N.E.I. increased in quantity more than threefold.' and in 1937 it was surpassed in value only by rubber, petroleum and tin.2 In the case of Malaya exports of coco-nut products rose in value from 9 millon dollars (Malayan) in 1906 to 17 million in 1912 and 36 million in 1929; in 1937 they stood at 31 million," Neither the cultivation of coco-nuts nor the preparation of copra for sale required a large capital. The drying process was conducted in primitive kilns owned by the Chinese middlemen to whom the peasants sold their produce and from whom they obtained such credit as they needed. At the outset the interest of European concerns was limited to the exporting function, and when plantation companies took up the cultivation of the coco-nut, they normally planted it on estates laid out primarily for rubber or other crops. The superiority of the plantations over the native smallholdings in most branches of agriculture lay in their command over technical resources and capital and in their ability to prepare produce of uniform quality for meeting the needs of foreign markets. In coco-nut cultivation, however, these advantages enabled the estates to compete with the peasants only in special circumstances, as on the clay soils of West Malaya where investment in irrigation and drainage permitted the estates to secure high yields. Over the greater part of the region the peasant easily held his own. He did particularly well in Indonesia,
where, it is estimated, about 95 per cent of the copra exports in 1938 came from smallholders." In Malaya, for reasons mentioned, the estates enjoyed a larger share of the industry. Yet even there they owned, in 1953, less than a quarter of the 500,000 acres under coco-nut palms.' The production of copra was thus not a major field of Western enterprise in either country.
