ABSTRACT
Indonesia, reputed to have successfully intensified farming, is another case where this was merely selective, concentrating on Java’s irrigated lowland rice rather than other staples, other islands and the uplands. After multinational companies had miserably failed to do so, the state distributed subsidized input packages, but non-recipients also changed their farming methods. A floor price stabilized the rice market. The state built a major fertilizer industry. Outside Java, production rose more through acreage expansion. The violent regime tried to forestall communism and prevent famines through social engineering, at times equality oriented, but in East Timor, it killed, above all precisely through ‘development’ and hunger. Public investment was financed more from oil export proceeds than ‘aid’, and foreign economic influence remained limited. The social effects were ambivalent. Landlessness increased but the average farm size was stagnant. Agricultural wage labor replaced sharecropping. Together with labor in emerging rural industries, self-employment and labor migration, this helped raise wages and reduce hunger, especially in the 1980s. Public agricultural programs tended to benefit well-to-do peasants, but income diversification and the economic rise of women slightly reduced rural inequality. The whole process involved tensions and violence, and much poverty was shifted to the outer islands through a public resettlement program.
