Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java

by Nancy Lee Peluso

Overview

Millions of Javanese peasants live alongside state-controlled forest lands in one of the world's most densely populated agricultural regions. Because their legal access and customary rights to the forest have been severely limited, these peasants have been pushed toward illegal use of forest resources. Rich Forests, Poor People untangles the complex of peasant and state politics that has developed in Java over three centuries.

Drawing on historical materials and intensive field research, including two contemporary case studies, Peluso presents the story of the forest and its people. Without major changes in forest policy, Peluso contends, the situation is portentous. Economic, social, and political costs to the government will increase. Development efforts will by stymied and forest destruction will continue. Mindful that a dramatic shift is unlikely, Peluso suggests how tension between foresters and villagers can be alleviated while giving peasants a greater stake in local forest management.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520915534
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	09/01/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

Nancy Lee Peluso is Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley.

Read an Excerpt

Rich Forests, Poor People

Resource Control and Resistance in Java

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By Nancy Lee Peluso

University of California

Copyright © 1992 Regents of the University of California
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-520-08931-6

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Chapter One

The Emergence of "Scientific" Forestry in Colonial Java

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Historians have paid too much attention to revolutions and too little to the creation of political stability.... Stability, no less than revolution, may have its own kind of Terror. E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters Of all these changes, the restriction of forest use was one of the most galling to the peasants; resources that had always been as free as the air they breathed and that remained close at hand were suddenly being denied to them. Forestry officials might be well-intentioned-though they seemed to be as concerned with forest revenue as with conservation-but their actions deprived peasants of what seemed natural rights.... Such restrictions constituted ... a leading grievance in more than one Southeast Asian peasant movement. James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant

The nineteenth century was a turning point in forest management and the forms of state control over the teak and nonteak forests of Java. It was then that a bureaucratic, colonial Forest Service drew boundaries between forest and agricultural land-on maps and in the field-and established police to restrict people's access to trees and other forest products. Through a process of trial and error, regulations for profitable tree plantation management were encoded in colonial law, as were the philosophies of forest conservation for hydrological purposes. The ideology of "scientific" forestry was embraced by the colonial state and its foresters, while local institutions of forest access and property were gradually phased out of the legal discourse. The ideas of this period, and the impacts of these policies on the lives of forest-dwelling people, remain significant today; the last forest laws effected by the Dutch government were drawn up in the late 1920s and continue to dictate contemporary Indonesian forestry.

This period was also the beginning of the foresters' great concern with their eminent rights of domain over land, timber, and the demarcation of forest boundaries. Their possessiveness is seen today in the persistent use of the terms of exclusion that criminalize customary rights of access to forest products and land: "forest theft," "encroachment," "squatting," and "illegal grazing." Forest dwellers continued to engage in these activities, despite the pejorative labels, in their practice of everyday life. They had to resist the state's increasing resource control in order to subsist, and thus were making, in effect, a political statement. As the twentieth century wore on, peasants continued to counter-appropriate forest land and species. Their actions, and the formalization of the colonial state's self-declared rights to the forest, set the stage for the complex conflicts that continue between foresters and forest villagers today.

CONSOLIDATING CONTROL: THE FORESTS OF JAVA UNDER THE COLONIAL STATE

The VOC was bankrupt by the end of the eighteenth century, largely because of the depredations and corruption of its own officials. In 1796 the Company's directors were replaced by a committee appointed by the government of the Netherlands. As of December 31, 1799, when the VOC's charter expired, the Dutch state replaced the Company as proprietor and administrator. The Batavian Republic inherited an extensive and wealthy colony and assumed the VOC's debt of 134 million guilders (Vlekke 1960:239). From 1808 to 1811, when Holland was under Napoleonic rule, Marshal Daendels served as governor-general of Java. Soon after the Napoleonic annexation of Holland, the English invaded Java. Stamford Raffles served as lieutenant-governor in Java from 1811 to 1815. The English placed William of Orange on the Dutch throne, and on August 19, 1816, John Fendall, the English successor to Raffles, formally transferred Java to three Dutch commissioners-general (Irwin 1967:28-35).

When Governor-General Daendels arrived in Java in 1808, he organized the exploitation of Java's teak forests, passed edicts on appropriate management, and secured the government's monopoly on teak, forest labor, and shipbuilding. For the first time in the colony's history, a quasimodern government forest service, the Dienst van het Boschwezen, was created, with "rights" to control land, trees, and forest labor (Soepardi 1974a:20). At the time, only teak timber was valued for its profits and shipbuilding; thus the domain of this early forest service was limited to lands where teak grew or could be grown.

Four elements in Daendels's system would retain at least philosophical importance through the ensuing two centuries:

The declaration of all forests as the domain of the state (Landsdomein), to be managed for the benefit of the state. The assignment of forest management to a branch of the civil service created expressly for that purpose. The division of the forest into tracts (percelen) to be logged and replanted on a rotating basis. The restriction of villagers' access to teak for commercial purposes, allowing them only to collect deadwood and nontimber forest products freely.

In three years, Daendels was unable to secure the apparatus of the state forest management agency. Though his ideas were written down as regulations and carried out in the field during his rule, he was not in power long enough to ensure their continuity. Key components of Daendels's plans changed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, namely, the structure of the Forest Service, the scale of its power, and the elimination of the blandong labor services (Schuitemaker 1950:39). Nevertheless, his attempt to implement a kind of a state forest management agency was an important step influencing the Forest Service born in the mid-nineteenth century.

Daendels was determined to manage the teak forests so the colonial state could profit from them for decades to come. He required the inspector general to report any incidents of high-level corruption, slackness in duty, or breaking the oath of office, and to swear "he would never scheme with wood traders, award them wood, or steal wood himself" (Soepardi 1974a:54-55). He also established the first regulations punishing misuse of the forest as defined by the state. The testimony of a "well-known person of good name" that a Javanese or Chinese had been caught "red-handed" or "suspiciously wandering without purpose in the forest" was sufficient cause for imprisonment. The maximum penalties for forest criminals were ten years in prison or the payment of a fine of 200 rijks dollars. Two-thirds of this fine went to the state and one-third to the person who reported the crime. Appeals could be made, but punishments would be reduced only to exile or shorter prison terms (van der Chijs 1896, 15:120-21). These regulations represented a harsh change from previous circumstances, but they were difficult to enforce; no forest police were yet patrolling.

Besides passing edicts concerning the technical aspects of forest management (issued August 21, 1808), Daendels appointed bosgangers, or subdistrict forest managers. The bosgangers oversaw logging, replanting, collection of teak seeds, and the girdling of trees the year before they were to be cut (Soepardi 1974a:55-56). Like the forest overseers working for the VOC, Daendels's bosgangers were mostly ex-soldiers (Brascamp 1917:207).

Daendels eliminated all private forest exploitation, and monopolized the trade and transport of teak timber for the state. This meant that all leases of villages and the forests they were to cut for private entrepreneurs were voided as well (Boomgaard 1987:23). In Rembang Residency, forest laborers, their village lands, and the adjacent forest lands were placed under direct administration of a Board of Forests (Furnivall 1944:65). Each woodcutter was given one catty (approximately 1.5 kilogram) of hulled rice a day and a small annual allowance of iron, salt, and gunpowder (Raffles 1817, I:183). The laborers worked eight to fourteen days in the forest at a stretch, during the work season (February to November), and were allowed eight to fourteen days' rest after each period of work (Boomgaard 1987:23).

Daendels's successor during the five-year interlude of English control in Java, Lieutenant-Governor Stamford Raffles, was determined to save money, and dealt a crushing blow to many of Daendels's state forest management measures. He felt that the state was overinvolved in forest management and that the system was expensive and unnecessary. Raffles retracted almost all of the forestry organizational reforms implemented by Daendels. Only in Rembang was a special forest superintendent appointed; in other residencies, the task of forest administration and oversight fell to the residents (Raffles 1817, I:184).

Raffles believed that the Dutch had sponsored the cutting of an excessive quantity of poor teak timber, below the quality required by contemporary shipbuilding standards. Believing that Indian teak was of much higher quality, he reasoned that making Javanese teak competitive within the trading sphere of the British empire would be too costly. Raffles felt the government monopoly on teak sale and shipbuilding created demands on government funds to police its interests. Moreover, he observed, forest laborers were oppressed and lowering wood prices would only cause them greater hardship (Raffles 1817, I:183).

Raffles initiated a policy of reserving the largest and best forests for the state and allowing private entrepreneurs to lease and log the rest (ibid.). Raffles also parceled out forest land as "gifts" to Javanese elites. In 1813, for example, he gave "Raden Adipatty Singasarie Penathan Djoeda ... and his heirs forever ... a tract of forestland situated in the District of Brebes \[in then Residency Tegal\] as a free gift.... This land was then \[to be\] entirely free from cultivation and habitation" (Zwart 1934:547). In his History of Java, Raffles was vague about his own conservation measures, but estimated that 40,000 or 50,000 beams could be extracted each year without damage. He was also more lenient in prosecuting forest "crimes." Not only did he want to save money, but he had also relinquished the government's absolute monopoly on teak. Philosophically, this was a major departure from previous state and VOC forest policies.

Another, perhaps unexpected, result of Raffles's "liberalization" of Daendels's forest management plans was the beginning of a long debate over the meaning of the words used in British treaties with the Javanese sultan and sunan. It remained unclear whether the susuhunan was granting the British rights to timber or to the land on which it grew. The text of the 1811 agreement between the English and the sunan indicates that the sunan's claim to sovereignty over the land was not at that time (and probably not in earlier times) being transferred:

His Highness reserves to the Honerable \[sic\] East Indian Company the exclusive privilege of felling teak and other timber for shipbuilding, in the forests of His dominions, and H H further engages to supply labourers for that purpose and for the transportation of the same to the limits of H H dominions and such labourers shall in every instance be paid by the British government at fair and equitable rates. \["Het gouvernement en de djatibosschen in Soerakarta," 1917:697\]

A treaty signed the next year reestablished British access to timber and labor, while indicating that the sultan retained his rights to the land, or at least his rights to rule a particular territory and its inhabitants. "H H secures to the British Government the sole right and property of the teak timber within the whole of the country subject to His administrations" (ibid., 698, emphasis added). Later, Dutch writers of the first set of scientific forestry laws and other colonial legal documents interpreted the control of the Javanese ruler over land or territory as being equivalent to Western property rights, which connote ownership. This interpretation did not allow for the more complex aspects of access to land and land-based resources operating in Java's forests at the time. Local people, regional rulers, and entrepreneurs were engaged in a "layered" system of rights to control or use the forest and its products. This system was flexible and adapted to different needs and different circumstances.

When the Dutch reassumed control of Java in 1816 they adopted some of Raffles's more profitable ideas, but also reestablished the Forest Board of Daendels's time. In 1826 the commissioners-general abolished the Forest Board and transferred control over the forests and forest laborers to individual residents, thus decentralizing control over the forests (Boomgaard 1987:26). Whatever efforts these residents made to regulate forest cutting, however, conflicting objectives from other government sectors accelerated the process. During the Java War (1825-30), for example, the state cut many teak beams and logs in Central Java to build forts and bridges and to block roads (Soepardi 1974a:58-59).

In 1832, under the Cultivation System, the forests were brought under the jurisdiction of the Director of Cultures, though the residents retained effective administrative control over the forests in their own districts (Cordes 1881:212). Teak forests were cut heavily with little regard for logging regulations. The tallest, straightest trees were selected to build sugar factories, coffee warehouses, tobacco-drying sheds, and housing compounds. An extensive road system was built through sections of the teak forest complex to deliver the prized logs to sawmills and woodworking centers (Schuitemaker 1950:40). Luxurious teak homes were constructed for plantation managers and highly placed personnel. In addition, roasting coffee, drying tobacco, and industrial processing of sugar cane from the extensive government plantations required tremendous quantities of fuel. In two regencies of Semarang Residency, 60,000 logs were cut just to build tobacco-drying sheds, while in Pekalongan Residency 24,000 cubic feet of firewood were cut annually for sugar refining. By regulations effective between 1830 and 1836, local people were required to cut and haul wood to the factories. After that year, factories were assigned their own forests from which they were permitted to cut their fuel. Apparently, the factories did very little reforestation. Later, when these enterprises were no longer subsidized by wood deliveries, they split the thick walls of the old sheds to build more sheds or to sell (Cordes 1881:208-10; Departemen Kehutanan 1986, I:67).

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Part I. INTRODUCTION
1. Structures of Access Control, Repetoires of Resistance

Part II. TRADITIONS OF FOREST CONTROL IN JAVA
2. Gaining Access to People and Trees
3. The Emergence of "Scientific" Forestry in Colonial Java

Part III. STATE FORESTS AND CHANGES IN STATE
4. Organized Forest Violence, Reorganized Forest Access, 1942-1966
5. State Power to Persist: Contemporary Forms of Forest Access Control

Part IV. PEASANT POWER TO RESIST
6. A Forest without Trees
7. Teak and Temptation on the Extreme Periphery: Cultural Perspectives on Forest Crime

Part V. CONCLUSION
8. Toward Integrated Social Forestry