The Discovery of the Indonesian Rice Farmer

Harro Maat
Technology & Agrarian Development, Wageningen University

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     Last modified: February 14, 2005
     Presentation date: 07/16/2005 9:00 AM in ROZH 102
     (View Schedule)

Abstract
session title: "Whom does agricultural research serve?"

From the 1870s writings appeared in colonial magazines of the Dutch East Indies that addressed the improvement of rice cultivation in the archipelago. With the aim to push government investments in rice these documents portrayed the indigenous cultivation practices as primitive and called for a science-based model of rice farming as could be found in Southern Europe. Rice research started in 1905 and from 1911 an Extension Service was set up to implement innovations. Charged to collect as much information about indigenous rice practices as possible the region-based agronomists soon discovered the ingenuity of these farming systems and portrayed rice farmers’ methods as very rational. The only way, they argued, to realize progress was not to import foreign models but to intensify existing practices. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s the extension officials were the “local counterpart” for the rice breeders in the central research station and acted as knowledge brokers between the indigenous and the scientific. Examples, covering innovation models, breeding strategies and seed multiplication, show how this affected the shaping of rice science and technology.

Multiple Paper Session:
Other papers in this session:
‘Europe’s Green Revolution: Peasant-Oriented Plant-Breeding in Central Europe, 1890-1945’
Pathologists and Peasants: Combatting the Coffee Rust in Costa Rica and Colombia, 1975-1990.
Between the trunk and the bark : forest entomologists, the spruce budworm and the pulp and paper industry in Canada, 1909-1973
What Green Revolution?: The Failed Promise of Scientific Corn Improvement for Mexico