Monoscapes - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 36

sky, the landscape takes on a moody presence. Where the hillsides are steep,
terraced fields cut into the slope with extraordinary precision, like so many
layers of a cake. It takes deep understanding to bend these landscapes and
the water to the collective will. No one is quite sure when these methods
of farming arose. In Bali, the first records of irrigated rice cultivation date
to AD 882; since then, landscape management on a heroic scale has been
built into the egalitarian Balinese sawah rice system. 22
Irrigation cooperatives, the subaks , were responsible for the allocation
of water and the maintenance of irrigation networks because wet rice
farming is too complex for one farmer to practise alone. Each subak
member had one vote regardless of the size of the landholding. Soil
fertility was maintained by the use of ash, organic matter and manures;
rotations and staggered planting of crops controlled pests and diseases;
and bamboo poles, wind-driven noise-makers, flags and streamers scared
birds. Rice was harvested in groups, stored in barns and traded only as
needs arose. The system was sustainable for more than 1000 years.
Yet, in the blink of an eye, rice modernization during the 1960s and
1970s shattered these social and ecological relationships by substituting
pesticides for predators, fertilizers for cattle and traditional land manage-
ment, tractors for local labour groups, and government decisions for local
ones.
The benefit was this: modern rice varieties yielded 50 per cent more,
though only under optimum conditions - the new rice was more suscept-
ible to climatic and hydrological variations. Pests and diseases increased
as a result of the continuous cropping and the elimination of predatory
fish and frogs by pesticides. Farmers sold cattle, as they were no longer
needed for ploughing and manures; mechanized rice mills displaced
groups of women who used to thresh and mill the rice. Modern rice had
to be sold immediately after harvest when the prices are low. This meant
that men received large sums of cash, and women could no longer plan
for the year's food security by monitoring the rice barn. The democratic subak
organizations, once in complete control, lost decisions to government
institutions, which decided cropping patterns, planting dates and irrig-
ation investments. The reduced employment in rice cultivation forced rural
people to seek work elsewhere; with the undermining of the subaks , goods
were no longer redistributed from the better-off to the poorest through
religious rituals.
The Indonesian and Malaysian islands and peninsula are also home to
another remarkable cultural system called adat . This comprises more than
indigenous knowledge or beliefs, more than a legal system. It is, as Patrick
Segundad of the Kadazan community in Sabah says: