Toerbeurtrijstbouw : individuele en collectieve rechten in de landbouw van Kerinci in Sumatra, Indonesië

In Kerinci, on theislandofSumatrainIndonesia, different categories of collective property co-exist with different types of individual property. In this thesis, thedevelopment of two categories of collective property arestudied: the inherited property of ricelands and the common property of the village territory. The main question that this study seeks to answer is how towards the end of the 20 th century individual and collective forms of property interact in Kerinci in the context of commercial agriculture and in view of the need to produce foodcrops for family self-sufficiency.In Kerinci the standard mode of exploitation of inherited rice fields is gilir ganti or time-sharing. In essence, this means that heirs and co-owners of an inherited estate do not grant each other permanent, but only temporary rights of exploitation to rice fields. Time-shares to use the plots are distributed among each other instead of the plots in their entirety. In Kerinci such an individual time-share to use a certain plot of land to grow rice is called a giliran . A giliran always lasts for one year and runs from September to September. The time interval between the years that an individual heir is allowed to take his or her turn to one or more plots of the inherited estate is determined by the total amount of plots that make up the estate as well as by the total number of heirs. When there are many heirs and only a few plots of sawah , individual heirs will have to wait several years before they can take their turn, but when sawah are abundant the interval between the turns may be brief. For the next generation of heirs, the inherited giliran are equally distributed among the heirs in another set of time-shares.Since inheritance in Hiang is a post mortem affair, the actual owners of the time-shares always belong to the oldest living generation. Long before actual inheritance, the giliran and other fields of the properties to beinherited,are therefore often already used by the children and grandchildren of the owner. An arrangement between giliran -owners and giliran -users practised most widely in this respect is a type of sharecropping by which costs and yields are split evenly ( bagi dua ). As time-share owners tend to anticipate the future, they often arrange for a settlement with their (grand)childrenthat mimics the model of time-sharing and that creates a shadow system of rotation on the level of use. In addition, private arrangements between brothers and sisters occur on the level of giliran -owners. When, for instance, a brother is relatively well-off, it is not unusual for him to grant temporarily the use of his giliran to a sister, albeit without altering his inheritance position and that of his children. Borrowing a giliran is a strategy to bridge or to shorten the interval between two time-shares of poorer siblings. When all brothers and sisters need their giliran for survival they can deviate privately from the giliran schedule by pooling and sharing their giliran with one or two other siblings. In this way, production costs and rice yields are distributed more evenly over time. If the logic of the inheritance of giliran were continued indefinitely, Kerinci farmers would after three or four generations end up with giliran that have been used for 30 or 40 years. In practice, however, giliran of such a long duration do not exist in Kerinci. In Hiang the running time of giliran differs between three and six years, while the most common running time is three years. This is a consequence of the practice of selling and buying giliran within the circle of close relatives. The widespread practice of selling and buying giliran is one of the cornerstones of the system of gilir ganti , since it prevents time-shares from becoming too fragmented over generations. There are several ways to transfer giliran between heirs. They can decide, for example, to sell giliran inherited from father or mother to one or all of their parents' offspring. They can also decide that only one of the children will replace father or mother, and that only he or she will inherit the entire giliran . In that case, other heirs will have to be compensated either in money or through the exchange of other inherited assets. The most common strategy to transfer giliran among heirs, however, is for brothers and sisters holding together new inherited property to buy and sell each other's giliran in due course, which results in a gradual reduction of heirs and giliran holders. Furthermore, it must be noted that rice fields belonging to the individual property of the deceased father or mother may also enter the system of gilir ganti should the heirs so decide. Following the inflow of individual fields in the inherited estate, new time-shares may be created next to the inherited giliran of each generation. Following this mix of old and new giliran and due to the practice of selling and buying time-shares, the inherited properties in Kerinci that are exploited in the gilir ganti mode, are typically of an ad hoc nature as they are centredaroundclusters of sibling groups of one generation. In terms of property flows, then, the property of a certain generation is only related to the inherited estates of previous generations by the less economically valuable, but sometimes ideologically and strategically highly appreciated 'old' giliran .The social effects of the continuation of inherited property estates and the exploitation system of time-sharing are twofold. First, inherited estates provide for a social security and livelihood system within families. Second, since most farming families in Kerinci are still owners and users of giliran in the gilir ganti system, most families also still have access to rice production. The overall effect of gilir ganti in Kerinci is that many families stay in rice cultivation as - part-time - owners of rice fields. As participants in the system of gilir ganti these families also have relatively easy access to sharecropping and other labour relations that provide for alternative means to grow rice when there is no giliran to be used. From this perspective gilir ganti is the single most important social institution of food security in Kerinci. Further, it can be argued that the continuation of gilir ganti in Kerinci does not hamper but, instead, facilitates the commercial management of agriculture. After all, growing rice in a regime of time-shares and commercial production do not exclude each other. On the contrary, by keeping more farming families in rice cultivation through gilir ganti , these families are able to take more commercial risks in the producton of tree crops.The second category of collective property, the common property of the village territory, is characterized by a very different historical trajectory in Kerinci. In some villages in Kerinci, such as Hiang, the traditional village lands are still covered with forests. In most villages, however, theseforesthave already been transformed into dry fields ( ladang ) and orchards ( kebun ). This does not imply that there is a shortage of forests in Kerinci as approximately 60% of the territory of the Kerinci district still consists of forests. These forests surround the agrarianvalleyofKerinciand nowadays they are all part ofKerinciSeblatNational Park.In Hiang a forest of 800 ha.isstill located on village territory. This forest has become common property of the National Park and thevillageofHiangin 1993 and since then it is called a hutan adat ('customary law forest'). As a result of this transformation the villagers of Hiang now'own'theforest along with the National Park. In practice, this means that villagers have lost the right of individual exploitation of a forest plot ( arah ajun ) and that former individual property rights of ladang in the hutan adat are transformed into use-rights only. At the same time, however, all villagers are allowed to gather forest products for their own use. For their loss of autonomy the villagers have been compensated with infrastructural works. Whether this co-management of the Hiang forest has so far been profitable for the villagers is difficult to assess. However, the transformation of the forests on the tanah ulayat into hutan adat has definitely changed the destination of the forest from an agricultural exploitation reserve into a conservationarea,and from a common property resource of villagers to a common property regime of co-management with the aim of nature conservation.