Sarawak, Borneo — the price of rice jumped up 40% three months ago. This was just as the traditional rice-year began again. The weather was odd and much of August, the traditional burn month of the slash-and-burn technique, was rainy.
Traditional slash-and-burn (also called swidden) agriculture is a method employed for thousands of years by natives all over SE Asia. It is practised with precautions and regulations. The felled, burnt logs are left in place to keep the soil from being washed away, and even weeds are cut to soil-level, not uprooted, for the same reason. After a season the forest is allowed to grow back, and maybe ten or fifteen years later cleared again. The slash-and-burn of evil reputation is industrial, scorched earth razing of hundreds of hectares of forest so that palm-oil monoculture plantations can be established.
September and October have been sunny, and we have noted some impressive clearings along the Bau-Lundu road. People are growing rice again. In Kampong Stunggang a few years ago, all the older folks were growing rice. They had nothing better to do and Dayaks enjoy growing rice. Dayaks are not humble peasants. In the past they resembled the ancient Greeks, who described their way of life as farming and fighting. Remember, Dayaks were headhunters.
Modern rice-growing in Sarawak is not, strictly speaking, subsistence agriculture, because plenty of farmers do have some kind of pension. Even now, a rice-field cultivated much the same way as an enthusiastic gardener in America cultivates her or his kitchen garden yields enough to give a significant lift to family nutrition and to savings in the family purse. In the old days, rice-harvests produced enough surplus to allow a lot of the yield to be turned into wine. Dayaks love to drink.
Sarawak is ruled by an elected dictator. He recently spoke in public, concerning a land dispute — a private contractor evicting native people from their land, occupied 100 years, so he could build a housing-estate. His words, “Don’t mess with me; I am the government.” L’état, c’est moi. If his rule were not so grasping, if he did not strain to alienate every single acre of land to himself, first to log (logging’s where the big money is), then establish a token plantation, the natives could cheerily give the finger to the global economy. This was proved true during both the Great Depression and the Japanese Occupation.
