Early Independence: Revival And Decline

The treaty ending the war for independence was signed in December 1949, bringing peace and the expectation of prosperity. The 1950s saw a small revival in upland commerce, but, relative to prewar levels, production stagnated. In 1950 not a single road into the highlands was still passable. Those in the midslope region were reopened in 1951, but the road to Tosari remained dosed until late 1953.

Commerce was slow to revive. In the midslope region the Japanese had destroyed the last stands of coffee. Although a few large farmers replanted coffee in the early 1950s, it would be five years before the first harvests, and another eight before mature yields began. A second obstacle to

the revival of upland commerce was the flight of Chinese from the region. The Japanese had dosed all Chinese-operated stores in rural areas and forbidden the Chinese to engage in trade. During the independence struggle republican militias continued the exclusionary policy. A few years after independence several Chinese store owners returned to the Tengger highlands, and some even tried to rent farmland, but their renewed presence was short-lived. In 1959 the military governor of East Java ordered all Chinese out of the countryside and into regency towns. Once again, Chinese stores were closed and with them went a vital source of capital.

By 1955, however, there were a few signs of commercial revival, especially around upperslope Tosari. Potato and vegetable exports from Surabaya to Sumatra and Kalimantan had been started again the year before, and the reopening of the Tosari road allowed farmers to contribute to the trade. Ties with Chinese merchants in Semarang, Solo, and Bandung were also renewed, providing vitally needed capital. There was no going back, however, to the halcyon days of the 1920s. Potato cultivation still suffered from fungal infestation, and with the Europeans gone, there was no demand for vegetables with especially high profit margins, such as artichokes, green beans, and cauliflower. Cabbages and leeks (bawang teropong ) became the upperslope region's primary cash crops.

From 1955 to 1957 a national antimalaria campaign made DDT widely available. Applied in massive doses, the chemical improved vegetable yields—while decimating populations of insect-eating birds and killing fish (which poor people harvested) in lowland paddy fields.^[7] During this same period, chemical fertilizers remained expensive and hard to find; almost no farmers used them. Although in the late 1950s the government's Padi Centra rice program created a small black market in ammonium sulphate, the chemical remained expensive and only intermittently available. Fertility management was further complicated by the lack of manure, the result of herd destruction during the Japanese occupation. The cattle population did not revive to 1930 levels until the late 1960s.

It was at this same time, farmers say, that some midslope fields became so infertile that they could no longer sustain maize cultivation. On severely eroded hillside fields, in particular, maize would not fruit. For the first time in the region's history, therefore, poor farmers shifted to cassava as a food crop. A similar shift from maize to cassava had begun

[7] Although technically a controlled substance, DDT remains one of the most widely used pesticides in highland areas. Farmers appreciate its low price (about U.S. $2.00 per kilo in 1985) and ruthless efficiency in killing pests. Distressingly, it is also dusted in high doses on stored potatoes to fend off mice and insect pests and increase storage life.

in some poor communities below the Puspo subdistrict in the 1920s.^[8] In the midslope highlands, however, cultivation of cassava became common only after the war. Grown without manure or chemical fertilizer, cassava can quickly exhaust soils, draining them of potassium and phosphorous. The plant also provides limited canopy during its early growth, and harvesting it seriously disrupts the topsoil, increasing the likelihood of erosion (Palte 1984, 46; Roche 1984, 14). For farmers hoping to earn a living on infertile lands, however, there was little choice but to cultivate whatever crop would grow.^[9]

Farmers showed great resolve in the face of these difficulties and managed to reverse the economic decline in some spheres. In 1954-55 the vegetable market was reopened in Tosari. In 1957 two local merchants in Tosari and one in Puspo managed to purchase World War II-vintage trucks. In the midslope region commercial cultivation of cassava sparked a modest trade expansion. In both mountain districts, however, the commercial revival was overshadowed by growing political controversy. The most serious dispute centered around some 250 hectares of European land seized by squatters after 1942. The squatters had not yet been given title to the lands, and there were rumors that they might have to return them to the government. Communist organizers repeatedly warned of just that possibility, saying that if the squatters did not join forces with them, they would lose their lands to greedy officials. In the early 1960s their warnings appeared to be confirmed when officials in one village seized squatter lands and gave them to relatives and district officers (see ch. 7).

The annihilation of communist cadres during 1965-66 brought a sort of resolution to the squatter problem. At the same time, the introduction of new inputs a few years later led to the first real expansion of commercial agriculture since the 1930s. The 1970s would bring new economic opportunities and new challenges.

[8] The colonial government had introduced cassava into Java in the nineteenth century, but peasant resistance to its cultivation remained strong until the food crisis of the 1880s (Palte 1984, 45).

[9] Commercial opportunities also played a role in cassava's expansion. A key factor was the opening in 1955 of a tapioca factory in Pandaan, about 65 kilometers from this mountain area. Another factory was established shortly thereafter in nearby Probolinggo. Both developments were part of a broad expansion in East Javanese cassava production that began in the prewar period and continued to the early 1980s, when falling prices resulted in production cutbacks. Over the years, cassava came to play a role in the diet of rural East Javanese greater (in terms of grams consumed per day) than that in any other part of the island, with the exception of Yogyakarta (Dixon 1984, 69).