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ABSTRACT
The paper compares evidence from the Philippines and Indonesia to examine the argument that the Philippines has a more unequal distribution of both agricultural land and household incomes than Indonesia. It is argued that the evidence from agricultural censuses and household surveys does not support this argument. Instead, the available evidence indicates that there has been a process of convergence in the distribution of land in the Philippines and Indonesia. The percentage of land in holdings over ten hectares has fallen in recent decades in the Philippines, while in Indonesia it may have increased. The cultivated area under large estates continues to grow in Indonesia mainly because of the growth of palm oil cultivation. Evidence on the distribution of household income and of land indicates that neither country has followed the Taiwan model of growth with equity in recent decades.
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Notes
1 Land data were also collected in the earlier censuses of the American era, held in 1903 and 1918, although the data are not always comparable. Owen (Citation1972, Appendix 1) discusses the problems.
2 David and Barker (Citation1979, Table P-16) estimated a series on both cultivated land area and crop area. The latter series was from the Bureau of Agricultural Economics and was much higher, because of double cropping, although it is possible that the series on cultivated land from the Agricultural Censuses was understated.
3 Putzel (Citation1992, 26–7) gives a broader definition of landlessness for 1985, which includes not just wage and family workers but also those employed in own account farming below subsistence. He argues that in the late 1980s, the landless and near landless could have been as high as 72% of all rural households.
4 Figures for 1940 and 1963 from the Central Bureau of Statistics (Citation1963, 80) and Central Bureau of Statistics (Citation1971, 144). It should be noted that in both these years, the figures given for planted area of estates were much smaller than total land controlled. The 1983 figure is taken from Central Bureau of Statistics (Citation1987, Table 7). The divergence between area controlled by large estates and planted area continued in the 1990s.
5 The Declining Welfare Survey conducted in the first decade of the twentieth century did contain data on land distribution for Java: see Hasselman (Citation1914). The 1963 census was carried out at a troubled time politically and the area under smallholder agriculture was probably understated, both in Java and elsewhere. Rebellions in parts of both Sumatra and Sulawesi would have made the implementation of surveys impossible. Recently, the Central Board of Statistics has acknowledged the problems with the 1963 data (Central Board of Statistics Citation2013b).
6 It should be noted that, although there was a higher proportion of land in holdings over ten hectares in the Philippines and Indonesia in 1960 compared with Taiwan, this did not mean that the distribution of land in either country was close to that in most parts of Latin America. On average, holding sizes were much larger in Latin America, and most land was in holdings over ten hectares (Hayami, Quisumbing, and Adriano Citation1990, Table 6).
7 Klaten was one of the kabupaten in Central Java where land conflicts had become violent by the 1960s: see Mortimer (Citation1974), Chapter 7.
8 See Anderson (Citation[1988] 1998) for a critique of the CARP in its early years; his criticisms were widely shared at the time. A graduated land tax was also recommended in International Labour Office (Citation1974), although never implemented.
9 Philippine Statistics Authority (Citation2019), Table 5.9. Some of the fall in area under agriculture is the result of land being converted to other uses. For example some estates in Luzon have converted their land into housing; others have moved land to leisure uses such as golf courses. It also appears that the 2012 result may in part be due to under-reporting by large farms in some regions. Over 28% of the total fall in area occurred in the Visayas, and large falls were also found in the Zamboanga Peninsula and the ARMM, where local authorities might have been unwilling to cooperate with the PSA in implementing the census.
10 In 2012, 12.3% of all land was in holdings under one hectare, compared with only 3.7% in 1980 (Philippine Statistics Authority Citation2015, Table B; Ranis and Stewart Citation1993, Table 10).
11 For much of period from 1963 until at least 1993, it was argued that the agricultural censuses in Indonesia understated land under smallholder agriculture. This claim was made in part because of the disparity between cultivated area reported in the censuses and that reported by the Department of Agriculture. But recently it has been argued that the official figures reported by the Department of Agriculture have overstated cultivated area of foodcrops especially in Java. A study using satellite mapping technology carried out in 2018 found that rice cultivated area was much lower than the previous figures reported by the Department of Agriculture (Central Board of Statistics Citation2018). The lower area data meant that rice production figures were also reduced.
12 A comparison of land settlement policies in Indonesia and the Philippines is given in Booth (Citation2019a, 231–239).
13 Many of the palm oil estates which have been established in recent decades are owned by foreign interests, especially in Malaysia and Singapore. Estimates given by Potter (Citation2016, .3) show that in 2010, 52.4% of total area planted to palm oil was operated by foreign-owned estates compared with 8.2% by government estates and 39.4% by smallholders.
14 In the case of Malaysia the official estimates of inequality and poverty use household income data and are thus not comparable with estimates from other countries based on expenditure data. Estimates of inequality in Indonesia have been made using both income and expenditure data in the years from 1976 to 1982 (Asra Citation2000, Table 6). The Gini estimates were higher using income data. More recent estimates using income data are not available from Statistics Indonesia.
15 Some commentators did query the World Bank approach: see Pyatt (Citation2003).
16 Asian Development Bank estimates for 2005 used three different poverty lines, one of which tried to adjust the poverty line for prices actually paid by the poor. When this adjustment was made, the headcount measure for the Philippines was higher than for Indonesia. See Booth (Citation2019a, 192–4).
17 Tadjoeddin (Citation2019, 286) goes further and argues that the Suharto era was characterized by low and stable inequality. For a rather different view see Booth (Citation2000); here I argue that between 1987 and 1996 relative inequality rose, especially in urban areas.
18 More recent data from the Farm Household Income Survey in 2003 indicate that the linkage ration fell slightly to 1.17; in other words in the decade from 1993 to 2003 the growth in off-farm incomes was only 17% higher than the growth in incomes from the farm holding. This was a much lower ratio than found in Taiwan from 1962 to 1980.
19 Byerlee and Viswanathan (Citation2018, 112) argue that over time smalholder cultivators may displace large palm oil estates in Indonesia, as has happened with rubber. Other authors are less supportive of this view; see Bissonnette and de Koninck (Citation2017). They point to the subsidies which large plantations receive, including acquisition of land at less than market prices.