Toulmin, Stephen Edelston. 2001. Return to Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). 60: He gives an extended quotation: "I have an anthropologist friend with a Dutch wife, and they do fieldwork on Bali. His main focus of research has been the system of water temples whose priests -- by tradition -- controlled the schedule for allocating irrigation water to the rice fields of different communes or individual farmers. For some 800 years, these temples were a feature of Balinese society; but when the Indonesian Islands came together politically, neither the Dutch colonial administration nor the central government of Indonesia recognized that water temples had any underlying economic significance: rather, they saw them as religious, and so cultural, monuments." 60: "In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the National Government of Indonesia decided to introduce to Bali, on a massive scale, new strains of a-called 'miracle rice' developed at the International Rice Institute in the Philippines. So, my friend points out: "Balinese farmers were forbidden to plant native varieties of rice: instead, double cropping or triple cropping of IR 36 [or similar varieties] was mandated. Farmers were instructed to abandon the traditional cropping patterns and plant high-yielding varieties as often as possible"." 60: "Along with this policy, the Asian Development Bank supported an engineering project on the basis of a report from economic consultants in Milan, Italy and Seoul, South Korea. From a purely technical and economic point of view, this engineering project was a strictly 'rational' recipe to increase rice production, and help to make Indonesia self-sufficient in rice, which was the prime aim of the policy." 60-1: "What happened? For two or three years the policy succeeded as forecast. The rice crop soared, and farmers put money in the bank. But, as the 1980s went along, the local authorities began to record explosions of insect pests, and infestation by funguses both old and new. Before long, the farmers of Bali were afflicted with all the Biblical plagues of Egypt: "By the mid-1980s, Balinese farmers had become locked into a struggle to stay one step ahead of the next pest, by planting the latest resistant variety of Green Revolution rice. Despite the cash profits from the new rice, many farmers began to press for a return to the older system of scheduling by the water temples, in the hope of cutting down the pest populations. Foreign consultants at the irrigation project, however, interpreted any proposal to return control of irrigation to the water temples as a product of religious conservatism and resistance to change. The answer to pests [they retorted] was pesticide, not the prayers of the priests. As one frustrated American irrigation engineer declared, 'These people don't need a high priest, they need a hydrologist!"" 225 n: "On the story of the Bali water temples, read J. Stephen Lansing's book, Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). See esp. pp. 113-115. A subsequent paper by Lansing and James Kremer, "Emergent Properties of Balinese Water Temple Networks: Coadaptation on a Rugged Fitness Landscape," in American Anthropologist (1993): pp. 97-114, analyzes the Water Temples "as a complex adaptive system" of the kind being studied at the Santa Fe Institute. Cf. Lucas Horst (Wageningen Agricultural University ), "Intervention in Irrigation Water Division Bali, Indonesia." His report gives a picture of the mistakes made in the Bali Irrigation Project. As he says, "The Italian and Korean consultants had no or little knowledge of the specific Bali-Subak irrigation"; they even described traditional irrigation procedures as making an arbitrary allocation of water to the farmers!
-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu michaelperelman.wordpress.com _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
