Rice in Colonial Malaya - Articles | Economic History Malaysia

Rice in Colonial Malaya

Paul H. Kratoska, Honorary Editor, Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society¹

From the late 19th century, the Malay Peninsula was one of the British Empire’s most prosperous colonial territories owing to the production and export of commodities such as sugar, pineapples, tin, and after 1900 rubber and palm oil. These industries and their associated trading infrastructure depended for workers on migrants from China and India, and rice was the dietary staple for both groups.

Farmers in Malaya grew rice for personal use as part of a diet that included fresh and dried fish along with leaves and shoots (collectively known as ulam) gathered from plants growing around rural kampongs (Rosedale and Milsum, 1940). They had little capacity to grow rice for sale and little interest in doing so because gathering and selling jungle produce and planting cash crops such as coconuts and (after 1900) rubber on smallholdings offered much better returns. Moreover, the lower Malay Peninsula had few areas suitable for large-scale wet rice cultivation; the terrain was hilly, and swampy land near the coast had brackish water that was unfit for rice.²

In the years leading up to the Pacific War, 1941–1945, imports accounted for two-thirds of the rice consumed in Malaya. Chinese workers favoured Siamese rice, while Indian labourers generally consumed rice imported from Burma (now Myanmar). This reliance on imports created vulnerabilities for Malaya because a serious disruption of regional trade, a fall in export earnings, or crop failures in Siam (now Thailand) or Burma could quickly lead to critical food shortages.

Several circumstances mitigated these risks: the British navy protected regional sea lanes, imported rice was inexpensive relative to Malaya’s export earnings, and Burma—the world’s largest exporter of rice—was part of the British Empire. Nevertheless, throughout the period of colonial rule, officials grappled with the question of whether Malaya should produce more rice and how that might be accomplished. The colonial administration followed a laissez-faire approach in dealing with the economy, relying on market forces rather than regulations to regulate the economy, and treating interventions as temporary expedients rather than departures from free-market principles. However, the market offered few incentives to rice farmers.

In the early 1890s, British colonial officials, claiming a need for ‘renewed and perhaps more sustained efforts’ to encourage rice cultivation, asked local officials to submit reports on land in their districts suitable for growing rice and the steps needed to bring that land under cultivation. The responses covered a wide range of possible government actions, such as constructing irrigation works, roads, and bridlepaths; distributing high-quality seed; providing agricultural equipment; offering loans for the purchase of draught animals; erecting rice mills; arranging free or assisted passages to Malaya; and remitting land rents for new arrivals. Responding to these proposals, W. E. Maxwell, the Colonial Secretary of the Straits Settlements, 1892–1895, said that the ‘first condition of successful agriculture is of course that it must pay’, by which he meant not only the return to farmers but also land rent collected by the state. He listed several obstacles to increasing local rice production, including:

small population size;
high wages paid for casual labour;
ready availability of more profitable employment;
high standard of comfort and luxury demanded by modern Malays;
meagre returns from paddy planting compared with other forms of agriculture; and
low cost of imported rice.³

These limitations would change very little during the 60 years of colonial administration that followed.

1900–1910: the Krian Irrigation Scheme

Between 1900 and 1910 the expanding rubber industry employed Tamil labourers from southern India, adding a new dimension to the colonial economy but not fundamentally changing it. The Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909 brought four Malay states formerly subordinate to Siam under the purview of Britain’s colonial office as British protectorates. Two of them—Kedah and Kelantan—included substantial plains with potential for commercial rice cultivation if the government invested in irrigation works. It was unclear how farmers would respond since rice planting was less attractive as a source of livelihood than readily available alternatives.

In 1904 the Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) prepared a lengthy report on Malaya’s agricultural policy in which he questioned the need to increase rice production. He reiterated the familiar point that ‘the villager or native generally cannot be expected to take largely to rice growing, when he can make so much more money, at so much less trouble, in work connected with mining or with other agricultural products’. If rice were ever temporarily unavailable, he said, people could eat yams, vegetables, and tapioca (Willis, 1905, pp. 50–51).

The decision about whether to promote rice cultivation would depend in part on an irrigation system opened in 1906 in the Krian District of Perak. The Krian Irrigation Scheme, initiated by the colonial government ultimately served 60,000 acres of rice land, feeding water from a reservoir located 40 km inland into a network of canals and drains that extended to the coast.⁴

Settlers came to Krian from Kedah and Patani to the north and from Banjarmasin, a rice-growing region in southern Borneo. They received five-acre plots of land, an allocation based on the idea that farmers needed two to three acres of land to grow rice for personal use, and that five acres would allow them to produce a surplus for sale.

Krian irrigation area, 1937.
Source: Head Quarters Drainage and Irrigation Department.

The Krian Irrigation Scheme was at best a partial success. While soils near the coast were exceptionally fertile, land further inland was not. Moreover, planting methods used for subsistence agriculture were not suitable for commercial production (Jack, 1923, p. 52). Subsistence farmers routinely planted a mixture of varieties in a single field. These varieties gave farmers a sort of insurance because they differed in their susceptibility to crop disease, variations in weather and water supply, and rat and insect damage. However, they produced grains that varied in shape and size, and commercial rice mills required uniform grains. With irregular sizes, the milling equipment would crush some grains and allow others to slip through unhusked.⁵

The government set up an experimental station in the Krian District to study and improve cultivation methods and to produce pure lines of grain that were suitable for milling. In one early trial, the government planted rice on eight plots of land using different cultivation techniques, but a control plot prepared by farmers from Banjarmasin using their normal methods produced the best results (Wilkinson, 1957, pp. 64–65).

Krian illustrated other problems likely to arise in irrigation schemes elsewhere. Commercial rice production needed seasonal labour, a requirement met in Krian by workers on sugar and rubber estates adjacent to the irrigation area who helped during planting and harvest seasons. Commercial production also required rice mills. Chinese entrepreneurs set up mills and employed agents to purchase rice and bring it to the mill. To bind farmers to them, the agents offered small loans to be repaid at harvest time, a practice that led to chronic indebtedness. Furthermore, farmers in Krian held land titles that allowed them to use their holdings as collateral for larger loans from moneylenders to pay for major life events, such as weddings or the hajj, and these loans led to foreclosures. The colonial administration tried to use market forces to deal with these matters, setting up and operating government rice mills and establishing a fund to offer small loans to farmers, with partial success.

Bags of rice being carried on a river boat down the Krian River, circa 1895 – the pontoon bridge over the river was later replaced by an iron railway bridge.
Source: National Archives Singapore.

1910–1940: market uncertainty and two economic downturns

Estates enlarged their holdings to meet the growing demand for rubber, in some cases by purchasing land from rural Malay communities rather than clearing forest. Concerned about displacement of rural Malays from their land, in 1913 the Federated Malay States government passed a Malay Reservation Enactment that restricted ownership of certain lands to Malays; later, starting from 1930, the non-Federated Malay States enacted their own Malay Reservation laws modelled on the 1913 enactment (Kratoska, 1983). Malay Reservations became a factor in food production. When Malay smallholders began planting rubber on kampong land, the government restricted what could be grown on some Malay Reservation land to rice cultivation, forcing farmers to plant other crops on non-Reservation land. ⁶

World War I, 1914–1918, caused shipping shortages in Asia that potentially jeopardised Malaya’s supply of rice. The government rejected suggestions that rubber estates be required to grow food crops on part of their land, concluding that the only way to increase local food production was to open additional rice land.⁷ While swampy coastal areas in Kedah, Lower Perak, Selangor, and Johor offered potential sites for irrigation, developing them was both difficult and costly. The ground in one such area in Selangor was described as ‘a tangle of interlaced roots with a kind of peat moss growing among them’.⁸ To attract settlers, the government would need to clear the land and build roads, schools, markets, clinics, and rice mills, and it was by no means certain that anyone would move to these places to grow rice for commercial sale. The District Officer for Ulu Selangor commented in 1917 that ‘nothing short of compulsion (which of course is out of the question under our present laws) will induce Malays to cultivate padi, at the present time’. He added that restrictions on planting crops other than rice made it ‘almost impossible’ to induce Malays to take up land in Malay Reservations. ⁹

After World War I, two crises highlighted the precarity of Malaya’s dependence on imported rice. A poor 1920 rice crop in Siam led the government there to ban rice exports for the year, causing prices for rice in Burma and French Indochina (now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) to rise sharply (Kratoska, 1990, pp. 115–146). Around the same time, a fall in rubber prices meant that estates had to use more of their income to feed their workers. The government temporarily subsidised rice imports, and when the rice market recovered in 1921, previous arrangements resumed. It also introduced the Stevenson rubber restriction scheme, in effect from 1922 to 1928, which limited was designed to increase prices by reducing production in Malaya and Ceylon. This intervention proved counterproductive because it allowed producers outside the British Empire to secure a greater share of the market.

The rice crisis, brief though it was, intensified concern over the food situation, and the government asked local officials to identify possible locations for rice cultivation. The Federal Council considered their reports in 1921, but without irrigation the places identified were not viable.¹⁰ Two years later, in a book entitled Rice in Malaya, the government's Economic Botanist, H. W. Jack, acknowledged that Malaya was overly dependent on imports but said, like others before him, that farmers would only grow rice for commercial sale if the return compared favourably with other occupations (Jack, 1923, p. 43).

In 1926 the Oversea Defence Committee of Britain's Committee of Imperial Defence issued a report on food supplies, saying that Japan posed a potential threat to British colonial territories in Asia and singling out Malaya’s heavy reliance on imported rice as a vulnerability.¹¹ In response, the colonial government called for increasing output by improving cultivation methods and seed quality, and ensuring that land designated for rice was not planted with other crops.

In 1929 Malaya’s exports exceeded imports by Straits$64 million but the onset of the Great Depression brought a sharp reversal in the balance of trade, and imports exceeded exports by Straits$51 million between 1930 and 1932 (Bauer, 1961, p. 189). The government again turned to export restrictions to deal with the situation, now imposing them on a wider range of export commodities.

While Malaya’s earnings from exports fell at the start of the Depression, prices for imported rice remained high until 1931, prompting the government to undertake yet another examination of the food situation. During the 1930s the Department of Agriculture redoubled efforts to increase yields by encouraging farmers to plant scientifically selected varieties of rice, apply fertiliser, and improve cultivation methods. Production grew from 197,000 to 340,000 tons per year, but the increase barely kept pace with rising demand and in 1939 Malaya imported 550,000 tons of rice (Department of Agriculture, 1940).

The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 revived fears that regional conflict might affect Malaya’s supply of rice. Singapore was a particular concern because the population there depended entirely on imports. The government estimated that the Royal Navy would need six weeks to arrive and deal with an enemy blockade of the island, and it created a stockpile of rice in Singapore sufficient to feed the population for that period. War in Europe changed this calculation, and the government increased the lead time for lifting a potential siege to 90 and then to 180 days, and it extended stockpiling to all British Malaya. When Japanese forces invaded Malaya, enough rice was stored at various locations to meet the needs of the population for six months, albeit on reduced rations.¹²

In September 1939 the British Cabinet called for preparations to be made for a three-year war. Shenton Thomas, the British High Commissioner for the Malay states, issued an urgent but remarkably naïve call to increase rice production by clearing land in forest reserves and using it to grow food crops. The Advisor on Forests responded by calling attention to failed efforts in the past.

Both during the last war and in the 1922 and 1932 slumps pressure was brought to bear on the department to allow the disforestation of allegedly suitable areas in reserves, with results that have been entirely negative. … A firm stand should be made against enthusiastic but inexperienced amateurs who know little about rice cultivation and who do not realize that Malayan soils are not naturally prolific, most of them owing what fertility they possess to the presence of forest.¹³

The warning was prescient. During their Occupation of Malaya, the Japanese administration cleared forest and rubber land to create space for food crops and forced many urban residents with no agricultural experience to move to the country and grow vegetables. The results were notably poor, and when people who had been forced to relocate abandoned their vegetable plots after the war and moved to squatter settlements near urban areas, food shortages were exacerbated.

Japan’s wartime government imposed economic controls and sold rice through a rationing system, and the post-war British administration did the same. Both also tolerated a black market to ensure that people had enough to eat and to reduce the risk of social unrest.

The Japanese Occupation and food supply shortages

Japan’s wartime empire embraced Asia’s major rice exporters—Burma, Thailand, and Cochinchina (now Southern Vietnam)—but a breakdown of marketing arrangements and shortages of ships and fuel made it impossible to maintain Malayan rice imports at pre-war levels (Kratoska, 1998, chapter 9). An ongoing Grow More Food campaign exhorted people in both urban and rural areas to cultivate vegetables and encouraged city dwellers to move to the countryside and grow food. The Japanese government threatened to confiscate land suitable for cultivation that was not planted with some sort of food crop. Tapioca and other root vegetables, which grew readily from cuttings and tolerated a wide range of soil conditions, became dietary staples. Before the war, tubers accounted for just 63,000 acres of land in the Malay Peninsula, and in December 1945 the area had increased fourfold, but root crops rapidly deplete soil fertility and production had barely doubled, rising from 185,500 to 396,000 tons.¹⁴

Faced with inadequate food rations in cities and towns and pressed by the Japanese to grow their own food, people with no experience of agriculture moved to rural areas and cleared land to grow vegetables. They often chose locations unsuited for the purpose, and the resulting soil erosion caused silting in rivers, which in turn led to flooding that damaged food crops. During what turned out to be the final months of the Occupation in 1945, the District Officer for Ulu Langat District in Selangor wrote:

Owing to the clearing out of high areas for planting of Foodcrops during the present emergency, soil erosion has been observed to be responsible for the increasing higher beds of the Langat and Semenyih River. As a result of the silting out of the river beds, the District has experienced very frequent and destructive floods even at slight showers causing severe damage to Foodcrops especially Wet Padi which are planted along valleys of the District.¹⁵

To encourage cultivation of rice and other food crops, the Japanese government defined farmers as ‘self-supporters’, making them ineligible to draw rations. Over the course of the Occupation, as the amount of food available for distribution on the ration declined, the government increased the number of people designated as self-supporters. Then, in the latter part of the Occupation, the Japanese restricted the amount of rice that farmers could keep for personal use, telling them to grow and eat tapioca and sweet potatoes. In Pahang, where the amount rice farmers could retain was based on a particularly low ration, 0.7 pounds per day for adult males and 0.5 pounds for females, the Japanese Governor acknowledged that the amount was inadequate but told farmers they had to sacrifice for the sake of the urban population. ¹⁶

The introduction of short-term varieties from Taiwan allowed farmers to plant two crops per year, but Taiwanese varieties did not grow well in Malaya and proved susceptible to padi blast disease. Routine maintenance on irrigation works was not carried out, and damage to coastal bunds in Krian and Kuala Selangor allowed seawater onto rice lands. Inferior tools supplied by the government and serious insect and rat damage, which destroyed as much as 50 per cent of some crops, also reduced output.¹⁷

By the end of the Occupation, the area planted with wet rice and total production had fallen, and Malaya was experiencing widespread malnutrition (Table 1).

Table 1: Pre- and Post-War Malayan Rice Production

Source: South (1949), table 30.

Food supplies during Malaya’s post-war recovery

The post-World War II administrations of Malaya had to deal not only with food shortages but also wartime infrastructure damage that affected agriculture (Kratoska, 1988). An official in Selangor wrote in June 1946:

Reports have been received of extensive damage to anti-malarial and other engineering works, and the silting up of a town’s water supply intake, irrigational channels and padi fields. These are the immediate and direct results of clearing and exposing steep slopes to erosion; the far-reaching consequences, which result from the silting up of the larger rivers, and which only develop at a later date, are the ruination of the lower riparian lands consequent on seasonal flooding and the accompanying danger of epidemics.¹⁸

In May 1946, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations established an International Emergency Food Council (IEFC) to regulate international trade in foodstuffs. The IEFC in turn created a sub-committee responsible for allocating rice to territories that needed imports to sustain the resident population. Rice remained under international control until 1949.

Malaya’s rice allocation depended on the quantities made available by countries with surpluses and on requests submitted by other food-deficit countries. Before the war, the average Malayan diet provided around 2,500 calories per person per day. Wartime planners in London considered that 1,700 calories per day, roughly 12 ounces of rice, was ‘the dietary necessary to meet minimum energy re¬quirements and to prevent disease and unrest’, and that individuals doing heavy labour needed 3,600 calories per day. The War Office treated these figures as ‘optimum’ and worked out reduced schedules of ‘practical’ requirements (Donnison, 1956, pp. 243–245). ¹⁹

In July 1946, the Food Advisor to the Special Commissioner for South East Asia observed that, based on official statistics, half the population of Malaya should be starving, but people got a bit of food here and there that did not appear in the returns. ‘Here and there’ mostly meant the black market, which the government tolerated for want of a better solution.²⁰ The growth of squatter settlements near towns and cities worsened the food situation, but the government was able to import wheat flour to alleviate hunger and people ate bread and wheat-based noodle dishes in place of rice.

In 1947–1948 some 860,000 acres were planted with rice in Malaya, up slightly from before the war, and irrigation works under preparation in Selangor at Tanjong Karang and Sabak Bernam covered an area of around 74,000 acres. However, the peninsula had few other areas suitable for such development, and the associated costs were very high.

In 1948, the government lifted controls on the movement of rice within the Federation of Malaya and Singapore. The quality of rice on the ration was poor, and by this time enough rice was available on the open market for many people to stop collecting their rice ration. The countries that supplied rice under the international allocation system were pressing for a return to free markets. When controls ended in 1949, the black market became the legitimate free market. Ironically, the Malayan government was soon involved in a rice control scheme of an entirely different sort, created to deny food to communist forces during the Malayan Emergency, 1948–1960.

Rice cultivation and preparations for independence

Between 1949 and Malayan independence in 1957, the government’s primary task was to transform British Malaya from a group of small states within the British Empire, into a centralised bureaucratic state with a cadre of local officers prepared to take over from British civil servants and an electoral system that accommodated party politics. As part of this process, the colonial administration moved towards centralised economic planning. The administration sought to diversify the economy through modernisation and development and to bring the Malay population more fully into the commercial sector of the economy. The first of what would become an ongoing series of five-year economic plans, the Draft Development Plan of the Federation of Malaya, 1950–1955, encapsulated this process. One goal of the Plan, to reduce dependence on imported rice by increasing local production, entailed a re-assessment of the economic role of the Malay community.

The development plan surmised that under prevailing conditions, rice grown in Malaya would not keep pace with demand. Noting that the future availability of foreign supplies was uncertain, the plan touched on the prevailing ideas for increasing local rice production: opening new padi areas, improving existing areas through drainage and irrigation, and raising yields by introducing improved varieties, controlling pest and crop disease, using fertiliser, and introducing better cultivation methods. However, the government also began to explore mechanisation, supported by Britain’s Colonial Development and Welfare Fund (Federation of Malaya, 1950, pp. 125, 129; Overton, 1989, p. 3). ²¹

In 1952 the government determined that the area planted with rice was falling and appointed a Rice Investigation Committee to study ways of increasing output and expanding the area planted with rice. The committee listed the following reasons for the decline:

the high prices paid for rubber, copra, and other cash crops;
the Emergency and associated resettlement schemes;
staff shortages in the Departments of Agriculture and Drainage and Irrigation;
inadequate water control in some irrigation areas;
a lack of amenities in rural areas and the heavy labour required to grow padi;
recruitment of young men by the security forces;
insecurity of tenure of leased land;
insufficient subsidies for colonists in newly opened areas; and
the attraction of high earnings from mining.

The Committee’s report noted that the quality of life in rural areas was unsatisfactory and made worse by rising prices for consumer goods. Non-agricultural work offered better incomes than farming. Towns and cities provided amenities and employment opportunities that drew people away from rice farming, particularly in places with poor soils. The Committee rejected the idea that simply increasing the price of padi by setting a minimum price would solve the problem, saying that rural communities required better housing, schools, markets, and communications, and that the rice bowl areas of northern Malaya in particular needed better water control.

The report concluded that little could be done to increase production on existing rice land and recommended opening new areas for rice cultivation and setting aside ‘a very substantial sum’ for a padi development fund. The State Agricultural Officer for Selangor, who was a member of the Rice Investigation Committee, observed that rice grew best on ‘the heavier coastal and river alluvium soils’, which in many areas were planted with rubber. He pointed out that yields from rubber trees grown on such land were relatively low and suggested converting some rubber land to rice cultivation. The government of the Federation of Malaya agreed in principle to the acquisition of rubber land but declined to provide any funds for the purpose.

The 1953 report departed from previous studies on rice cultivation in several ways, but the major innovation related to Malay land ownership and Malay farmers. The Malay Reservations Enactment had attempted to ensure that rural Malays held sufficient land to maintain their customary lifestyle, but the policy had become intertwined with initiatives to increase domestic rice production. Restrictions on the crops that could be grown on Reservation land had had no effect on the level of imports but had contributed to rural poverty. In 1951, a newly created Rural and Industrial Development Authority began exploring ways to improve the economic position of the Malay population, and in 1952 the state of Selangor launched an enquiry into why Malays had not entered business life. Insofar as it dealt with rice cultivation, the conclusion was that unfavourable marketing arrangements for rice and other rural produce kept the rural Malay population from accumulating capital to invest in businesses (Federation of Malaya, 1953).²²

Rice Production Committee interviewing key stakeholders, collecting public suggestions, and evaluating methods to expand the acreage and yield of padi.
Source: News clipping from Singapore Standard, 13 November 1952.

In January 1955 the Federation of Malaya appointed yet another Rice Committee tasked with considering the economics of rice cultivation and recommending measures that would provide farmers with an adequate return for their labour. The committee presented the issue in stark terms:

The consumers have no more grounds for thinking that they have an inalienable right to cheap rice in sufficient quantities at all times (particularly since the majority of the rice they eat is imported) than the producers have for expecting that they should be subsidized into a happy state of affairs where intermittent work over 7–8 months a year will provide them with a decent standard of living.

The Rice Committee concluded that conditions in the padi industry were poor and likely to deteriorate further, and that unless the government took drastic steps to alleviate rural poverty, ‘an explosive situation will be created which may be difficult to control’. The Committee’s report said much needed to be done beyond expensive land development and irrigation projects and would also involve substantial costs (Federation of Malaya, 1956, pp. iv–v). After independence, the incoming government would be dominated by Malay political parties, and the votes of the rural population were a crucial determinant of the country’s future.

Conclusion

In colonial Malaya, the small returns from rice cultivation, as compared with other forms of agriculture, constituted a major obstacle to increasing domestic rice production. At independence that remained true, but other circumstances had changed. The country had experienced shortages when an important supplier experienced a crop failure, fluctuations in overseas demand for its export crops had called into question the country’s capacity to buy sufficient rice, and the World War II years had demonstrated that a prolonged breakdown in regional trade could bring the population close to disaster.

Exploiting comparative advantage by producing high-value exports and importing inexpensive rice from countries better able to grow it commercially carried unacceptable risks. Investing in irrigation works and associated infrastructure to increase domestic rice production was expensive and had unpredictable results. Trade and peaceful conditions in the region were important as well, and the transition from colonialism to independence was complicated by military action against communist forces in the Malay Peninsula and by warfare and turmoil elsewhere in the region.

The solution appeared to lie in increasing output through improved varieties of rice, double-cropping, fertilisation, chemical pest control, and mechanisation. It was left to the newly independent Federation of Malaya to move ahead on this agenda or seek an alternative economic model.

Further reading

Bauer, P. T. 1961. ‘Some Aspects of the Malayan Rubber Slump 1929–1933’, in T. H. Silcock (ed.), Readings in Malayan Economics. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press.

Donnison, F. S. V. 1956. British Military Administration in the Far East, 1943–1946. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.

Department of Agriculture, Straits Settlements and Federated Malay States. 1940. ‘The Development of Rice Cultivation in Malaya’. Malayan Agricultural Journal, 28, pp. 472–478.

Federation of Malaya. 1950. Draft Development Plan of the Federation of Malaya. Kuala Lumpur: Government Press.

______ 1953. Report of the Rice Production Committee. Kuala Lumpur: Government Printer.

______ 1956. Final Report of the Rice Committee. Kuala Lumpur: Government Printer.

Hill, R. D. 1977. Rice in Malaya: A Study in Historical Geography. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press (reissued 2012. Singapore: NUS Press).

Jack, H. W. 1927. Rice in Malaya. Bulletin No. 35, Department of Agriculture, Federated Malay States and Straits Settlements. Kuala Lumpur: Methodist Publishing House.

Kratoska, P. H. 1983. ‘“Ends that We Cannot Foresee”: Malay Reservations in British Malaya’. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 14(1), pp. 149–168.

______ 1988. ‘The Post–1945 Food Shortage in British Malaya’. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 19(1), pp. 27–47.

______ 1990. ‘The British Empire and the Southeast Asian Rice Crisis of 1919–1921’. Modern Asian Studies, 24(1), pp. 115–146.

______ 1998. The Japanese Occupation of Malaya: A Social and Economic History. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

Overton, J. 1989. ‘The State and Rice Production in Malaya in the Late Colonial Period’. Unpublished paper for the Malaysia Society of the Asian Studies Association of Australia.

Rosedale, J. L., and Milsum, J. N. 1940. Malay Leaf and Other Vegetables and Their Analysis. Kuala Lumpur: Federated Malay States Government Press.

Short, D. E. and James C. Jackson. 1971. ‘The Origins of an Irrigation Policy in Malaya: A Review of Developments Prior to the Establishment of the Drainage and Irrigation Department’. Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 44, No. 1, pp. 78–103.

South, F. W. 1949. ‘Report on Padi Areas and Padi Production in Malaya during the Season 1945–1946’. Malayan Agricultural Statistics, 1949, Table 30.

Wilkinson, R. J. 1957. ‘The Incidents of Malay Life’, in Papers on Malay Customs and Beliefs. Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 30(4) (180), pp. 41–79.

Willis, J. C. 1905. A Report upon Agriculture in the Federated Malay States, 1904. Kuala Lumpur: Government Printing Press.

Endnotes

¹In the early 1970s I lived for several months in the part of the Krian District lying near the coast. The fields were double-cropped and planted with high-yielding strains of rice. Farmers used fertilisers and insecticides to increase their yields, but the great depth of mud in this part of Krian made the soil unsuitable for mechanical cultivation. The land had been subdivided repeatedly as it passed to successive generations, and some families survived on what they could grow on very small plots of land.

After the land was flooded at the start of a growing season, farmers used scythe-like tools (tajak) to cut the weeds and rice straw and raked the decomposing vegetation into bunds that served as boundaries around their fields. In the past they had covered the bunds with mud and planted vegetables, but with new dwarf varieties of rice and double-cropping, rice plants produced less straw and there was much less weed growth.

The ground was waterlogged for much of the year, leaving few areas suitable for growing vegetables. Everyday meals included fish such as ikan sepat caught in the irrigation canals. As the land dried out prior to the harvest, fish retreated to deep ponds (kolam) maintained in the fields. After the harvest, farmers emptied these ponds and caught the fish, which they either dried for personal use or sold to dealers, but they told me the size of the catch had fallen sharply owing to fertilisers and insecticides. Double-cropping had given farmers additional income, and they had to spend it to buy fish and the vegetables they once obtained from the land, leaving them with little, if any, net gain.

“Main Jala” – Traditional fishing in a paddy field's irrigation channel.
Source: Paul H. Kratoska’s private collection.

²See, for example, R. O’Shaughnessy, Report on the Krian Irrigation Scheme, Perak, pp. 6–7, High Commissioner’s Office file 948/1897, Arkib Negara Malaysia (ANM).
³Paper laid before the Legislative Council, 23 February 1893. Maxwell’s remarks are on pp. C143–C172.
⁴For details about the origins of the Krian Irrigation System, see Short and Jackson (1971), and Hill (1977), pp. 108–115.
⁵Director of Agriculture to the Secretary to the Resident, Selangor, 19 June 1917, Selangor Secretariat file 2467/1917, ANM. Agricultural officers identified three to four hundred varieties of rice in the Malay states.
⁶Appendix dated 17 February 1916, in Director of Agriculture to the Under Secretary, Federated Malay States, 22 May 1916, Selangor Secretariat file 2931/1916, ANM.
⁷Discussion of the Rice Lands Enactment in Proceedings of the Federal Legislative Council, 1917, pp. B8–B9.
⁸Abraham, ‘General Description of the Country’, in Bernam-Selangor Survey (extract from Annual Report, 1914), Selangor Secretariat file 1010/1915, ANM.
⁹District Office, Ulu Selangor, to the Secretary to the Resident of Selangor, 9 January 1917, Selangor Secretariat file 4460/1916, ANM.
¹⁰Reports concerning irrigation at Bruas and Krian in Perak, in the Dong area of Pahang, along the Selangor River, and in Negri Sembilan were tabled at the 26 July 1921 meeting of the Federal Council. A similar report on Kedah is in the High Commissioner’s Office file 29 of 1921, ANM.
¹¹Oversea Defence Committee, Committee of Imperial Defence, Food Supplies for the Civil Population in the Event of War, 30 April 1926, CO 537/937, The National Archives of the UK Government (TNA).
¹²Revised Report on Singapore Food Supplies, 1938, 21 December 1938, and Thomas to MacDonald, 27 April 1939, CO 852/264/13; Thomas to MacDonald, 3 August 1939, CO 852/264/14; History of the First Three Months of the War, section 16, ‘Food Supply’, in Government to Colonial Office, 15 February 1940 (Secret), CO 852/327/9; see also FO 371/13446, TNA.
¹³High Commissioner to the Federal Secretary, 10 September 1939, and Advice on Forests, Rice Growing, 23 September 1939, in Ad. F. 358/1939, ANM.
¹⁴Colonial Office, Food and Nutrition Survey, p. 9, British Military Administration, DEPT 9/4, ANM.
¹⁵Report for April 2605 [1945], District Office, Ulu Langat, 71/2605., ANM
¹⁶Plan for Food Campaign for Showa 19, Batu Gajah 62/2604; Notes on Pahang District Officers' Conference, 9 October 2603, District Office, Temerloh, 82/2602, AM.
¹⁷Minutes of a Conference of District Officers Held at Ipoh, 4 October 2604, PT Larut 161/2602; Assistant District Officer, Ipoh, to Assistant District Officer, Batang Padang, 8 June 2602, Land Office, Batu Gajah, 82/2602, ANM.
¹⁸Deputy Chief Secretary to the Resident Commissioner, 26 June 1946, Selangor Civil Affairs file 282/1945, ANM.
¹⁹Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia, to the War Office, Rice Situation in South East Asia Command, 27 October 1945, WO 203/1436; Report of the Young Working Party, p. 3, in BT 25/75/SLA/MISC 6, TNA.
²⁰Josselyn to the Secretary of State, Washington, Despatch No. 80, 12 July 1946, US National Archives and Records Administration, RG 59, 846d 61317/7; Colonial Office, Food and Nutrition Survey, British Military Administration, DEPT 9/4, ANM.
²¹Report of the Rice Investigation Committee, Paper No. 69, Federal Legislative Council, March 1949–January 1950, p. B-561.
²²Reports for the Special Committee on the Economic Position of the Malays, Selangor Secretariat file 2579/1952, ANM.