Questioning the Development: The Maintenance of Local Variety of Rice in the Changing Dayak Community of Central Kalimantan, Indonesia

Keywords

Development, Local Knowledge, Farming, System, Rice Variety, Kalimantan, Indonesia

Abstract

The paper is about rice landraces among the Day-ak in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. We found that today they still maintain the knowledge and keeping the existence of local variety of rice. While in Java, where the capital city is located and the development is centralized, these va-rieties have been replaced by a more-productive-and-resistant-to-pest varieties. The Dayak still maintain more than 60s varieties. From the biodiversity’s perspective, it is a delightful news; while from the cultural perspective, the persistence of their custom regarding to the practice of tra-ditional cultivation is fascinating as well. The local knowledge on agriculture is well conserved and practice daily. Our ethnographic observation conducted in April-July 2016, revealed that the resilience of those rice varie-ties is related to the local farming system. Experiencing the lack of programs for village development, the community has maintained the local leadership and its government structure at the village level. We came to the conclusion that an uneven development program across the country has caused some areas to be good biological and cultural conservation areas. If development is an option then, ironi-cally, the less intervention actually makes biological and cultural sustainability achieved.

Copyright

© 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Purwanto Semiarto
AU  - Sutji Shinto
PY  - 2018/12
DA  - 2018/12
TI  - Questioning the Development: The Maintenance of Local Variety of Rice in the Changing Dayak Community of Central Kalimantan, Indonesia
BT  - Proceedings of International Conference on Issues in Social and Education Research (ICISER 2017)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 22
EP  - 26
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://www.atlantis-press.com/article/55910559
ID  - Semiarto2018/12
ER  -