Rice Breeding in the Dutch Colonies

Abstract

At the end of the nineteenth century the Dutch State inherited military and administrative control over the Dutch East Indies from a bankrupt United East Indies Company. After some initiatives to modernise the colonial administration and develop the colony, the Dutch government fell back on a straightforward exploitation of the resources of the various islands, with no serious interest in the welfare of the Javanese and inhabitants of the other islands. Only in the last decades of the nineteenth century the colonial government started to formulate and implement policies that supported the local population in their livelihood. Crucial in the indigenous economy was the cultivation of rice, by far the major food crop, and consequently officials of the colonial government created various mechanisms to support this activity. Central in this chapter are the efforts of the colonial government to improve the rice crop by changing the genetic make-up of rice. In other words, the development of plant breeding and genetics is again the subject, but this time in the context of the Dutch colonies. The focus on rice in this chapter is different from the focus on wheat in the previous chapter. In chapter six wheat was mainly an example to illustrate how genetics and plant breeding were included in agricultural science in the Netherlands. Except for the 1930s wheat was not a crop that had the special attention of geneticists and breeders in the major institutes in the Netherlands involved in genetics and plant breeding. Rice, by contrast, was of special interest to the colonial government. The ability to increase and improve the food supply of the local population was more or less the measure of the Netherlands as a responsible and humane coloniser. Moreover, a proper food supply means that the people can spend their time on other activities than arranging a daily meal. And a hungry population is generally not very satisfied and may revolt against its rulers. In other words, besides humanitarian reasons there were also economic and political arguments why the colonial government put much effort into the improvement of food crops. Rice was, and is, not the only crop grown and consumed on Java but it is by far the most important. In result, public plant breeding and genetics in the colonial context was, for the major part, directly related to rice. A major concern for researchers and officials was how to establish a relation between science and practice. The story follows the activities of various researchers and colonial officials in a chronological order. First the main technical features of the rice crop are briefly discussed, followed by a description of attempts by the colonial administration to improve rice cultivation at the end of the nineteenth century. In the ensuing sections the institutionalisation of research for rice and other food crops at the beginning of the twentieth century is examined. At the end of the 1910s and in the early 1920s the efficacy of rice breeding was questioned and some alternatives were tried out, but at the end of the 1920s rice breeding was firmly established in public agricultural research and extension. The Second World War and the ensuing independence of Indonesia implied a shift from the former colony to a remaining colony, Surinam. Rice breeding was employed there with different objectives and in an entirely different setting. The independence of Surinam in 1975 implied an end to specific and organised breeding programmes in rice by the Dutch. What that implied for Dutch agricultural science is one of the issues addressed in the conclusion.