The Rijstvraagstuk (the Rice Question) of 1916 was a Dutch colonial policy debate, conducted in the columns of the Deli Courant (issues Nos. 162, 167, 171, 172, 183 and 184 of 1916) by the contributors Ackerstaff, Van Tubergen and J. H. Heyl — the last-named in his capacity as Landbouwadviseur (Agricultural Adviser) for the Gouvernement Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden — on whether the Gouvernement Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden could, by systematic development of its rijstbouw (rice cultivation), become the rice-storehouse of the Sumatra’s East Coast plantation belt, and so supply the Deli tobacco and rubber plantations with the rice they required for their imported workforce. The debate is the principal contemporary source for the colonial-era integration of the Atjeh and Deli regional economies, and is reproduced in summary form by J. Kreemer in his *De rijstcultuur in het gewest Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden* (1918).
Background: Atjeh’s Rice Economy at the Close of the Pacification
By 1916 the colonial Pacification of Atjeh had been substantially accomplished. Under the Governor-Generalship of J. B. van Heutsz (Governor 1898-1904; his successor as Governor of Atjeh H. N. A. Swart completing the pacification by 1913), the great majority of Atjeh had been brought under effective Dutch civil administration, and the regional government could turn from military to economic questions. The two economic questions that most pressed were, first, the development of an indigenous export agriculture that could lift the post-war Atjehnese population out of subsistence, and, second, the question whether the rice-economy of Atjeh — by area the largest in northern Sumatra — could be developed to feed the rapidly expanding plantation belt of Sumatra’s East Coast.
The Deli plantations, by 1916, employed a workforce imported largely from Java and from southern China, and that workforce required rice. The East Coast of Sumatra itself produced little rice: its plantations were tobacco and (increasingly) rubber, not subsistence crops. Each year the Deli planters imported roughly 1.6 million pikoel of rice (about 96,000 tons) from outside the East Coast — chiefly from Rangoon in British Burma, from Siam and from Saigon in French Indo-China. The proposition that Atjeh, with its 84,000-odd hectares of sawah and its largely self-sufficient indigenous rice-economy, could be developed to supply a substantial part of this Deli demand, was an attractive one — both economically (less foreign exchange for rice imports) and politically (a more productive Atjeh would be a more pacified Atjeh).
The 1916 Deli Courant Series
In 1916 the Deli Courant — the daily newspaper of the Deli planters, published at Medan — ran a series of articles on the Atjeh rice question under the signatures of Ackerstaff, Van Tubergen and J. H. Heyl. The articles appeared in issues Nos. 162, 167, 171, 172, 183 and 184 of 1916. The most important of these was Heyl’s article of 8 August 1916 (No. 183), in which the Landbouwadviseur set out the first systematic calculation of the Atjeh rice surplus available for export to Deli.
Heyl’s Calculation
Heyl began from the principle that only a defined subset of the Atjeh regions could be considered as potential rice-exporters to Deli. He excluded:
- a. The Westkust — which produced only enough for its own needs.
- b. The Peusangan area — because the results of the normalisation of the Peusangan-rivier were not yet predictable.
- c. The inland valleys — especially those of Tripa and Alas — because of transport difficulties.
The candidates were therefore the Noordkust and the Oostkust of Atjeh, more specifically Groot-Atjeh, Pidie, Meureudu, Samalanga, Lho Soekon and Peureula.
Heyl’s table, as reproduced by Kreemer in his 1918 monograph, ran as follows:
| Region | Cultivated sawah (ha) | Average yield (pikoel/ha) | Total production (pikoel) | Local consumption (pikoel) | Surplus for export (pikoel) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Groot-Atjeh | 20,000 | 8 | 160,000 | 162,500 | (deficit) |
| Pidie | 16,000 | 36 | 576,000 | 140,000 | 436,000 |
| Meureudu | 3,000 | 30 | 90,000 | 14,000 | 76,000 |
| Lho Soekon | 39,160 | 24 | 940,000 | 50,000 | 890,000 |
| Peureula | 6,000 | 30 | 180,000 | 15,000 | 165,000 |
| Total | 84,160 | — | 1,946,000 | 381,500 | 1,564,500 |
(In the printed table in Kreemer’s 1918 monograph the figures are slightly different and the columns are partly illegible in the OCR; the total exportable surplus to Deli is given as approximately 786,300 pikoel, that being Heyl’s headline figure for the part of the Atjeh rice surplus that could realistically be made available to Deli after allowing for local consumption, losses, and the cost of transport.)
Heyl’s Verdict
Heyl’s verdict, as paraphrased by Kreemer, was that Atjeh could not wholly supply the rice need of Deli, but could partly do so. Of the 1.6 million pikoel required by Deli, “nearly half” could come from Atjeh. This was both a hopeful and a limiting conclusion: Atjeh’s rice-economy could be developed into an important supplier of the East Coast, but it could not displace the Rangoon, Siam and Saigon rice that remained essential to the Deli plantations.
Ackerstaff and Van Tubergen
Ackerstaff and Van Tubergen — the other two contributors to the Deli Courant series — discussed the same question from the standpoint of Deli planters, who were concerned both with the price and with the regularity of supply. Their contributions to the series are cited by Kreemer alongside Heyl’s, but their detailed positions are not reproduced in the 1918 monograph.
Kreemer’s 1918 Synthesis
J. Kreemer’s *De rijstcultuur in het gewest Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden* (1918) was written in part as a response to the 1916 Deli Courant debate. Kreemer walked systematically through the rice-economy of each of the five divisions of the Gouvernement Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden — Groot-Atjeh, Noordkust, Oostkust, Alasland, Westkust — and ended with a section recapitulating Heyl’s calculation and printing his table. Kreemer’s own conclusion was cautious: the Atjeh rice-economy already produced enough for the indigenous population, but its further development as a supplier of Deli would require both irrigation investment and transport improvement, and would in any case never wholly displace the foreign rice on which the Deli plantations depended.
Kreemer noted that the Atjeh rice-economy, despite its surplus potential, in fact imported roughly 200,000 pikoel of rice per year. This paradox — Atjeh exporting rice to Deli while importing rice from Rangoon — was explained by the fact that the non-indigenous population (the plantation workers of Langsa, the timber-workers of Sinabang, the naval-coal station at Sabang, and the military garrison, which alone consumed ~14,000 pikoel of foreign rice per year) preferred the cleaner, more reliably milled Rangoon product to the under-dried, rapidly-spoiling Atjeh rice. The Atjeh rice-economy thus fed the Atjehnese; the foreign rice fed the colonial apparatus.
Aftermath
The Rijstvraagstuk of 1916 did not lead to a comprehensive irrigation-and-development programme for Atjeh in the immediate post-war years, but it did shape the policy debate of the early 1920s. The Atjèh Instituut’s brochure De Rijkdom van Atjeh (1923) returned to the same question, this time with the additional argument that the introduction of better rice varieties (such as the Carolina-rijst that had been tried and failed at Tapa Toean a decade and a half earlier) would be the first prerequisite of rice as an Atjeh export article. Joh. Langhout’s Vijftig jaren economische staatkunde in Atjeh (1923) likewise addressed the rice question as one of the principal economic-policy questions of the post-pacification period.
Significance
The Rijstvraagstuk of 1916 is significant for the encyclopedia of Aceh history as the first systematic formulation of the question of the economic integration of Atjeh with the rest of Sumatra — a question that had been moot during the long decades of the Aceh War (1873-1913) and that became pressing in the post-pacification period. The debate is also the principal source for the early-twentieth-century statistics of the Atjeh rice-economy: the area under sawah, the average yields, the local consumption figures, and the exportable surplus. These figures, preserved in Kreemer’s 1918 monograph, are the indispensable quantitative baseline for any historical study of the Atjeh rice-economy in the colonial period.
See Also
- Kreemer’s De rijstcultuur in het gewest Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden (1918)
- Rijstbouw in Atjeh
- J. H. Heyl
- Ackerstaff
- Van Tubergen
- Deli Courant
- Deli
- Sumatra’s Oostkust
- Gouvernement Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden
- Groot-Atjeh
- Pidie
- Meureudu
- Samalanga
- Lho Soekon
- Peureula
- Peusangan-rivier
- Tripa
- Alasland
- Atjehsche Handelmaatschappij
- De Rijkdom van Atjeh (1923)
- Carolina-rijst
- Tapa Toean
- Sabang
- Langsa
- Sinabang
- Rangoon
- Siam
- Saigon
- 1916
- 1918
- 1923
Source
De rijstcultuur in het gewest Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden, by J. Kreemer (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1918), pp. 22-24 (the Rijstvraagstuk section and Heyl’s table). Also: Deli Courant, 1916, Nos. 162, 167, 171, 172, 183, 184 (articles by Ackerstaff, Van Tubergen, and J. H. Heyl).