Horticulture and Palm Harvesting in Southeast Asia

Ellen suggests that the availibility of wild sago may have limited horticultural development because there 'is little incentive to alter a landscape at some effort and adopt new and untried techniques when a living can be had by simply extraacting resources from an unmodified environment'. In his study of the Nuaulu of Seram, Ellen presents a detailed description and analysis of the combination of a hunting-gathering economy and a horticultural in which root tubers are cultivated by shifting agricultural methods (1978). For the Nuaulu sago gathering provides the most important source of staple food while gardens are planted with such tubers as taro, manioc and yams. Usually gardens are farmed for a year and then left fallow, tho crops such as manioc and fruits such as banana and papaya continue to be taken from the same plot in the second and third years. In some cases garden land is turned over for long-term cultivation of sago palms and cash crops such as cloves and coconuts, which Ellen term 'silviculture', and which results in land being taken out of the swidden-fallow cycle altogether and, in effect, used for permanent cultivation of tree or palm crops.

Ellen also indicates that lowland sago is vitally important in the Moluccas (mainly on the islands of Seram, Halmahera, Buru, Aru and Bacan), and has been the primary source of carbohydrate since at least the fifteenth century.  It is a remarkably productive palm, has 'year-round availibility'. Vegetables can be intercropped with sago, and the palm also provides a source of liquor, firewood, medicines and raw material for utensls and other items. Usually along the Melanau (in Borneo) there was a gender division of labour with men clearing, cutting and rasping the palms to obtain the sago pith, and women, cleaning, processing and drying the flour, and making it into biscuits and other foodstuffs.

This cottage/home-based industry in Sarawak also used to provide flour for export, but rasping and processing subsequently became mechanised, factory-based and controlled by Chinese companies. It resulted in increasing unemployment in some of the sago districts and native sago producers became wage labourers for others, and tied into credit-debt relations with Chinese dealers. In the Moluccas, Ellen also draws attention to the importance of sago flour and biscuits in exchange netweorks, and from the 15th century its close relationships to clove production in that the areas which concentrated on spices for export needed to import sago to meet their basic food needs.