Faktor-Faktor yang Memengaruhi Kualitas Karet Perkebunan Rakyat

Abstract

This research compared rubber quality between smallholder rubber farmers in rubber development program village and non-program village. The objectives of the research were to describe the socioeconomic characteristics of the farmers, describe the rubber farm conditions, identify cause of low-quality rubber, identify farmer’s efforts to increase rubber quality, to describe and to test relationship between socioeconomic characteristics of the farmers, technical factors, and rubber quality among them, and to analyze the net increase of farmer income after use of rubber quality improvement technology. Data for the research were generated from 64 respondents randomly (stratified cluster sampling) from three villages; one village was rubber development program village and two else were non-program villages. Descriptive statistics, qualitative analysis and binary logistic regression model were used in analysing the data. The empirical data showed that majority of farmers were over 40 years: 54.69 percent were middle age (40-60 years) and 31.25 percent were old age (over 60 years). Findings revealed that majority of farmers (93.75 percent) cultivated their rubber plantation by intercropping system. The result of analysis showed that smallholder rubber farmers in rubber development program village produced lower grade rubber (average 6.13) than rubber farmers in non-program village (average 6.98). The cause of that was the use of additive coagulant such as extract of Gadung tuber (Dioscorea hispida Dennst). The identification result suggest that the causes of low-quality rubber were the use of coagulant other than formic acid and existence of contaminants such as wood shavings (tatal), leafs and black dry rubber in coagulump. The empirical result revealed that majority of farmers did efforts to increase rubber quality such as cleaning of collecting pans periodic (57,81 percent), keeping of coagulump from contaminants (57,81 percent), but just a little farmer used trained tappers (32,81 percent), cleaning of collecting cups before tapping(28,12 percent ), dissociating types of coagulump (9,38 percent). There were no farmers using of formic acid as coagulant. The qualitative analysis indicated relationship between membership of farmer institution and soscial acivities, education, family income, family size, farm size, use of TSP as coagulant and rubber quality. The binary logistic regression model revealed relationship between age, education (negative relationship), family size, membership of farmer institution, familu size, (positive relationship) and rubber quality at 20 percent probability level. The partial budgets analysis proved that use of formic acid as coagulant was profitable in program village and non-program village, but there were no farmers using of formic acid as coagulant because it was scarce (difficult to find).