Our intensive household studies reveal that trading has to be considered as part of the household's endeavour to ensure its reproduction. Trading, however, is only one source of income among a variety of economic activities comprising mainly cash-cropping, subsistence production, wage labour, and handicraft. The contribution of each sector to reproduction varies from household to household in such a way that trading is inversely proportional to the importance of farming: for peasants who own no land or who only possess marginal land tenure, trading may even be the only source of money income, while rich farmers live by selling their cash crops and do no trade at all.

This complementary quality of economic factors raises the question of whether there is any hierarchical order among them. Obviously among most peasants, cash-cropping comes first in priority. This may contradict Scott's theory, according to which a peasant pursuing his “safety first” strategy never endangers subsistence production as the major and reliable basis of reproduction (Scott 1976). However, it has to be noted that firstly most peasants still follow a mixed production scheme, albeit with subsistence production on a reduced scale, and secondly, clove growing for over a period of thirty years has proved to be reliable and fairly stable in terms of market forces.

The complementary, even dependent, character of economic sectors would imply that the household's search for security has to be understood within the totality of its variant economic activities. Elwert (1983, 1984) and Elwert, Evers, and Wilkens (1983) have shown that economic sectors permeate into one another, at the same time undermining and perpetuating one another in pursuit of mere reproduction. Undoubtedly the whole system of combined sectors is dominated and transformed by the logic of the capitalist world market, and it is only seemingly paradoxical that the persistence of the more “traditional” sectors, such as subsistence production and small-scale trading, is in its favour, as will be explained.