Indonesia is known as a fertile country with abundant food resources. However, its reliance on imported foods could push the country into a food crisis.
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Kompas/Angger Putranto
Longshoremen unload bags of imported rice from Vietnam on Friday (23/2) at Tanjungwangi Port in Banyuwangi. The 20,000 tons of rice was not distributed in East Java province, and will instead be distributed to several regions in the eastern part of the country.
JAKARTA, KOMPAS – Indonesia is known as a fertile country with abundant food resources. However, its reliance on imported foods could push the country into a food crisis.
An agriculture professor at the Bogor Agricultural University (IPB), Dwi Andreas Santosa, warned about the threat of a food crisis in a discussion Kompas held last week.
"The proportion of wheat as a staple food has jumped from 21 percent in 2015 to 25.4 percent in 2017. I am concerned that it has passed the critical threshold of 25 percent," Dwi said.
The proportion of wheat as a staple food would continue to increase every year, he said. "The problem is, 100 percent of our wheat is imported," he said.
A number of studies show that the consumption pattern of Indonesians today focuses on the two main food commodities, rice and wheat. The Central Statistics Bureau’s (BPS) 1954 data showed that rice comprised 53.5 percent of staple foods. The rest consisted of cassava at 22.26 percent, corn at 18.9 percent and tubers at 4.99 percent.
In 1981, the consumption pattern of staple foods shifted drastically. Rice accounted for 81.1 percent, with cassava at 10.02 percent and maize at 7.82 percent. In 1999, cassava consumption dropped to 8.83 percent and maize to 3.1 percent.
Entering 2010, staple foods other than rice disappeared from the consumption pattern and were replaced by wheat. The rice consumption that fell in 2012 increased in the following years, reaching 101 kilograms per capita consumption in 2016 from 96.6 kilograms in 2012. This figure was among the highest in the world and exceeded those in other rice-consuming countries such as Malaysia, Thailand and Japan.
Production constraints
The uniformity of food consumption among rice and wheat complicates efforts to fulfill the country’s food needs amid the rapid population growth.
The population growth and the pace of development have also affected the rice bowls of Java and Bali. The conversion of agricultural land is visible in Karawang, West Java, one of the largest rice-producing areas in Indonesia, where rice fields have turned into housing complexes.
The head of the West Java Food Crops and Horticulture Agency, Hendy Jatnika, said the rice fields had also been turned into toll roads as part of the national development policy, which includes the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed train and the new international Airport in Majalengka, Bandung.
At the Ministry of Agriculture, Food Security Agency head Agung Hendriadi said the annual rate of rice field conversion ranged from 100,000 hectares to 110,000 hectares. To overcome this, the government was developing new rice fields as part of its self-sufficiency program focusing on three main sectors: rice, maize and pajale, or soybean.
Agriculture Minister Andi Amran Sulaiman has expressed his optimism on several occasions that Indonesia can turn a world center of food production by 2045. In addition to incentives to increase farming areas, more rice fields are being opened to boost food production.
The Ministry of Agriculture’s data showed that in 2015-2017, the government opened 209,410 hectares of new rice fields, mostly located outside Java. Only 887.18 hectares (0.42 percent) are in West Java. However, a special audit of the Supreme Audit Agency (BPK) found that only 150,959 hectares of new rice fields were developed from 2015 to the first semester of 2017. The budget disbursement reached Rp 2.6 trillion, only part of the Rp 4.1 trillion allocated for the development of new paddy fields. The BPK also provided auditing notes, particularly on land status as well as the surveying, investigation and design (SID) processes.
The executive director of Land Expansion and Protection at the Ministry of Agriculture’s the Directorate General of Agricultural Infrastructure and Facilities, Tunggul Iman Panudju, said that the cultivated land had been processed according to the SID and fulfilled all requirements related to land, water source and farmers.
Challenges
According to Dwi, developing new rice fields was not a solution to the food problems. In addition to different ecologies, not all communities outside Java were rice cultures. "Since the New Order, most paddy fields [outside Java] have failed," he said.
In addition to the challenges of diminishing farmland, rice production was now being threatened by an “explosion of pests”, especially infestations of the brown planthopper, which had become more frequent.
According to a University of Indonesia anthropology professor, Yunita T Winarto, the pest infestations were triggered by an increased use of pesticides as the result of increased imports.
Another challenge ahead is climate change. According to a joint review of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Agriculture Ministry, the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency published in January 2018, rice crops are particularly vulnerable to climate change. The study says that within the next 20-50 years, rice production is projected to decline by 1.5 tons per hectare in eight major rice-producing provinces.
As the consumption of rice and wheat continued to grow while efforts to increase production became more difficult, Indonesia needed to reformulate its food policy. "We must return to the diversity of local foods," said the coordinator of the People\'s Coalition for Food Sovereignty, Said Abdullah.
