Food Sovereignty Urgent

Kompas/ Riza Fathoni

A food vendor serves customers on Thursday (22/2) in Jatinegara, Jakarta. Foods such as sweet potatoes, peanuts and corn are rarely found in urban areas. They can be alternative food sources for rice and wheat flour.

Food diversification can no longer be put on hold. Many benefits will follow, especially in raising the quality of human resources.

Despite Indonesia’s wealth of local food sources, a majority of Indonesians consume rice and wheat as sources of carbohydrates. The New Order’s food policy was aimed at achieving self-sufficiency, despite the fact that it focused too much on rice, and in the past 13 years, the government has narrowed its food policy to focus on several commodities, i.e. rice, soybean, corn, sugar and beef.

The desire to achieve food self-sufficiency was driven by, among other reasons, the need to reduce dependency on food imports, to save foreign exchange and to develop domestic production skills.

These targets have yet to be achieved. There are many reasons why and many of them are obvious, including the lack of new breakthroughs in seedling technology that can multiply yields and adapt to the local agro-climatic conditions, the decline in fertile farmlands and the lack of new post-harvest technology.

This daily’s coverage highlights the increasing marginalization of local sources of dietary carbohydrates by rice and wheat flour, most of which are imported. Rice has replaced local carbohydrate sources, as the government uses rice to fulfill the food needs of civil servants, police and military personnel across the country, because of it is easy to transport and store.

The shift in public consumption habits towards rice, the social status of which has increased in line with the increasing status of civil servants, has been accelerated by the government’s policy to use rice as part of its social welfare program. Meanwhile, food companies using wheat flour as a main ingredient have conducted massive campaigns to shift consumption habits towards bread and noodles as an alternative to rice.

We need to recall the original goal of food production. Food is a basic human right and, therefore, it should be affordable and adequately available, and people must be given choices. Therefore, food sovereignty is the more suitable approach for Indonesia than food self-sufficiency, and a national food policy strategy based on food production and consumption map is needed.

The map must identify those regions and communities with excessive, adequate and inadequate food, as well as those regions on the brink of a food crisis.

Food sovereignty must incorporate adequate nutritional intake as determined by age, gender, profession, ethnicity and religion. This is because food sovereignty is closely linked to food diversification in order to achieve an adequate nutritional intake.

Achieving food self-sufficiency is not always beneficial economically, socially or environmentally. Producing 1 kilogram of rice, for instance, requires between 3,000 liters and 5,000 liters of water. The food self-sufficiency policy also makes domestic food prices higher than global prices, and this will burden consumers and may not necessarily benefit farmers.

Food sovereignty based on local food diversification will develop local food industries and the people’s independence, which are critical to the sustainability of the nation’s socioeconomic security.