Four Years of Food Sovereignty

KOMPAS/RIZA FATHONI

Peolpe buy subsidized food products in 2018 in Petamburan, Central Jakarta, Thursday (12/13/2018).

Food sovereignty is a big theme of the Joko Widodo-Jusuf Kalla government. The food sovereignty program’s 2015-2019 target is the achievement of self-sufficiency in rice, corn and soybeans, as well as increasing meat and sugar production (Agriculture Ministry, 2015-2019 Strategic Plan).

To achieve these goals, the budget for the agricultural sector was increased sharply; 3 million hectares of irrigation channels were rehabilitated; reservoirs, dams and dykes were built; 1 million hectares of new paddy fields were created, and the agrarian reform program was launched. Massive efforts to increase productivity were carried out through the upsus pajale action (special efforts to increase rice, corn and soybean production), along with fertilizer and seed assistance and the distribution of agricultural machinery and equipment.

The unfavorable market structure was overcome by forming the Food Task Force, setting the retail price ceiling (HET) policy, establishing the Indonesian Farmers Shop and the Sergap policy to increase the State Logistics Agency’s (Bulog) absorption of unhusked and husked rice. The Agriculture Ministry “recruited” the Indonesian Military (TNI) and the National Police (Polri) in carrying out some of these programs. The expenditure for food security over this four-year period was Rp 408.9 trillion (Supreme Audit Agency/BPK and Finance Ministry, 2014-2018), outside the budget for agricultural infrastructure development and agrarian reform. Thus, it is necessary for ordinary people to seek answers on the achievements the various programs have made in the last four years.

Achievements of agricultural programs

With regard to agricultural infrastructure, it is likely that the target of building up to 65 dams/reservoirs by 2019 will be met, with some facilities a continuation from the previous government. Forty-nine dams/reservoirs are completed, under construction, or in the contractual process through 2019 (Natural Resources Directorate General, the Public Works and Housing Ministry, 2017). Twenty-nine dams are targeted for completion in 2019, of which 55 percent are located outside Java and 45 percent are on Java/Bali.

Dams/reservoirs play a very important role in agricultural development because they reduce the flooding hazards during the rainy season and provide water during droughts. The success of Thailand’s and Vietnam’s rice programs also depend on a reservoir (Thailand) and a canal network (Mekong Delta, Vietnam).

The dams that have been and are being built will provide optimum benefits with cross- successful sectoral cooperation. The upstream and downstream reservoirs are under the authority of other ministries that guarantee an adequate supply of water, as well as prevent reservoir siltation and water utilization, if their irrigation networks and paddy field development programs are managed well. If these two aspects are not fulfilled, it is useless to construct a dam/reservoir.

How about food production and imports? Shallots and corn are the two main commodities that have seen sharp declines in imports over the past four years. Shallot imports, which averaged 97,744 tons/year in 2012-2014, have tumbled to a mere 5,283 tons/year in 2015-2018 (Data and information center, the Agriculture Ministry, 2012-2018; November-December 2018 imports calculated from the averages of the previous 10 months). In addition to importing shallots, Indonesia also exports the commodity, although the export average for the past four years was lower than in 2012-2014, at 5,941 tons/year compared to 9,502 tons per year in 2012-2014.

The sharp decline in import volume was also seen in corn. Regarding the corn productivity program – or more precisely, a program to limit imported corn, imports declined sharply from an annual average of 3,389,839 tons (2013-2015) to 1,017,219 tons (2016-2018). On the other hand, the export average increased 105,317 tons/year to 162,820 tons/year.

The sharp 94.6 percent decline in imported shallots was made possible through increased production from developing new shallot production centers. Indonesia\'s corn production also increased by an average 500,000 tons of dried corn per year and corn farms increased by around 50,000 hectares per year from 2016 to 2018 (FAS-USDA, December 2018), although this remains far below the government’s official figure.

Then why is the decline in imports much greater than the growth in production? It has been confirmed that corn imported for feed was replaced by the substitute product of wheat at an average of 2.12 million tons per year in 2016-2018, almost the same as the average decline of 2.37 million tons per year in imported corn during the same period.

As for the condition of rice, soybean sugar and beef, it has practically been unchanged over the past four years. After prolonged controversy, Statistics Indonesia (BPS) finally released rice production data that used a new method of calculation. As a result, the Agriculture Ministry’s rice data was 46.85 percent higher than the BPS’ calculations. The rice import average also increased. In 2005-2014, 0.920 million tons of rice was imports per year, which increased to 1.138 million tons/year over the last four years (BPS 2000-2010; Agriculture Ministry 2011-2018).

Indonesia\'s dependence on imported soybeans also grew. If this figure was around 80 percent previously, it is currently at 92.9 percent (2017). As for sugar, if the previous figure was around 50 percent, 80 percent is currently met through imports (2017). The beef supply has also not improved, with around 260,000 tons of meat imported this year.

Food trade deficit

The volume of imported food has continued to increase over the last four years. In 2014, 18.17 million tons of 21 commodities in the food crops subsector were imported. The import volume continued to increase successively to 19.27 million tons in 2015, 20.69 million tons in 2016, 20.52 million tons in 2017, and 22.26 million tons in 2018 (2014-2018 Import-Export Database, Agriculture Ministry).

Amid the success of the onion development program, total imports for 63 horticultural crops experienced fluctuations, from 1.65 million tons in 2014 to 1.39 million tons in 2015, which then increased again in the next two years to 1.42 million tons in 2016 and 1.72 million tons in 2017. In 2018, the figure dipped again to 1.53 million tons.

Since 2015, the trade deficit in food, horticulture and livestock commodities has increased from US$9.95 billion to $10.59 billion in 2018. The balance of trade in agricultural commodities has been helped greatly by the plantation subsector, especially oil palm, which reversed the previous deficit into a surplus. The agricultural trade surplus reached its peak in 2011 at $22.77 billion, and then continued to decline by nearly half to reach its lowest point in 2016 at $10.92 billion. In 2017, the surplus rose on increased palm oil production and prices, but then fell again to $12.28 billion in 2018 (Journal of Agricultural Import-Export Statistics 2001-2013; 2014 Import-Export Quarterly Bulletin; 2015-2018 Import-Export Database, Agriculture Ministry).

Return to food sovereignty

Looking at the numbers and data, several questions arise as to why the hard work of the government and the Agriculture Ministry’s ranks has not resulted in encouraging figured? What has gone wrong? Is it possible for "food sovereignty" to be a solution?

So far, food sovereignty has been a very biased term that has moved farther away from academia and grassroots movements. Lay people no longer see the difference between food sovereignty, food security, food self-sufficiency, and dozens of other terms. All are mixed up, even though the literature explicitly states that food sovereignty contradicts food security (Benford and Snow, 2000; Lee, 2008). The policies and programs that have been carried out are concepts derived from the food security paradigm, even though they have been termed “food sovereignty”.

The global farmers movement agree upon six pillars of food sovereignty: 1) the right to food; 2) agrarian reform; 3) farmers\' access to productive resources; 4) agroecological farming; 5) local trade and markets; and 6) democratization of agriculture. National policies have not the basic right to food, but new access to food is a food security concept. Moreover, diversification and local foods are mere jargon and staple foods are converging on two sources, namely rice and wheat. Wheat has even replaced 25 percent of rice.

Half-hearted agrarian reform will not produce anything. What has followed is an increasing inequality in land tenure between small groups of individuals and large groups of smallholder farmers and landowners. In 2003-2013, a mass conversion of land ownership occurred from small farmers to non-farmers covering 508,287 hectares in Java (processed from the 2013 Agricultural Census). On the other hand, paddy fields that supported 14.1 million rice farmer households actually shrank from 7.751 million hectares (2013) to 7.105 million hectares (BPS, 2018).

Agroecological farming is being marginalized by Agriculture 4.0, transgenic crops, smart farming and agriculture that overutilize fertilizers and pesticides. In 2014 and 2016, the Association of Indonesian Seed Banks and Agricultural Technology (AB2TI) evaluated the agroecology approach on hundreds of hectares of land in 13 regencies and found that of rice paddy yields had increased 57.36 percent. The same approach is being applied today in North Aceh, which started in April 2018 with small-scale rice harvests of AB2TI smallholders on 200 hectares of rice fields. The program has now grown to thousands of hectares with an average production of 11-12 tons per hectare, or double the production using the conventional approach.

Protecting smallholder farmers from the unfair system of international trade was marginalized by the fact that total imports of agricultural commodities had increased in 2018 to 31.2 million tons, valued at

$16.8 billion. Agricultural democratization, which means that smallholders have the right to establish agricultural policies at all levels, has only ended in never-ending discussions.

In closing, the concept of food sovereignty can only be headed towards one thing: farmers’ prosperity and welfare and their right to seeds, technologies, cultivation, culture, education and information. Increasing production and decreasing dependence on food imports will only yield rewards when we work to improve farmers’ welfare and rights, not vice versa. If only.  (Dwi Andreas Santosa, Professor, Bogor Agricultural University (IPB); General Chairman, the Association of Indonesian Seed Banks and Agricultural Technology (AB2TI); Associate, CORE Indonesia)