President Susilo Bambang Yu-dhoyono has appointed Suswono from the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) as agriculture minister to replace Anton Apriyantono, also from the PKS. By appointing a minister towing the same party line, expect continued improvement in the development of Indonesian agriculture.
Important targets to be achieved by the Agriculture Ministry, as revealed by Suswono, are how to ensure food security and sustainable food self-sufficiency. The key factor for the successful implementation of those targets is to increase agricultural productivity.
Increased productivity has become a necessity given that the challenges facing Indonesian agriculture are quite hard. In the food sector, for instance, Indonesia faces growing demand due to an increasing population and rapid economic growth, but also has to deal with the reality that some of the factors of production are declining, such as the amount of land and the number of farmers.
If we consider the increasingly open market at the regional and global level, the challenges in Indonesian agriculture will be even greater.
Liberalization and globalization mean that Indonesian farmers face greater opportunities to sell their products in the broadening market.
However, they must also compete more rigorously with foreign products, and those who can manage their farms in a market-oriented way will be in the best position to take advantage of opportunities to earn more money.
Agricultural productivity is influenced by various factors, such as availability of fertile land, of water, of fertilizer, of equipment and agricultural technology.
Farmers' skills are strongly linked with their level of education and experience. Currently, 70 to 80 percent of farmers in Indonesia only have an elementary education.
This is certainly related to the ability of farmers to plan well and to solve problems. Nowadays, the problems facing farmers are more complex than ever, so it follows that the abilities and skills of farmers should also be improved.
Former agriculture minister Anton developed a program to educate farmers' children. Of course this is a part of human investment that is very important in agricultural development.
Through this program, the children of farmers are expected to be able to access higher education, and after graduation they are expected to return to their villages to develop agriculture there.
With better competency, young generations of Indonesian farmers can contribute more toward increasing agriculture productivity.
Unfortunately, investment in agricultural education does not necessarily correlate to improved agricultural productivity.
In some countries, such as India, for instance, the education level has not had a significant influence on increased productivity. This occurs when a new generation of farmers (farmers' children) grow disenchanted about working in the agricultural sector.
When the education level of these children rises, they grow less interested in working in the sector.
This reality can be understood given the image of agriculture in developing countries as a backwater sector. Farmers are considered to lead unsatisfying lives.
In this context, agricultural schools thus have less of an impact on agricultural productivity improvement, due to many of its graduates being reluctant to work in the agricultural sector. What is happening in India is also experienced by Indonesia, where farmers' children who go to school tend to leave the farm after graduating.
The backwater image of the agricultural sector comes about because agriculture in developing countries, including Indonesia, is generally not considered a business.
Farmers work their land on a strictly subsistence basis. In addition, the mind-set of Indonesian farmers is still production-oriented rather than business-oriented or market-oriented.
Data from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS, 2008) shows 90 percent of Indonesian farmers are subsistence farmers with very little land. The land they farm is insufficient for the economies of scale that can generate healthy profits.
We are now in a situation where prospective farmers sent to school do not "know the way back", while existing farmers lack competence. The presence of agricultural extension workers is helpful enough in the process of transformation of knowledge and skills of farmers.
Given the difficulty of attracting the children of farmers, who are better educated, to come back to the agricultural sector, the government may need to consider sending current farmers "back to school" so that they have the ability to manage their farms as promising and profitable businesses.
The writer is a lecturer at the Bogor Institute of Agriculture, a PhD candidate at the University of Tokyo, and secretary of the Indonesian Agricultural Science Association (IASA)-Japan.
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