It was quite interesting to read an opinion article on food safety policies by Indroyono Soesilo, which appeared in The Jakarta Post (July 14).
Throughout the article, Indroyono addresses several crucial issues such as the remarkable production progress of main food crops including rice, corn and soybean: A strategy for boosting production and lowering food prices, improvement of the standard of living of farmers, and the importance of increasing household income in improvement of food security.
As I have proposed in my previous article at The Jakarta Post (June 24), solving and setting up the new policies on Indonesian food security and safety could not be simply approached from the production issues of conventional staple foods.
An improvement on production of rice, corn and soybean has been reported for recent years. However, we likely cannot have too much hope that production of those three commodities will significantly increase at the same time.
Among those staple foods commodities, there is high competition. This occurs because they are commonly cultivated on irrigated farming land. It is a matter of choice for farmers to emphasize on water availability, commodity prices and workforce availability.
By tracing the agricultural development stage in Indonesia, the main policies are likely still influenced by irrigated farming land bias indicated by much more programs related to rice, corn and soybean production, while the other food crops get less attention.
The green revolution and following agricultural development programs, which were mostly focused on wet farming land production, can be evidence of food development bias. Although the government is continually constructing new irrigated farming lands (sawah) mainly in outer islands, due to the rapid conversion of fertile wet farming lands into non-farming purposes in Java, in total irrigated land at the national level is standing at about 12 million hectares and it is going nowhere.
Production efficiency and staple food crop productivity to some extent still can be increased.
Agriculture developmental programs such as farming area extension, crop variety improvement, improvement of cropping intensity and upgrading irrigation facilities can be the strategies.
“Indonesia has been categorized among nations with the highest productivity in terms of paddy production by 5-6 tons per hectare.”
However, it is not an easy matter. For instance, so far there is no visible progress on the improvement of farming land access, contrary to the average of land ownership per farming household, which been remarkably decreasing overtime.
Maintenance of irrigation facilities also does not work well. There have only been very few cases of development of new dams for supplying water for farming activities.
Even though limited, there is still the possibility of income improvement by intensification of agricultural input usage and modern technologies, which may increase productivity. By the same rate of product price, if farmers can increase the quantity, the total income received will also increase.
Paying high attention to main staple foods is clearly important, however, it cannot solve all problems related to food security and safety in Indonesia.
In addressing food security issues, we should also strongly consider the other sources of foods for about 24 million of our inhabitants.
Indonesia has very favorable natural resources endowment due to its situation in the tropical region, hence we have a huge variety of food crops including tubers and roots crops.
Larger parts of them are traditionally available and simply cultivated by peasants on rain fed and or dry land areas.
However, technological progress, investment and utilization of them have been underdeveloped.
As definitely told by Indonesian food history, a high dependency on rice has a serious impact on its production.
Even though recently we have achieved self-sufficiency on rice production, the risk of food shortage has always been shadowing national food production. We should properly consider the development of alternative foods such as roots and tubers crops.
Indroyono’s article also proposes lowering food price. This policy likely will increase the suffering of small scale farmers as food producers.
Regarding policy strategy for improving household farming income, we are often witnessing something misleading as commonly campaigned by governmental agencies and political parties.
Indonesia has been categorized among nations with the highest productivity in terms of paddy production by 5-6 tons per hectare. With land ownership so small, on average less than 0.5 hectares, improvement of agricultural production will not have a significant impact on farmers’ received incomes if food price is kept low. It is almost impossible to keep farmers wealthy without changing price policy.
Government policies which protect agricultural product price should be appropriately performed. The policy of higher agricultural product price stands strongly on the side of producers, which could improve farmers’ income and wealth.
The increasing of food prices will of course have a serious impact on some parties, mainly the rural and urban poor.
They are traditionally the beneficial parties under the low food price policy. Solving this problem can be done by the government by offering a new scheme for the poor.
The scheme can be implemented under social safety net programs through cheap food distribution and other related policies.
Increasing food price policies for producers-farmers should be arranged separately with policy directed to rural and urban poor in accessing lower priced foods. Combining those policies will be problematic and will not provide satisfaction for each party.
I agree with Indroyono’s argument that increasing the household income will possibly improve the household access on food which in turn will also improve their food security.
However, only increasing household income will not automatically guarantee the improvement of food security.
If there is no improvement of food diversification, which is indicated by a wider presence of food variety over time, household access on food security will not be the case.
Food availability refers to the supply side, which is determined by the level of food production, stock level and net trade.
In addition to economic capability, the physical availability is always important guaranteeing the people’s access on food.
The writer is a lecturer at the School of Agriculture, Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, and is a PhD candidate at the University of Tokyo. This is his personal opinion.
| 
|
|
|
|
|
|
|