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ndustry Minister M.S. Hidayat lobbied a number of African countries Friday to back Indonesia’s candidacy for the top post at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

“The industry ministry invited African ambassadors to a dinner to introduce me to them and to gain support from African nations,” Indroyono Susilo, the Indonesian candidate for FAO director general, told The Jakarta Post.

He said Indonesia had the support of other ASEAN countries.

As the only candidate from Southeast Asia, Indroyono, who is also secretary to the coordinating public welfare minister, said Indonesia had extensive fisheries, forestry and natural disaster management systems that the country could contribute to the world organization.

He said it was important to integrate and connect food producing areas to areas that lacked food
and it was also important for developing countries to have their own standards and codification system on food they produced but not let them become new non-tariff barriers.

Indonesia, a member of FAO since 1949, received an FAO award for achieving rice self sufficiency in 1985. If Indroyono is elected, he would be the first Indonesian to head one of the UN’s top bodies.

An FAO conference in Rome in July will appoint a new director general for the period from Jan. 1, 2012, to July 31, 2015.

Food observer and economist Bustanul Arifin said an Indonesian candidate was suited to head the FAO as the country successfully mitigated the impact of the 2008 food crisis by focusing on domestic rice stock production and management.

“Indonesia can be a leader in international and regional cooperation for food reserves, starting from ASEAN+3 [China, Japan and South Korea],” he told the Post via text message.

The head of the national strategic studies division at the Indonesian Farmers’ Union (SPI), Ahmad Ya’kub, said while he doubted Indroyono’s capability in leading the FAO, an Indonesian candidate was perfectly suited for the role.

“From what I know, Indroyono’s background is engineering, not agriculture. I’ve never heard of his contributions to Indonesian agricultural,” he told the Post.

“I’m not sure he well understands that we have 13 million small-scale farmers with a maximum
300 square meters of land each at a time when food security is promoted to the advantage of big corporations.”

Ya’kub said that to attain food security, what mattered was the availability of food, not who the producer or distributor was.

He added farmers, large and small alike, had been traditionally producing and distributing agricultural crops and food on their own.

Ya’kub cited a 2009-2010 FAO study that showed more than 1 million people were starving, a large increase from the 825 million people in 1996, underlining the failure of the food security concept.