T

he Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry is calling for the empowerment of cooperatives dealing with the agricultural sector to help attain food security in the country.

The call emerged on Friday from discussions during the two-day Jakarta Food Security Summit at the Jakarta Convention Center.

According to the chamber'€™s deputy chairman for agribusiness, Franky O. Widjaja, the empowerment of cooperatives was one of the five main ideas from the summit.

'€œThe chamber is pushing for the empowerment of the cooperatives model of partnership in the agriculture and plantation sectors in order to boost productivity of food crops,'€ Franky said during his closing remarks.

The industry group'€™s second recommendation was the need to adopt sustainable technologies that would also increase food-crop productivity.

Franky said the prudent use of technologies such as genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture has been proven to have succeeded in exponentially driving productivity in the Philippines and the US.

Besides, the chamber also called for the formation of a task force to help oversee the improvement of spatial planning in the country, as more land acquisition is needed in order to increase productivity and achieve food security.

The fourth point from the panel discussions was a recommendation for the adoption and duplication of innovative financial instruments that take into account the cost of living for its actors, specifically the farmers of food crops, Franky said.

This point came from the experience of Financial Services Authority (OJK) chairman Muliaman Hadad in dealing with the similarly structured fisheries sector, which is currently trying to improve access to funding for fishermen.

The final recommendation, Franky continued, was to push for the duplication of the Partnership for Indonesia'€™s Sustainable Agriculture (PISAgro) model of farmer mentorship, wherein '€œthe key to success lies in the empowerment of farming groups through corporate support in technology, training, seeding and the funneling of funds from the government'€.

Franky believes that the cooperatives model sets an example for how multistakeholder collaborations can be implemented on a national scale, as intended by President Joko '€œJokowi'€ Widodo.

PISAgro currently works with 83,000 smallholder farmers and aims to expand its outreach to 1 million farmers in three years.

On Thursday, President Jokowi said he had identified several methods that farmers employed to increase productivity and set up cooperatives with other sectors to market their products.

'€œWe can copy such existing examples and broaden [the implementation] nationwide,'€ he said in a short speech, made after a brief discussion with farmers who became successful through the PISAgro model.

Because of such existing innovative models, Jokowi believed that food self-sufficiency could be reached in the next three or four years.

According to the Agriculture Ministry'€™s secretary-general, Hari Priyono, the private sector'€™s recommendation to revitalize the food-crop sector through cooperatives is deemed as the right move, considering how hard it is for actors in the agriculture and fisheries industries to access funding from financial institutions.

According to the 2013 Agricultural Census, the country has 35,700 farming groups, only half of which are legal entities in the form of cooperatives.

Hari said the limited access to funding would not only be remedied by turning farming groups into legal entities, but also by improving farmers'€™ financial literacy and managerial capacity. '€œWe will follow up the chamber'€™s recommendation by speeding up the legal incorporation of farming groups into cooperatives,'€ he said.