TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Diet diversification key to food security
Anthea Webb - JP/Hans Nicholas JongAs the world celebrated World Food Day on Oct
Change Size
Anthea Webb - JP/Hans Nicholas Jong
As the world celebrated World Food Day on Oct. 16, the government pledged to achieve food security in seven diet staples, including rice, corn and chili. Historically, rice has been the country's number one staple food with most Indonesians depending on rice for as much as 80 percent of their caloric intake. But as Indonesians eat more rice, our children continue to suffer from chronic malnutrition, with 8.4 million children or 37.2 percent of children under 5 experiencing stunted development. Between 2010 and 2013, the prevalence of stunted growth increased from 35.6 to 37.2 percent; an alarming figure given the condition's lifelong consequences.
Rice does not naturally contain many important nutrients, like vitamin A or iron, and children with a rice-based diet can suffer from an impaired immune system, blindness or even die due to nutrient deficiencies. The Jakarta Post's Hans Nicholas Jong talked to World Food Programme (WFP) country director Anthea Webb recently about the issue of food security and malnutrition in the country. Below are some excerpts from the interview:
Question: What is the significance of World Food Day for Indonesia?
Answer: World Food Day puts the focus on what we need to do to ensure that everyone eats well. Indonesia can use this day to celebrate its achievement of the Millennium Development Goal to halve hunger, and focus on what steps are needed to achieve food security, improve nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture by 2030.
How will climate change affect Indonesia's ability to achieve food security?
I think we already see climate affecting food security in Indonesia. You can already see a very strong El Niño effect this year and some of the forecasts of the possible impacts on agricultural production are quite alarming. I'd actually like to see it as potentially a way of encouraging Indonesians to diversify their diet. There are a lot of local foods available here that are highly nutritious, but people are not necessarily eating that many of them. There may be ways for us to encourage farmers to produce more crops that are better adapted to [Indonesia's] climate and have more nutritional benefit. But this means farmers will need help
to adapt.
How crucial is addressing the issue of child malnutrition in Indonesia?
The cost of not addressing child nutrition is too high. It means that all the money that has been invested in healthcare and universal health coverage is not going to be as effective, because children who are malnourished grow up to be adults who are unhealthy.
So the additional costs on the system are going to be too much. All the money invested in education is not going to have the same effect, because children who are malnourished don't learn as well. All of the work that is going into producing Indonesians who are prosperous and able to compete on the world stage will be held back if not every single Indonesian is able to operate to their full capacity. So if you count that cost, I think it becomes a very simple economic decision, as well as a moral one and almost a religious imperative to solve this issue.
Is the government aware of the economic cost of not tackling malnutrition?
It was the Minister of Finance who talked about this issue when he met my executive director in July. And he'd been talking about it with the World Bank as well, so I think the understanding is there. The hard part is actually implementing it. But once you have the understanding then you start to see movement on it.
Are you optimistic that regional governments will do something?
Absolutely because food security isn't created in the national parliament. It's fostered in the national parliament, but food security is created as far from the capital as you can possibly imagine. And that's where it needs to be measured because it's really those people who are going to tell us whether we are succeeding or not.
Provincial governments, district governments, subdistrict governments and village leaders see whether or not their people are food secure. And they know that progress doesn't happen unless they are [food secure]. So I'm very convinced that putting food security at the core of our planning is going to improve the situation.
How could Indonesia benefit from the adoption of SDGs in terms of reducing child malnutrition?
The great thing about the SDGs is that they belong to the countries. They are not something that the UN came up with by itself and instructed everyone to do. We can't instruct anyone to do anything. We can [only] encourage.
So the first goal is to eradicate extreme poverty. The second one is about ending hunger, improving nutrition and achieving food security with sustainable agriculture. It's kind of the key to unlocking everything else because you won't end poverty unless you also end hunger and malnutrition. So for us it's a big opportunity.
Most of those aspects of the SDGs around food and nutrition are already incorporated in the government RPJMN [Mid-term development plan]. There are some very smart leaders here who saw what was likely to be the outcome of those and already had strong support to achieve them anyway.
So I hope this will only serve as additional encouragement in the community. What it brings is an expectation that countries will be reporting on their progress internationally. So there's an added incentive to show progress and that usually has a positive effect on people when they realize that everyone is going to check whether we actually do what we've said we'd do. Who wants to be seen as not achieving their goals? Therefore, people want to be the first to achieve them. And Indonesia has a good track record on that. [However], there are still some areas where we haven't meet the last set of goals, like maternal mortality.
Why is the level of malnutrition in eastern Indonesia especially alarming?
One of the interesting things about food security and nutrition is that it relies on lots of actors. It's absolutely essential for the government to have the right policies in place, but it's not enough. So policies are one thing, but food security depends on the private sector, consumers, farmers, water and sanitation and other things. And bringing them together isn't always easy, particularly in those places where the situation has been difficult for some times. It takes time.
Unlike some other industries where you can change the policy and within a year you can see a difference, food and nutrition take many years in order to start seeing a difference. The good thing is that we do see improvements in some parts of the country, even in the most difficult ones, so they're going in the right direction, except on nutrition in some places.
That's because there are so many variables, so many pieces of the puzzle that need to come together and it is inevitably a challenge. But I am reasonably confident that there's enough political will to get things moving in the right direction. We need to create enough momentum so that people start to see that it is not normal to have more than one third of your children malnourished.
