Mark Smulders - FAO

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is focusing on the impact of climate change on food security. In conjunction with International Food Day of Oct. 16, The Jakarta Post’s Hans Nicholas Jong and Tama Salim spoke with FAO’s representative in Indonesia and Timor Leste, Mark Smulders. Here are some excerpts from the interview.

Question: What is today’s state of food security in Indonesia?

Answer: This year’s theme is that “the climate is changing, hence food and agriculture must change as well”. Climate change manifests itself nowadays by more severe climate events, mainly because of changing sea surface temperatures etc. Luckily for Indonesia, we don’t get hit as bad as the Philippines or the Caribbean by cyclones or tropical storms, but the increased intensity of these storms are a sign of climate change.

For Indonesia we had the big El Niño last year, which […] did not have a very large impact on national food security […] [As] Indonesia is such a vast archipelago, it will have different impacts […] in different parts of the country.

The big challenge is how to best manage these resources for future generations.

Indonesia has to really prepare itself for climate change, not only for the dry periods but also for the increased intensity of rainfall. [...] So Indonesia needs to prepare better […], to conserve the soil and
moisture.

[What] is more difficult to prevent is landslides and flooding. Particularly on Java, we can expect more intensive rainfall and heavier storms as a result of climate change. So we need to be better prepared for landslides, whether in terms of infrastructure, but also [in terms of] agroforestry to ensure [...] there’s not too much […] risk of landslides. [...]

How does this relate to food security?

Food security exists when all people at all times have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food […] Indonesia has done very well in increasing the total availability of food to the population.

[For] the Millennium Development Goal [MDG] on poverty and hunger, Indonesia reached the Hunger target, reducing the number of undernourished people — from nearly 20 percent in 1990–1992 to only 7.6 percent in 2014–2016. Indonesia was given an award in 2013 by FAO for having achieved [...] the MDG on undernourishment. But Indonesia still has 20 million chronically undernourished people.

The main concern is still the very high rate of malnutrition [...] [T]here’s still a lot of food that people consume that can’t be utilized well by the body [...] either because of [poor] sanitation, also because it’s not as diverse as it should be.

So how achievable is food security in Indonesia?

[...] at national level, yes. But again, in Indonesia in particular, climate change must be seen not in isolation of other challenges, i.e. urbanization.

Urbanization has put a lot of pressure on agriculture and the forestry sectors because of the conversion of land for urban use. By 2030, [Indonesia will] more or less have 300 million people.

Meanwhile, many see agriculture as not being profitable [and] the youth are not keen to stay in agriculture. So the question is not so much what is climate change going to do, but […] who’s going to produce our food for a growing population?

To feed the world population of about 9 billion people in 2050, we have to increase food production by 60 percent.

So Indonesia has to significantly increase food production to feed future generations.

For that we need to do three things: First, we need to make agriculture more profitable. It should be seen, particularly by the young and future generations, as a good livelihood.

Second, to do so, we need to manage the resources well, both soil and water. With a growing population, there is much more stress on fresh water; the agricultural sector is a major consumer. The third thing is to see how we can increase agriculture sustainably and make it resilient [...] The big challenge is to improve the food systems, the value chain.

[…]Indonesia still needs to invest a lot more in the food industry [for] processing food […]

Indonesia wastes about 13 million metric tons (MT) of food every year simply because of poor infrastructure or waste [...].

According to our initial estimates Indonesia maintains a food supply of 226.9 million MT, or 908,200 MT per capita. With food requirements reaching 119 million MT per year, the country wastes 13 million tons of food. This means that the waste could feed close to 11 percent of the population (27.5 million), similar to the total number people living below the poverty line.

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