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Climate change already affecting food production
Agricultural experts have called on the government to introduce programs in response to climate change, which has begun to affect food production in parts of the country
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span>Agricultural experts have called on the government to introduce programs in response to climate change, which has begun to affect food production in parts of the country.
Bustanul Arifin, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of Lampung (Unila), said on Tuesday that the government should, for example, establish a mitigation or adaptation plan with concrete measures to minimize the impacts of climate change.
The senior economist said rising temperatures caused by climate change made plants like rice and wheat ripen faster and dry quicker, resulting in a fall in production. With an effective mitigation and adaption plan, the impact of changing weather patterns on farming could be minimized, Bustanul said.
He warned that Indonesia could suffer food scarcity if the government failed to address the impact of climate change.
The change in weather patterns as a result of climate change, such as prolonged dry seasons and extreme rain causing massive flooding, has led to a decline in food production, especially rice.
“Some people might say this [climate change] is not real, but I am telling this is real. The global temperature has risen for some 100 years [...] The world has experienced drastic increases in [food] prices,” Bustanul told The Jakarta Post.
The climate change impact on national agriculture was discussed at a hearing between Agriculture Minister Syahrul Yasin Limpo and House of Representatives Commission IV overseeing agriculture on Monday.
During the hearing, several House members told the minister that extreme weather conditions caused by climate change, such as prolonged drought, had led to crop failures in their respective regions.
“Today in East Nusa Tenggara, we are experiencing a crop planting failure. It is possible that some areas in the region will experience starvation due to this problem,” Yohanis Fransiskus Lema of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) said, adding that the rainy season, which normally started in November, only had begun in January.
“In Sumbawa, there are around 13,300 hectares of corn plantation. Due to the prolonged drought, almost 70 percent of it could be damaged,” Johan Rosihan from the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) said on Monday. A House member from PKS, Hermanto, explained that in his region in West Sumatra, around 50 ha of paddy fields had been damaged by recent floods.
Meanwhile, Bogor Agricultural University (IPB) economic and agriculture expert Hermanto Siregar told the Post on Tuesday that, as a consequence of an increase in global temperature, there would be a sharp decline in productive farming areas, which would result in a decline in production.
Production could fall by 15 to 40 percent due to extreme weather patterns, like El-Niño or La- Niña, because they caused “negative shocks” throughout the agricultural sector, he said.
IPB professor and agricultural expert Dwi Andreas Santosa explained to the Post on Tuesday that droughts during last year’s dry season had seen rice production plummet by around 8 percent.
He added that dry farmland could become a breeding ground for pests, which in turn contributed to the decrease in production.
Agriculture product prices will rise as a consequence of declining productivity, according to a publication by the International Food Policy Research Institute titled Food Security, Farming, and Climate Change to 2050: Scenarios, Results, Policy Options.
“The likely price increase ranges from 31.2 percent for rice [in the optimistic scenario] to 100.7 percent for maize [in the baseline scenario]. With perfect mitigation, these price increases would be less: from 18.4 percent for rice in the optimistic scenario to 34.1 percent for maize in the pessimistic scenario,” as explained in the book published in 2010.
Bustanul said anticipatory efforts could take two forms: adaptation and mitigation, with adaptation focusing on adjusting to the already changing climate and mitigation on reducing the severity of the harm experienced.
One way to adapt was to change crop varieties — to crops that could withstand both flooding and dry spells. Such varieties had already been planted in several regions of Indonesia, including Yogyakarta and Klaten, Bustanul noted.
The second form of adaptation was to utilize local wisdom to allow farmers to plant a more diverse range of products instead of pressuring them to plant rice up to three times a year, Bustanul said, adding that that would be beneficial for the preservation of nutrients in the soil as well.
As for mitigation, agricultural insurance, which is still being developed, could be one solution.
Dwi agreed, saying that the program’s implementation could ease farmers' burden in case of crop failure. (ydp)
