Thanks to the Agricultural Integrated Survey (AGRIS) conducted in 2021 by Statistics Indonesia (BPS), a multidimensional assessment covering the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainability has become possible for the first time in Indonesia, at both the national and provincial levels.

The survey collected nationwide data from around 300,000 agricultural households and 2,000 non-household agricultural entities, including businesses.

Unfortunately, the survey results released last December painted a worrying picture about the future of our agriculture sector. It confirms the bias in our agricultural development strategy that focuses heavily on food production and sets aside the importance of sustainability for several decades.

AGRIS adopted the Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture Systems (SAFA), an assessment framework developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization. SAFA measures sustainability according to indicator 2.4.1 of the Sustainable Development Goals, which indicates the percentage of agricultural land managed under productive and sustainable agricultural practices.

The assessment covers 11 indicators that represent all dimensions of sustainability, namely land productivity, profitability, resilience, soil health, water use, fertilizer pollution risk, pesticide risk, biodiversity, decent employment, food security and land tenure. Each indicator independently assesses sustainability, as each carries the same relative importance.

The results show that around 90 percent of agricultural land in Indonesia is economically unsustainable due to relatively low productivity, measured as farm output value per hectare. This also applies to all leading provincial food producing hubs, such as South Sumatra (94 percent), West Java (85 percent), Central Java (75 percent), East Java (91 percent), South Kalimantan (98 percent) and South Sulawesi (76 percent).

This picture is similar to another AGRIS finding that showed around 72 percent of our farmers are small-scale food producers, in terms of their physical and economic scope. The majority of these farmers are based on the islands of Java (58 percent) and Sumatra (20 percent). All provinces on Java, the country’s leading food producing region, even have more small-scale food producers than the national average: East Java (75 percent), Central Java (81 percent), West Java (82 percent), Yogyakarta (85 percent) and Banten (87 percent).

This means that national food production has depended on small-scale farmers for decades. Sadly, they have low productivity and earn low incomes from agriculture. AGRIS shows that their productivity averages just Rp 215,650 (US$45.30) per work day in a single year in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP). As a result, their annual net income from agriculture averages just Rp 5.2 million ($1,100). This figure is slightly below the national poverty line, meaning that they are very vulnerable to falling into poverty if they relied only on agricultural income. That is why our poverty is still a phenomenon of rural agriculture.

Another worrying finding is that a relatively large proportion of our agricultural land is environmentally unsustainable. This is reflected in the poor management of pesticide use, fertilizer use and biodiversity protection. When it comes to pesticide use, around 30 percent of agricultural land is unsustainable, due to the high use among farmers of hazardous pesticides and/or pesticides that disregards mitigation measures of the impact on health and the environment. Some provinces even have a proportion that is much higher than the national figure, such as Gorontalo (52 percent), West Sumatra (51 percent) and West Kalimantan (51 percent).

Reliance on chemical fertilizers used haphazardly also results in a relatively substantial proportion of unsustainable agricultural land, which is around 19 percent. There is a significant number of farmers that use chemical fertilizers and do not employ any specific measures to mitigate environmental risks.

The three provinces with significant unsustainable fertilizer use are Bengkulu (34 percent), Central Java (32 percent) and Yogyakarta (36 percent). This will increase the risk of pollution posed by the chemical substances in the fertilizers on the natural soil fertility in those provinces.

Around one-fifth of agricultural land is also unsustainable due to the absence of measures that protect biodiversity, such as crop diversification and organic agriculture. The three provinces with the highest proportion of agricultural land set aside for biodiversity protection are East Java (59 percent), East Kalimantan (39 percent) and Southeast Sulawesi (26 percent).

In terms of the social dimension, land tenure certainty is a critical issue. At least 29 percent of agricultural land does not meet at least one of the sustainability criteria for land tenure, such as possession of a deed that guarantees the right to sell and/or bequeath the property. Meanwhile, land is a critical asset in agricultural production and possessing rights over this key asset ensures that farmers have full control over their land and are not at risk of losing it.

Given these findings, the 2021 AGRIS results should provide valuable inputs for redesigning our agricultural development strategy. There must be a shift in our agricultural paradigm from being focused solely on food production to a more sustainable model. The strategy must incorporate measures that focus on improving productivity through environmentally friendly technologies and digitalization, improving pesticide use and management, promoting extensive use of organic fertilizers and appropriate use of nonorganic fertilizers, protecting biodiversity through crop diversification according to local varieties, and ensuring that all farmers have guaranteed tenure and rights over their land.

It is our responsibility to ensure that our agriculture sector can fulfill the needs of the current generation without reducing its capacity to fulfill the needs of future generations.

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The writer is a data analyst at Statistics Indonesia. The views in this article are personal.