Indonesia’s Quest for Food Self-sufficiency: A New Agricultural Political Economy?

ABSTRACT

The aspiration to achieve food self-sufficiency has returned to the Indonesian policy agenda in the post-reformasi period. After being side-lined as a policy goal immediately after the transition to democracy, political leaders since 2009 have increasingly cited self-sufficiency to justify policies to raise domestic food production and reduce food imports. These policies are often inefficient and at odds with the goals of food security and decreasing poverty. The self-sufficiency drive is thus often attributed to ‘political’ motives. But what kind of politics is at work in Indonesia’s renewed self-sufficiency drive: a broad-based politics that aims to foster support among smallholder food producers, or an elite politics based on rent-seeking by narrow constituencies? The distributional implications of food self-sufficiency policies in the post-reformasi period suggest that both dynamics are at work. Narrow elite interests have benefited, but smallholder landowners account for a significant share of many agricultural crops. Although smallholder landowners are increasingly differentiated, they constitute a reasonably broad-based constituency. The valorisation of agriculture reflected in the self-sufficiency drive and related rural sector policies may lay the foundations for a more inclusive agricultural political economy.

KEYWORDS:

• Indonesia
• agriculture
• food self-sufficiency
• land ownership
• reformasi

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. There is an extensive literature on the massacres and their long-term reverberations. Notable works include Cribb (1990), Farid (2005), and Kammen and McGregor (2012). On the ongoing impacts, see McGregor and Setiawan (2019).

2. In addition, 12.7 million hectares of designated as forest land are supposed to be redistributed to rural communities under social forestry schemes.

3. Many works have documented the dispossession entailed by the imposition of state ownership in different parts of Indonesia, along with ongoing contestation by local communities (see, for example, Peluso 1992; McCarthy 2006; Kelly and Peluso 2015).

4. The decline in rural incomes (as opposed to agricultural wages) is consistent with the end of the commodity price boom by around 2011–2012 (Yusuf and Sumner 2015).

5. These figures do not of course take into account unrecorded imports sold on the black market.

6. Although Indonesia’s 2013 agricultural law prescribes a maximum landholding of two hectares for smallholder status, for plantation crops the cut-off is 25 hectares (Jelsma et al. 2017). In some provinces, much land is planted without a permit (see Potter 2016; Hamilton-Hart and Palmer 2017). A detailed land survey in a district in Riau found seven different categories of “smallholder” ranging from very small holdings of around one hectare to large “investor” plots of 10 hectares, with many investors holding multiple plots (see Jelsma et al. 2017).

7. Such an outcome may be somewhat self-limiting, given that the smallholder advantage vis-à-vis large estates lies in their more efficient use of labour (Bissonnette and De Koninck 2017). It is likely that family farms avoid the labour monitoring and evasion costs associated with coercive labour practices.