Creative farmers and climate service politics in Indonesian rice production

ABSTRACT

Providing climate information services to farmers is expected to optimise agricultural outputs amidst increasing climate uncertainty. Consequently, Indonesian governmental and extra-governmental actors provide climate services with the goal of improving productivity and increasing national food security. Existing research about climate-smart agriculture generally, and climate services in particular, presents these projects as largely technical or anti-political endeavours. Here, we analyse how rice farmers, collectively and individually, engage with climate services. We find that farmers ‘play’ with and between the climate service projects, manipulating them in order to subsidise their livelihoods and assert their individual and collective political power across scales.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate services
• climate change adaptation
• climate-smart agriculture
• Indonesia

Acknowledgements

Our thanks first and foremost to the collectives of farmers working across Indonesia who inspire us and share with us their creativity, wisdom and time. Our thanks also to Professor M. A. Yunita T. Winarto for her leadership in producing farmer-centric climate services in Indonesia. We would also like to thank Mark Vicol, the anonymous reviewers, as well as participants in several conferences for comments on previous versions of this paper. This research was possible thanks to funding from the Centre for Anthropological Studies at Universitas Indonesia and the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre at The University of Sydney.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Interview with farmer in Klaten, Central Java, February 2011.

2 Interview with BMKG official, Jakarta, August 2017.

3 Interview with BMKG official, Jakarta, May 2018.

4 Interviews with BMKG officials, Jakarta, August 2016, August 2017, May 2018.

5 The vast, vast majority of the participants in the climate services projects are men. That is not to say that women have no role in the kinds of decisions that climate services intersect with, but that the climate, agro-ecological and harvest data is mostly discussed and strategies negotiated privately within households. The gendered practices and impacts of climate services or climate smart agriculture are not the focus of this paper (but, see e.g. Tall et al. 2014b).

6 Project meetings with farmers, West Java, November, 2016.

7 Interview with farmer, East Lombok, October 2017.

8 Interview with SFS Facilitators, East Lombok, October 2017.

9 Again, however, these farmers are not the most marginalised participants in rural agricultural economies: for the most part, landless labourers or farmhands (buruh tani) are largely excluded from participation in these projects, especially the state-run climate service projects.

10 Field Observation, Indramayu, April 2017.

11 Field Observations, Indramayu, August 2017.

12 Interview with farmer, Indramayu, August 2017.

13 Interview with farmer, Indramayu, April 2017.

14 Interviews with former CFS participants, Indramayu, April 2018. There are also numerous examples where the CFS has tried to find exemplary farmers for promotional materials and has had to resort to using SFS farmers for these purposes, suggesting a very limited sustained uptake of the climate service project (see similar example below).

15 Interview with NGO leader, East Lombok October 2016.

16 Interview with agricultural office, East Lombok, October 2016.

17 Field observations, Indramayu, October 2017.

18 We could not support the claim that the climate service projects directly increase harvests. However, anticipating climate situations helps avoid harvest failure, and can force recalculations of input costs (Winarto, Walker, and Ariefiansyah 2019).

19 Interview with farmers, East Lombok, August 2015.

20 Field observations, Sumedang, October 2018.

21 Field Observations, Indramayu, October 2017.

22 Field observations and Interviews with farmers, East Lombok, August 2015.

23 Interviews with farmers, Indramayu, December 2016

24 Interview with farmer, East Lombok, March 2015.

25 Field observations, Indramayu, August, 2017.

26 Interviews with farmers, Indramayu, August 2017; see also Tarsono (2017).

27 Interview with farmer, Indramayu, August 2017

Additional information

Funding

The funding for this research was provided by Rural Responses to Climate Change & Environmental Anthropology at the Centre for Anthropological Studies, Universitas Indonesia and the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, The University of Sydney.

Notes on contributors

Rhino Ariefiansyah

Rhino Ariefiansyah is a Lecturer and Researcher in the Department of Anthropology at Universitas Indonesia. He has degrees in Cultural Anthropology from Universitas Indonesia and in Arts and Politics from SciencesPo, Paris. Rhino is interested in human ecology, environmental and climate change, and migration.

Sophie Webber

Sophie Webber is a Lecturer in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney. Sophie is an economic and environmental geographer, studying adaptation and resilience in Southeast Asia and the Pacific region. She is particularly interested in the political economy of climate change goods and services, including finance, information, and materials.