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ABSTRACT
Indonesian food security policy suffers from a fundamental internal contradiction – between neoliberal pressures towards more integration into the global market-based food system geared towards profit and an intractable residual belief in national self-sufficiency in staple foods. While this contradiction presents itself in technical and economic terms, it is fundamentally a matter of culture and ideology. The article addresses this contradiction by way of a study of key metaphors of food security, among which the most central is lumbung – the traditional rice barn. Lumbung of various kinds have been a central pillar of food security across the archipelago since ancient times and still serve in many contexts as a metaphor for food security at various levels. While this ‘lumbung culture’ may have ‘hindered’ attempts to integrate Indonesia more fully into wider circuits of market exchange, it has to some extent protected the Indonesian food system from the growing vulnerabilities of climate, resource/environmental stresses, and pandemics.
Acknowledgements
This article is based primarily on periods of field research (both joint and separate) by the two authors in Bali and central Java/Yogyakarta in mid 2017, 2018 and 2019, but is more broadly grounded in over two decades of wide-ranging ethnographic work by the authors in both Bali and central Java. Our current research project, ‘Food security in Indonesia: a moral-economy approach’, is funded by the Australian Research Council, while previous research has been partly funded by Auckland, Massey, ANU and Melbourne Universities. Thanks are due to many friends, colleagues and anonymous farmers in Bali and Java and also to two anonymous reviewers for IMW.
Notes on contributors
Graeme MacRae has conducted ethnographic research in Bali, sometimes Java and occasionally India since the early 1990s. His more recent work has focused largely on the interesections of development and environmental issues, including agriculture. He also teaches anthropology at Massey University, Auckland. Email: [email protected]
Thomas Reuter is a Professorial Research Fellow, Asia Institute, University of Melbourne. He has conducted ethnographic research in Indonesia on a wide range of topics, from political elites to indigenous people, religion, social change, development and environmental issues. Email: [email protected].
Notes
1 Strikingly similar sentiments have been expressed in China for at least 2,000 years (Will and Wong 1991: 2–3).
2 Other countries in the region, notably Thailand and Vietnam appear to achieve both ends simultaneously, but this is related to comparative advantages afforded by different demographic, economic and especially geographical conditions of mainland countries, in comparison to island and peninsular ones, which tend also to have similar ideologies of self-sufficiency (Davidson Citation2018).
3 The extreme case is Graham Hancock’s rather sensationalised Lords of poverty (1992) but there is also a substantial literature, since the 1970s, documenting failures of aid/development projects.
4 We use this term as a shorthand for the international network of agri-food institutions that developed mainly during the 1960s and 1970s. At its heart is a group of specialist international organisations coordinated under the umbrella of the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research Centres (CGIAR), but its key components are replicated in national research systems comprising specialist research centres, agricultural universities. It also includes the FAO and other UN agencies and is sometimes closely linked to philanthropic foundations such as Ford, Rockefeller and more recently Gates. Similar but independent research and development agencies are also found in China.
5 See, for example: <http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/178014/icode/>
6 The Indonesian term kedaulatan pangan translates literally as food sovereignty, but it should not be confused with the wider global usage pioneered by La Via Campesina (Agarwal Citation2014). The Indonesian usage refers to national independence, which in effect means self-sufficiency, primarily in rice.
7 This text has since been removed from the website of the Ministry of Agriculture, but parts of it still appear in a number of regional government websites and are also still referred to on the Ministry website.
8 The administrative system of the Indonesian state involves a fairly standard system of ministries and departments, but replicated at national, provincial, district (kabupaten) and sometimes sub-district levels. With the post-Suharto devolution of much decision making and budgets to district level, branches of the same department may have different policies and practices in different districts. The result is complexity, sometimes contradiction, and not infrequently confusion.
9 At last report, they began exporting in 2019, but were not able to in 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic – but fortunately this setback occurred before they had abandoned their subsistence base.
10 See, for example, Josa Lukman's Jakarta Post article (2020).
11 These commodities have changed somewhat over the years (e.g. the replacement of kerosene with LPG) but the basic framework has remained the same, and especially the centrality of rice. A closely related concept of Bahan Pangan Pokok (essential foodstuffs) is also now more commonly used in government discourse (e.g. Kementerian Pertanian 2017).
12 For an example of budaya lumbung (lumbung culture) being invoked as an ideal in the context of the current pandemic, see Mazland (Citation2020) in the Columnist.
13 The term mandiri means (roughly) ‘to stand on one’s own feet’, but its wider meaning implies independence and sovereignty.
14 While it may come as no surprise that one of the major national rice milling and trading companies is called Lumbung Padi Indonesia, so also is a Jakarta money-changer called Lumbung Valuta and the tourist accommodation sector in Bali is replete with lumbung-names and architectural references.
15 We heard this from a taxi driver about his own household in mid 2018 and on the same day we saw a media report to the same effect.
16 Production of rice fluctuates from season to season and consumption per capita is trending downwards, but an estimate, based on official statistics for production and consumption (as well as imports and exports) confirm that Bali is generally self-sufficient in rice. This is also the opinion of a senior agricultural scientist with whom we have discussed the issue.
17 The historical dependence of local people on the palace for food is common knowledge around Ubud, although the details and mechanics of it less so. The general history of Ubud is documented in detail in MacRae’s (Citation1997) thesis. Our evidence for this system of lumbung has come to light only recently, and consists largely of a substantial, if not always consistent body of oral accounts by people old enough to remember the physical lumbung. The inconsistencies are somewhat baffling, but probably reflect the fact that the palace is not a monolithic institution but a cluster of closely related sub-puri. As ricefields are owned by individuals, different sub-puri probably had their own lumbung, or possibly none at all. Our account here is based on a synthesis interpreted from these accounts.
18 Pers. comm., June 2018.
19 Peraturan Pemerintah Republik Indonesia Nomor 11 Tahun 1959 tentang Pengertian Istilah Lumbung Desa termaksud dalam Pasal 2 Ayat 4 Rijst Ordinantie 1948.
20 Unfortunately Prof Purwanto appears not to have written, let alone published about these systems, hence reference to our conversation with him in June 2018.
21 This wastage of resources seems in one way extraordinary, but on the other consistent with the practice of cremation of ritual structures after their use. A likely explanation is that the light roof and wall materials were burnt, while the heavy structure was re-used.
22 Agricultural subsidies were withdrawn, progressively but rapidly, around 1990, in response to pressure from the IMF. By about 2000 though, many of them had been reinstated and some of them, most notably for fertiliser, remain in place today and are a major item of government expenditure.
23 See <http://www.bulog.co.id/visimisi.php>
24 While lumbung have largely disappeared in Java and Bali, they are still common in parts of Indonesia where agricultural traditions remain stronger, industrial/commercial production is less common, and subsistence is still the norm.
25 Examples include ancient China (Will and Wong 1991: 2–3), pre-colonial North American (Wesson Citation1999), prehistoric Iberian peninsula and modern Morocco (de Meulemeester Citation2005).