The paradox of progressing sideways: food poverty and livelihood change in the rice lands of outer island Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Despite economic growth in middle-income countries across the global south, pockets of food poverty persist in the countryside. An accepted account suggests that many of the poor are stuck in a 'truncated agrarian transition' where neither agriculture nor labour markets provide sufficient opportunities. Yet, statistics indicate that many have moved out of poverty, even as undernourishment continues. Exploring an Indonesian periphery, this paper interrogates this conundrum. It describes a ‘sideways scenario’ where change fails to map onto both expectations of forward development and stagnation described by established theory. While many progress in quotidian terms, persistent food poverty and stunting remain. Here, ‘advancing sideways’ amounts to a paradoxical form of progress.

KEYWORDS:

• Livelihoods
• diversification
• social protection
• food security

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Saiful Mulyadi at ICIAOS at the Syiah Kuala University for hosting the research and to Kutanegara Pande of PSKK at Gajah Mada University for facilitating the project. A heartfelt thanks to Nulwita Maliati (Malikussaleh University) and Shaummil Hadi (Al Muslim University) for invaluable assistance in the field and to the district governments and villagers in Aceh Besar and Aceh Utara for their generous hospitality. Thanks also to Rudy Purba for assistance with the survey data, and to Andrew McWilliams, Gerben Nooteboom, Sarah Milne and Keith Barney and the reviewers for invaluable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Nutritional security amounts to adequate access, utilization and absorption of the food nutrients required for a healthy life.

2 Data from interviews with district agricultural offices.

3 This is likely to be an underestimation: respondents are reluctant to discuss their social contributions and assistance.

4 While the poverty ranking exercise classified 53% of the sample as ‘frugal’, below the community poverty cut off, according to the Indonesia Database for Policy and Economic Research in 2013 Aceh Besar and Aceh Utara districts have official poverty rates of 16.9% and 20.3%, respectively.

Additional information

Funding

This research was undertaken under an Australian Research Council grant entitled ‘Household vulnerability, food security and the politics of social protection in Indonesia’ [DP14 -S5380405].

Notes on contributors

John F. McCarthy

John F. McCarthy is an Associate Professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, Canberra. He works on questions of governance, institutions and rural development with a focus on forestry, agriculture, food security and land use. His publications include Land & Development in Indonesia: Searching for the People’s Sovereignty (ICEAS, 2016), The Oil Palm Complex: Smallholders, Agribusiness and the State in Indonesia and Malaysia (NUS, 2016), and The Fourth Circle: A Political Ecology of Sumatra’s Rainforest Frontier (Stanford University Press 2006).