Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
10
FOOD SECURITY AND THE
DE-AGRARIANIZATION OF THE INDONESIAN
ECONOMY
Jeff Neilson and Bustanul Arifin
Food insecurity and the spectre of famine have been persistent, and sometimes volat-
ile, political issues in Indonesia since the country gained independence in 1945. Dur-
ing the early 1960s, a combination of drought; a rat plague on Java; the destruction
of crops due to the eruption of the Gunung Agung volcano on Bali; and imprudent
economic policy resulted in large-scale food shortages across the arhipelago. A 1964
article in
Time Magazine
, 'Indonesia: Of Rice and Rats', described the dire situation
on Java:
Nearly 1,000,000 people were on a starvation diet in Java; scores have already died
of malnutrition. Peasant villages emptied as food supplies dwindled, and native
families poured into already overcrowded cities.
his same period of hronic food insecurity was portrayed in the 1982 ilm,
The Year of Living Dangerously
, when Billy Kwan, the half-Chinese, half-Australian
cameraman working with journalist Guy Hamilton, unfurls a protest banner from
a Jakarta building reading 'Sukarno feed your people'. In the film, Billy is subse-
quently killed as a result of this provocative political statement. In reality, President
Sukarno went on to lose his grip on power due, at least in part, to his inability to en-
sure food security for the population. Sukarno's successor, President Soeharto, subse-
quently made national food security (narrowly equated with national-scale rice self-
sufficiency) a central pillar of economic and social policy. Indeed, ramifications from
the 1964 rice crisis and associated food riots are still felt in the political formulation
of food policy in Indonesia today.
For Soeharto, rice self-sufficiency reflected a dominant international perspective
on food and hunger, widely held until as recently as the mid-1990s, whih prioritized
