Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
production-centric explanations aimed at maintaining domestic food stoks. he
work of Amartya Sen, particularly his 1981 topic
Poverty and Famines: An Essay on
Entitlement and Deprivation
, however, led to a fundamental shift in the way that
sholars and policymakers approahed food and famine. A highly simpliied render-
ing of Sen's work explains that famine is not a result of food shortages per se, but
is due to the absence of resources (or entitlements) at the individual or household
level to access food. The 1996 World Food Summit in Rome was later widely accred-
ited with introducing a framework for understanding food security that incorporates
Sen's three dimensions of availability, accessibility and utilization. As this hapter
demonstrates, the discursive practices that shape food policy in Indonesia, however,
have been largely unable to accommodate suh a household perspective. Reconcil-
ing policy priorities at different scales (national, regional and household) by man-
aging the relationships between supply control and household access to food lies at
the heart of the food security conundrum in a de-agrarianizing Indonesia, and is the
core concern of this hapter.
Soeharto ruled Indonesia autocratically for 32 years, from 1966 until 1998, in
what became known as the
New Order
regime. The New Order is generally as-
sociated with the introduction of pro-western economic liberalism into Indonesia;
rampant and highly centralized corruption; severe limitations on individual demo-
cratic freedoms; and the sometimes violent repression of activist movements and hu-
man rights. Peasant organizations and others advocating land reform were singled
out for particularly harsh treatment by the regime due to their association (real or
imagined) with the outlawed and demonized Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI).
Despite this extreme political marginalization, it is inaccurate to portray the regime
as systematically working against the commercial interests of farmers. Economic
policies during this period even indicated a structural bias towards agriculture in an
attempt to ensure political stability and stimulate food production through farmer
appeasement (Timmer, 2004). The regime, however, tended to equate food security
with national-level rice self-sufficiency (i.e. an emphasis on a narrow definition of
food 'availability'), maintaining a single-minded policy of rice protectionism.
Structural hanges in the Indonesian economy, associated with socio-economic
processes of de-agrarianization, now demand new strategic approahes to food se-
curity, requiring greater emphasis on food accessibility at the household-level and
an appreciation of the diverse livelihood portfolios of the Indonesian poor. The emer-
gence of representative democracy in Indonesia since 1998 (a period generally re-
