Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Source: Central Agency of Statistics (BPS), various issues
As explained below, increasingly costly supports are required to encourage In-
donesian farmers to continue growing enough rice for Indonesia to feed itself, caus-
ing some to question the actual cost-efectiveness of suh a strategy.
The Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate: food self-sufficiency at
all costs?
Perhaps the most audacious and impudent policy consequence of a production-
oriented approah to food security, politically invigorated by the 2008 global
food crisis, has been the move to establish the Merauke Integrated Food and
Energy Estate (MIFEE) in the relatively underpopulated eastern province of
Papua. In a move reminiscent of the failed atempt by Suharto to establish a
multi-million hectare food bowl in the peat swamps of Central Kalimantan in
the 1990s (the so-called mega-rice project), MIFEE has lofty goals of generat-
ing 1.95 million tonnes of rice, 2.02 million tonnes of corn, 167,000 tonnes of
soybeans, 2.5 million tonnes of sugar and 937,000 tonnes of crude palm oil eah
year on 1.2 million hectares of land (Deptan, 2010). The estate was officially
launhed in August 2010 amid hyperbolic sloganeering about the need to se-
