Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
SPI has adopted a policy stance that critiques the FAO vision of food security,
as expressed in the 1996 World Food Summit, as failing due to its reliance on bio-
tehnological solutions and international free trade (SPI, 2008). Instead, SPI promotes
the concept of 'food sovereignty', as articulated internationally by La Via Campes-
ina, for Indonesia. According to SPI (2008), food sovereignty for Indonesia involves
protecting domestic food production through a trade policy that rejects free trade
agreements on agricultural products and insists on: removing agriculture from the
WTO; enforcing domestic market controls; maintaining production subsidies; local-
izing food self-sufficiency; introducing disincentives for export-oriented agriculture;
and implementing widespread land reform. SPI successfully taps into the deeply-
held popular support for rice self-sufficiency, thus ensuring political support for food
protectionism.
At the heart of the agrarian future envisioned by SPI is the need for political
action on land reform, a process that commenced in 1960 with the passing of the
(still current) left-leaning Basic Agrarian Law, but was subsequently stymied under
the New Order. For the first time in nearly 40 years, substantial pledges for agrari-
an reform were announced by President Yudhoyono during a speeh on January
31, 2007, including the redistribution of approximately 9.25 million hectares of land
(8.15 million hectares in Java and 1.1 million hectares off-Java) to landless peasants
and
petani gurem
('impoverished peasants', usually defined as cultivating less than
a 0.5 hectare threshold). Yudhoyono outlined how these lands would predominantly
be former forestry lands or unused plantation leases. These announcements respond
directly to concerns over the poor viability of current smallholdings in Indonesia.
There are about 24.9 million agricultural households in Indonesia today (40 per
cent of the total number of households), 13.6 million of whih are in Java (
Table
10.2
). Despite a declining overall proportion of households engaged in agriculture,
the absolute number has increased since 1993 (
Table 10.2
)
, with an average of around
400,000 new farm households per year. The expansion of agricultural land has oc-
curred less rapidly than the growth in the number of farm households, suh that
land fragmentation has increased (in Java, households with agricultural land of less
than 0.5 ha increased between 1993 and 2003, see
Table 10. 2
)
. According to the Agri-
cultural Census, the majority of farm households were managing agricultural land
smaller than 0.5 ha in 2003 (
petani gurem
). These small land holdings ensure that it
is diicult for farmers to atain economies of scale, unless the farming activities are
functionally consolidated (see Siregar, 2007).
