Paper short abstract:

Food security has returned to the Indonesian policy agenda, but combining elements of an old model of rice self-sufficiency and new one based on technical development and market-oriented production. This paper explores the tensions between them by way of ethnographic examples.

Paper long abstract:

For the first half-century of independence, food security was a top priority of Indonesian state policy. The aim was self-sufficiency and the method was centralised, top-down control of production and distribution of key commodities, of which the most important was rice. During the 1970s and '80s the Green Revolution package of bio-technological interventions transformed the rice-growing ecology, economy and culture across most of the country. The results were a spectacular increase of productivity and production, peaking in brief self-sufficiency in the mid-1980s, after which the gains slowed and eventually reversed. The costs were damage to soils, water and ecosystems, dependence on purchased seeds and petrochemical inputs and loss of traditional agro-ecological knowledge. When subsidies were withdrawn around 1990, areas under cultivation, labour employed, production and farmers' livelihoods all went into decline and the country has been dependent on rice imports ever since.

Food security has returned to the state policy agenda, but the vision has shifted, to a dynamic, but inconsistent mix of the standard model shared by international food and development agencies and the agri-food industry - of maximising production by technological interventions and marketisation of cash crops but with substantial residues of the old model based on rice self-sufficiency. This leaves room for a mix of policies, practices and initiatives of various scales, levels and motivations.

This paper approaches this shifting foodscape, and especially rice-scape, from the bottom-up, by way of ethnographic interventions at various points in the chain between government policy and the ricefields.