Dr. Sjarifudin Baharsjah, winner of the 2013 Dioscoro L. Umali Award in Agricultural Development, has called on Asian nations not to abandon rice sufficiency and urged them to revolutionize their farm sectors as well.
Baharsjah, a former Indonesia agriculture minister, accepted the award in ceremonies held at the New World Hotel in Makati on January 16, and thanked the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA), the Dioscoro L. Umali Foundation (DLUF), and the National Academy of Science and Technology (NAST) of the Philippines for the award.
In his message, SEARCA Director Dr. Gil C. Saguiguit Jr. said the annual award “acknowledges and honors exemplary individuals who have distinguished themselves through their significant contributions and life work in agricultural and rural development (ARD) in their respective countries while providing impetus and influence to overall development efforts throughout the region.”
The award, Saguiguit added, is the premier award in ARD in Southeast Asia and that “it projects the face of SEARCA, epitomizing our mandate and objective of promoting ARD in Southeast Asia.
Baharsjah, 80, is recognized for his efforts to promote food security in Indonesia through policies and measures, particularly the agribusiness approach, effectively increasing productivity of rice farms and uplifting the welfare of Indonesian farmers.
He is the first Indonesian and only the fourth to receive the Umali Award, which recognizes lifetime achievements of exemplary individuals who have advanced agricultural development in Southeast Asia.
In accepting the award, Baharsjah said Indonesia became self-sufficient in rice in 1984 after decades of importing the grain largely through the application of the Green Revolution technology of Noble Laureate Norman Borlaug and translated in practical terms for Indonesia by A.T. Mosher.
The rice varieties used to raise output came from the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) but these were further improved through the work of the Indonesia Agency for Agricultural Research and Technology (IAARD).
Indonesia depends largely on Java to produce rice, accounting for 60 percent of the national rice production, and to encourage more farmers to plant these varieties required extension services and the provision of subsidies, including fertilizers, and credit to farmers.
“When the country decided to adopt an export-driven growth policy, the agriculture sector was confident that it could support the policy, in part, not only because of its rubber, crude palm oil, and cacao exports playing a significant role, but also because it was confident in its ability to produce enough rice to create the low-cost condition which would make the country’s exports of industrial products competitive in the world market,” Baharsjah said.
The awardee said Indonesia had 238 million people to feed in 2010, and the population growth rate is 1.5 percent yearly.
Significantly, Baharsjah revealed, the per capita rice consumption per year is higher than that of the Philippines at 139 kilos while the hectarage for irrigated rice fields (sawah) in Java is now down to 3.3 million hectares, with the annual decrease of farms estimated at 50,000 hectares annually.
Moreover, he noted that rice production has stagnated at 5 metric tons (MT) per hectare, which is higher than the average of 3.9 MT per ha in the Philippines.
“A serious impact of the agricultural policy which insisted on maintaining self sufficiency in spite of failures to actually achieve the goals, coupled with the opening of the domestic market to foreign produce was the rise in poverty and unemployment in rural areas, a rural agriculture economic involution, even within a seemingly healthy national economy,” Baharsjah noted.
“The last socio-economic census reveals the decrease of 5.04 million of very small farmers in the rural areas. This is partly due to their inability to find jobs, also much of their lands, however small, had been taken over by richer farmers or by large firms, a sign that the process of land grabbing is happening in the rural areas. Most of the landless and peasant farmers migrated to urban towns and cities where they live from low and unstable incomes in the informal sector. Those who decided to remain in the rural areas became laborers in the land they formerly owned, a sure sign of the involution of the rural agricultural economy,” he warned.
“As most of the country’s population lives in the rural areas, and unless the agriculture economic involution of the rural areas is not properly addressed, it may become an ever enlarging balloon of poverty which endangers the national economy,” Baharsjah added.
Within this frame of thought, clearly the current “agricultural policy”
which mainly consists of setting targets to reach self sufficiency in rice, corn, sugar, soybean, and meat may lead simply to a repetition of serious policy failures which would lead to an agricultural catastrophe, he stressed.
“A new agricultural policy, based on the actual availability of natural resources and the best possible agricultural practices has to be formulated which would lead future development of our agriculture to achieve long term goals, namely: the ability to produce enough food for our people, to raise income and welfare of our farmers, and to contribute significantly to national development,” Baharsjah declared.
Baharsjah said Indonesia can turn the situation around by implementing seven major policies.
First, it should expand the major land resources from only irrigated sawah to include upland and swampy land for rice and food production as well as examine the potentials of the application of versions of the Green Revolution such as the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), which promotes planting of a single seedling, apply organic fertilizers and intermittent irrigation which assist in mitigating the threat of global warming and still produce rice at a respectable range of 7 MT/ha to 8 MT/ha. Indonesia has sawah of
7,969,000 ha, uplands of 10,743,000 ha, and swamplands of 14,905,000 ha.
Second, Baharsjah recommends the shift from Green Revolution to a Blue Economy, which requires the fuller exploitation of the uplands and swamplands for food production, as advocated by Gunter Pauli. The Blue Economy is based on a regional approach, with farmers as the principal operators, farming a multiple crops farming system which individual crops synergize with the other crops, producing higher value products through processing and other value adding activities instead of raw products only. The Blue Economy applies a zero waste principle which guarantees sound ecology.
Third, agricultural research must be reoriented. It has become highly necessary to strengthen research on upland and swampy land multiple cropping systems including those with fish and cattle, Baharsjah stressed.
Consequently, there is a need for researchers to be more innovative and creative, beyond the standard single crop focus. It is also necessary to establish an Upland/Swampy Land Agriculture Research Center to generate technical and socio-economic know-how to assist farmers working in upland and swampy land multiple cropping systems to increase their productivity and welfare.
“It is necessary to continue and further develop the research on rice-based multicrops system as initiated by Suryatna Effendy and A. Syarifudin from IAARD in collaboration with McIntosh from IRRI,” he said.
Fourth, there should be a reorientation of extension to farmers. The switch from the Green Revolution model to a Blue Economy model also implies a change in the capability which is required from extension workers when working with farmers, and with farmer groups in their interaction with private firms.
Currently, extension workers are mostly transmitters of the Green Revolution Technology to farmers. However, under the Blue Economy, the extension workers are required to reassume the twin roles, namely to be transmitters of technology-cum-motivators to farmers. A model for extension workers in the Blue Economy era are the extension workers-cum-motivators working to motivate farmers practicing the integrated pest management (IPM) approach to protect their crops, instead of spraying pesticides.
Fifth, reorientation of the government approach to agricultural development.
There is a need to re-orient the management of agricultural development by government. The current single crop approach by government which is inherent to the development based on the Green Revolution Technology is not sufficiently capable of managing agricultural development based on a regional approach with multiple cropping systems as required by the Blue Economy Model, Baharsjah argued.
Sixth, reverse the roles of government and farmers. The insistence of setting self sufficiency as target and applying the Green Revolution model in spite of its lack of success in achieving its goal has given rise to the tendency on the part of the government to assume an increasingly dominant role while farmers are forced to assume an increasingly non-active role with no incentives to strengthen their local wisdom and social capital, Baharsjah said. It is necessary to reverse this trend by decreasing the role of the government to mostly regulating and facilitating, and restoring the role of the farmers as the true stakeholders of the development of agriculture.
Seventh and last, reallocate the development budget. The composition of the budget should reflect programs in line with the execution of agriculture development based on Blue Economy instead of that based on the Green Revolution model. Currently, allocation of the budget for agricultural development reflects the strict adherence to the Green Revolution model. The largest components of the budget are destined for irrigation and subsidies on fertilizers, both to support rice production on sawah. A very small part of the budget is allocated to strengthen research and to improve the quality of human resources which include increasing the effectiveness of extension to farmers. This pattern of the allocation of development budget has to be revised, Baharsjah concluded.
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Contact Person: Leah Lyn D. Domingo
Email: llbd@agri.searca.org
Telephone: +63-49 536-7097
Website: www.searca.org
SOURCE Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture