[asia-apec 1226] IPS Wire story Food First-INDONESIA: Not Your 'Traditional' Famine

[Anuradha Mittal]

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</bigger></bigger></fontfamily>Copyright 1999, Inter Press Service

FOOD-INDONESIA: Not Your 'Traditional' Famine


WASHINGTON, Aug 2 (IPS) - Indonesia became the world's largest food
aid

recipient last year in a "manufactured crisis" sparked by economic
collapse

but exacerbated by misguided development policies, says a new report.


 Food aid to the world's fourth most-populous nation should be
severely

reduced "and redirected to truly starving countries . . . such as
North

Korea," according to the South East Asia Food Security and Fair Trade

Council, a coalition of activist groups in the Asian region and the
United

States.


 The group, which sent an international team of aid and agricultural

experts to Indonesia earlier this year, concluded that Indonesia needs
"not

food aid but economic and agricultural reforms of a fundamental kind."
This

would create the "jobs and income that will enable them to surmount
not

only hunger, but poverty," the report said.


 "Indonesia is not suffering a critical food shortage in the
traditional

sense," said Anuradha Mittal, report co-author and policy director at
the

Oakland-based Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known

as Food First.


 "Abundant food is available for those who can afford it, but few can
due

to the economic collapse," Mittal said. "Yet the image of a food
shortage

that can only be remedied with food aid continues to dominate."


 The report, "Manufacturing a Crisis: The Politics of Food Aid in

Indonesia", accused the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
and

World Food Program (WFP) of stoking donor alarm over Indonesia's food

situation by issuing "grossly mistaken" assessments of the country's

1998-99 rice shortfall.


 The agencies, however, said they stood behind their figures.


 Foreign grain began to pour into Indonesian warehouses on the strength
of

numbers distilled by the FAO and WFP from Indonesian government data in
a

process that activists characterized as doomed to repeat the failures
of

earlier food-aid programs.


 "Time and again we have found [food aid] to be a self-serving act on
the

part of donor countries, in the guise of charity," said Peter Rosset,

co-author of the 1998 book "World Hunger: Twelve Myths". "Local food

production is undercut in recipient countries, as farmers cannot
compete

with free imports and have to abandon the land," he said.


 The report charged the United States, Canada, Australia and other
donors

with seeking to open long-term markets for their surplus wheat and
rice. It

assailed Japan for dumping excess rice stocks in the form of a "soft
loan"

payable in kind within the next 40 years.


 When it became clear that the influx of cheap food was not needed in
much

of the countryside, aid officials diverted the flow to Indonesia's
slums

"to pacify a restive urban population" and boost the ruling Golkar
party's

standing in June's parliamentary elections, the report added.


 The report drew fire from the FAO and WFP as being "a bit confused"
and

"biased." Aid officials, in letters to the report's writers, bristled
at

the accusation of complicity in government efforts to contain
political

dissent and complained that they had been misquoted in the document.
No

less controversial was the report's assertion that Indonesia's was "not
so

much an emergency food crisis but a generalized crisis of
development."


 Viewed in the short term, the crisis stemmed from the massive flight
of

foreign capital that was at the center of the Asian financial crisis
of

1997-98. But the long-term culprits, according to the report, included
an

"industry-first" development strategy and a "Green Revolution"

(chemically-intensive monoculture farming) approach to food
self-sufficiency.


 Under the tutelage of international financial institutions, Indonesia
had

long sought to harness local capital and attract foreign investors to

industrialize the country. Among other things, this meant manipulating

exchange and interest rates.


 These measures "drew resources from agriculture to industry because

agricultural projects took a long time to yield a decent rate of
return,

whereas urban investments, such as in real estate, yielded profits with
a

quick turn-around time," the report said.


 Furthermore, "a policy of providing cheap food was clearly designed
to

subsidize industry by keeping the price of wage goods low for the
urban

working class. However, this decreased the profitability of
agriculture,"

contributing to a downward spiral of investment and productivity in
the

country's farms.


 Something had to be done, so Indonesia embraced the "Green
Revolution"

and, in 1984, was deemed by the FAO to have achieved food
self-sufficiency.

The picture never was very clear, however, because rice
self-sufficiency

was taken to mean food self-sufficiency.


 The "Green Revolution" forced rice on the many Indonesians who

traditionally had subsisted on corn, roots, or other staples - and in
turn

forced a single model of wetland rice cultivation on geographically

distinct regions, some of which were unsuited to this type of farming.


 As a consequence, differences in nutritional needs and status were
glossed

over, as were local environmental conditions and bio-diversity.

Paradoxically, food and ecological insecurity worsened in parts of the

country even as more rice was produced.


 "Thirty years of 'Green Revolution' has left many farmers dependent
on

expensive external inputs of seeds, fertilizers and pesticides," the
report

said. "The tragic results of this dependency became stark with the
onset of

the financial crisis in late 1997."


 Imports were limited for want of foreign exchange and fertilizer
subsidies

were withdrawn, once again threatening agricultural production.
Farmers

have been further imperilled by an influx of 2.3 million tonnes of
cheap or

free emergency food aid from donor nations, the report asserts.


 That aid effort should be redirected toward "truly starving countries"
and

Indonesian food aid restricted to pregnant and nursing women and
children

living below the poverty line, according to the report. In the longer
term,

the country should revive its agriculture without again succumbing to
the

ecological, economic and nutritional vagaries of chemically-intensive

monoculture farming. (END/IPS/aa/mk/99) 



Anuradha Mittal

Policy Director

Institute for Food and Development Policy - Food First

398 60th Street, Oakland, CA 94618 USA

Phone: (510) 654-4400  Fax: (510) 654-4551

http://www.foodfirst.org