LISTEN TO THE LAND - IT SPEAKS

 REINVENTING THE POLITICS OF FOOD                                                  Duncan Graham 

Indonesian farmers are vanishing fast. Once the majority in the workforce, their produce was essential for stomachs and politics.  Founding President Soekarno was blunt: Food security was "a matter of life and death". 

Meals are more than avoiding hunger. If the land doesn’t yield enough, traders hoard and retailers ramp prices; food riots can topple governments. 

Farmers provide the world with "most of its healthy food acting from a sense of moral commitment to the communities of which they are a part." 

This dedication by the authors of Small Farmers for Global Food Security starts their collection of studies that “charter the demise and reinvention of moral ecologies in Indonesia.” 

It's a curious phrase.  Anthropologists Thomas Reuter (Melbourne University) and Graeme MacRae (NZ’s Massey University) define ecologies as a means of survival that “need to be sustainable if they’re to last.”    

That's agriculture and not to be devalued. Chewing magnetite doesn't build Iron Man muscles. 

Mining can keep us in pocket for a while but ores are finite and the business is fickle. Nickel quarries in Australia are closing because Indonesian companies powered by Chinese money produce cheaper ore.  

Here’s the moral bit: "An almost universal respect for land … embodied in rituals of gratitude, practices of conservation and ideologies of reciprocity with natural systems ... often mediated by divine agents." 

Though largely belittled in a society worshipping status (some Indonesian men grow a long fingernail to show they don't toil for a living), the sowers and reapers are the feeders.  

The practical comes with Sembako, a contraction of sembilan bahan pokok (nine essential foodstuffs) decreed by the Soeharto government last century to try and keep grains flowing and prices under control.   

Modern nutritionists are critical of Sembako - rice, sugar, cooking oil, meat, eggs, milk, corn, LPG, and salt. We now know filling can be unhealthy living. 

As in most Southeast Asian countries rice remains the basic.  In the past, a mighty carved hardwood chest (lumbung padi - domestic granary) was an Indonesian kitchen centrepiece.  Communities had barns.   

Now the government controls supplies through Bulog, the national logistics agency that runs warehouses across the country. 

 Australians are familiar with giant silos dominating Wheatbelt towns, road trains and mechanical elevators.  By comparison, Indonesia's storage and transport system appears primitive and inefficient as the grain is packed in 50kg sacks lugged manually.   

Bulog is often in the general news pages assuring consumers there's plenty of rice - even though much is now imported, usually from Thailand and Vietnam. 

Nationalists consider this shameful; in the early years of independence, the Republic was an exporter. The shrinkage of available land has crippled the idea of Indonesia as a country that can feed its own. 

The dwindling number of farm labourers left are best seen around sunup, pedalling or motorbiking on clap-trap machines. The women come later to pick, wash and pack. 

The workers are poor and their gear is simple: A shouldered hoe, a sickle across the handlebars, and a backpack sprayer, the only tool of modernity.  The rest are the same as those used centuries past. 

East Java’s independent small farmers till some of the richest land in the world, fertilised by volcanic ash falling like snow, irrigated by complex and ancient waterways.  Some areas are capable of three crops a year. 

Blocks are usually less than a hectare, enough to keep granddads busy but not feed their families. 

Younger men are rare; they’re usually on motorbikes in the city ferrying kids to school and adults to eight-hour air-con office jobs.   

Who'd want to dig and hoe, spray and harvest whatever the weather, hour or day? There's more comfort and money and no mud in the spreading concrete paddocks of housing and factories sealing nature forever. 

Socialism is a dirty word in Indonesia, though widely practised, the state forcefully interfering whenever it can. 

When the overuse of insecticides killed the natural predators of plant hoppers destroying rice, Jakarta introduced Farmer Field Schools to educate growers about handling plagues. 

All good until funds dried up, the bureaucrats departed and the pests returned.   

The book tells that Reformation (1998) brought some liberation from Jakarta centrality; farmers encouraged by better-educated local community leaders started to lose their feelings of inferiority. 

Now they’re mixing modern discoveries with ancient wisdoms, tossing aside government orders on how to better production. 

Top-down policies have failed, but bottom-up ideas are getting traction. 

‘Sustainability’, ‘bio-diversity’ and ‘climate change’ are entering village vocabularies, say the authors.  Organic farming is booming, driven by growers responding to market needs.  

Cooperation with other like-minded groups and networking are all made easier through social media. 

However, the problems with certification that troubled Australian producers in the early years of the movement, remain in Indonesia. 

Trusted official agencies are rare. The cost of getting a crop approved turns poor farmers away. The use of new strains of seeds and chemicals is constrained by suspicions that the national government is linked with  Big Agro. 

 Reuter and MacRae claim distrust has been lessening with the current Joko Widodo government, “which appears to be, for the first time, on the side of the farmers”. 

But how many are left? Late last century the population divide was 60-40 per cent in favour of rural areas.  Now it's reversed. 

In those 25 years, more than 40 million people have arrived.  Australia expands through immigration and natural growth - in Indonesia, it's only the latter and worryingly fast. 

The future of Indonesian agriculture is far more complex than keeping supply lines open and people in the paddy.  This book reveals the clumsiness of official policies as powerful agencies try to change and control the ways wee folk keep the world alive. 

Changes in Indonesian farming illustrate the benefits of  better yields  - and the downsides.  Pesticides and machines kill weeds but can also destroy jobs, lifestyles and community cohesion.

For our shelves and tables to stay laden with nutritious foods, hear this book's message: Take great care with change.  Think widely. Innovation, respect for the land and its custodians are as vital as new seeds and systems.

Small Farmers is published in Indonesian by Obor and in English by Cambridge Scholars. 

First published in Australian Outlook, 16 September 2024: 

https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/book-review-small-farmers-for-global-food-security/