by Anuradha Mittal
How Jakarta used food aid to feed repression
News of drought-caused food shortages and hunger in Indonesia alarmed the world in 1998 and 1999. After the World Food Program (WFP) and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned that Indonesia needed to import as much as 5.14 million tons of rice, the US agreed to grant 12,000 tons and sell 300,000 tons. Malaysia, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and Japan all contributed. More than 25 percent of the rice available in the world market in 1998 was diverted to meet the Indonesian "emergency."
But word began to filter out that many agricultural communities were prospering in the midst of the crisis. In view of these conflicting reports, South East Asia Food Security and Fair Trade Council organized a fact-finding mission to Indonesia in January 1999.
The investigation found a surreal juxtaposition of bounty and misery, caused by the well-publicized economic collapse of the world's fourth most populous nation. We found that abundant food was available for those who can afford it, but few could, due to the economic collapse.
It turns out that the WFP/FAO figures were based on flawed Indonesian government statistics that served the goals of a government keen to put food aid in the service of its political interests. The Indonesian government used Western food aid to pacify the new urban poor and consolidate support for the June 1999 elections. This was done with the approval of foreign governments and multilateral organizations. As a World Food Program official put it, "Hungry people are angry people."
More than 100 million Indonesians are living below the poverty line (up from 30 million in 1997). In 1998, the average Indonesian family saw ten years of savings wiped out by six months of currency devaluation. The crisis was caused by more than a decade of pressure from the US, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund to open Indonesia's financial markets to foreign investors.
Today many Indonesian banks and companies are on the brink of bankruptcy. Every day in Jakarta an estimated 15,000 workers lose their jobs. City dwellers have begun returning to the countryside. The International Labor Organization states that "further price increases in 1999 will push some 140 million people, or 66 percent of the population, below the poverty line."
Faced with a mounting economic crisis, Indonesian President B.J. Habibie issued a notorious edict that Indonesians should fast in order to save rice.
This crisis has its roots in a 30-year-old development model imposed by the Suharto dictatorship and the World Bank. Pushing rice as the staple food has created dietary dependence on a crop ill-suited to climate and geography.
A growing dependence on Green Revolution chemicals has resulted in a fragile agro-technology that can easily be unraveled by policy decisions. In December 1998, for instance, the government abolished all subsidies for fertilizers. The government offered to extend more credit, but most small farmers lack collateral and cannot afford to pay the required 16 percent interest rates.
Food aid became a channel through which donor countries advanced their political and economic interests. The US, for example, used food aid as an opportunity to dump excess US wheat into Indonesia, thus opening up a previously unexploited market. Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party used food aid as an outlet for excess government rice stocks. (Owing to two years of good harvest, Japan had four million tons of unsold rice. Part of the surplus included US rice imported under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Despite this stockpile, Japan was facing strong pressure from the US to import even more rice.)
Rural Bounty, Urban Privation
Our four inspection teams found that starvation was not rampant throughout the country.
In Central Java, wetland organic rice farmers, fishers, and highland dry padi farmers merely laughed when we asked, "Is there starvation here?" The farmers knew of no one who was hungry. Alternative foods or staples (cassava, sweet potato, and gurat) were always plentiful. They had never really experienced any shortage of rice, even during the 1997 drought.
In Kupang, the impact of the economic crisis was insignificant since the staple here is corn. However, because the government considers a shortage of rice a shortage of food, the relief plan was based on the need for rice.
In West Timor, traditional reliance on corn and tubers has been replaced by rice cultivation, which is expensive and ill suited to the dry local climate. The shift to rice has made the area dependent on rice imports from other parts of Indonesia and other parts of the world.
In East Kalimantan, we found a severe food shortage due to forest fires and drought. The government's subsidized rice was selling at two-and-a-half to three times the pre-crisis price, and the quality was so poor that some families reportedly were feeding this rice to their pigs.
In East Timor, we encountered a food crisis caused not by drought but by 23 years of military occupation. [See below.]
In the slums on the outskirts of Jakarta, men have lost their jobs and children are helping to earn money by collecting metal scraps, begging and cleaning car windows. During the economic crisis, the sale of children increased, with the selling price for young girls reportedly reaching three million rupiah ($395). Residents told us that they had seen food aid mentioned on TV but had never received any themselves.
Crisis of a Development Model
Indonesia's collapse was an event waiting to happen. Over the years, Indonesia had implemented a model of development that made it vulnerable to the massive exit of foreign capital.
The Green Revolution increased agricultural productivity and released people to serve as an industrial work force. Central to this strategy was the World Bank, which practically bankrolled the whole effort. In 1984, Indonesia achieved self-sufficiency, an accomplishment that won Suharto a gold medal from the FAO. Problems with this approach soon became evident.
The Green Revolution called for converting as many people as possible into rice-eaters. But traditional Indonesian agriculture had been diverse. In upland areas and in dry outlying islands, cassava, sago, corn and other local roots were the traditional staple crops. Farmers related how the Indonesian army implemented the Green Revolution by forcing them to destroy their traditional local crops.
Thirty years of Green Revolution left many farmers dependent on expensive imported seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides. Now the economic crisis has forced some farmers to return to traditional methods of agriculture. They are also returning to the local varieties of seeds and recognizing the loss of biodiversity caused by the monoculture practices of the Green Revolution.
Hari Petani Sedunia is an organic farming organization in Central Java that helps farmers obtain local rice varieties from other islands such as Sulawesi and Sumatra. The farmers told us that they had returned to organic rice farming because it was cheaper and better for their health, the land, and the environment.
The Green Revolution benefited the wealthy and powerful segments of the populace, concentrated ownership of resources, accentuated the division of labor, and further marginalized the role of women. Small farmers who borrowed money to purchase the new imported seeds and fertilizers often lost their land when they were unable to repay the debt.
Conclusions, Recommendations
The threat of prolonged drought passed quickly and food production has recovered in many affected areas. Agricultural production in many parts of the archipelago actually has increased. Despite these facts, last April, the FAO and WFP renewed the call for food aid.
Indonesia needs to undertake two major reforms: First, a fundamental shift away from the rice-intensive Green Revolution and a move towards diet diversity, less chemical intensity, and less dependence on a few varieties of seeds. Second, the industry-first strategy should be abandoned in favor of balanced development that supports agriculture.
The investigative mission issued the following final set of recommendations:
- The projection of Indonesia as a country facing starvation must be stopped.
- Food aid to Indonesia should be reduced, and the food redirected to truly starving countries such as North Korea.
- Use of food aid for urban pacification and electoral purposes must be halted.
- Food aid must be limited to women who are pregnant or nursing babies, and children living below the poverty line.
In a subsequent meeting in Jakarta, a World Bank representative informed the mission that Indonesian rice farmers were "better off in 1999 because rice prices were up 300 percent." We asked if this 300 percent made any kind of difference when there was already such a shortage of rice that nothing remained to be sold - 300 percent of zero sales was still zero. What Indonesia needs is not food aid but an economic recovery program that cleans up the banking system and puts people to work.
The Fact-Finding Team
The fact-finding mission was sponsored by the South East Asia Food Security and Fair Trade Council. Members included Philippine Congressman Leonardo Montemayor and former Senator Leticia Shahani, as well as academics and from the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam.
Anuradha Mittal, a member of the fact-finding team, is the policy director of Food First/Institute for Food Development Policy, USA.
Manufacturing a Crisis: The Politics of Food Aid in Indonesia is available for $9.00 (including postage) from The Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First) [398 60th Street, Oakland, CA. 94618; www.foodfirst.org]. California residents add 8.25% sales tax.
Food Security in East Timor
by John-David Comtois
We were lucky to visit East Timor in the rainy season when everything was green and lush. The amount of greenery could easily have left the visitor with the impression that all was well. But for the greater part of East Timor there is only one brief growing season - from late November to early March. Outside of that, it becomes desert - tremendously hot and dry. The whole vista turns to brown and black.
In East Timor, one cannot discuss food production without discussing the presence of the military and the effects that presence has on the villagers' ability to produce adequate food. Over the course of the last two decades, the agricultural production system has been murdered, raped, burned, tortured, disenfranchised, divided, exiled, neglected, and otherwise kept from taking root.
I was given a set of photos picturing the tortures and murders of villagers near Suai in the Kovalima district approximately 90 km southeast of the capital of Dili. In these photos, two men and one woman lay dead in a cornfield. They are burned, shot through the knees, stabbed in their sides and their throats have been slit. In the immediate vicinity of this atrocity, the cornstalks are beaten to the ground. It is a picture that captures the fall of agriculture with the fall of the people.
For the East Timorese, the last 23 years has been a period of fight and flight. The military's fear of villagers interacting with the East Timorese resistance forces has led them to bar farmers from working their land. Great tracts of forest have been cut and hauled off by the military or other Indonesian parties - partly for profit and partly to eliminate hiding places and ambush locations.
In some areas of eastern East Timor, farmers are either too scared or are simply denied the right to expand their agricultural area beyond their small family gardens. Draft animals have been killed or have been taken for food by the military or paramilitary on both sides of the conflict.
Twenty-three years of forced neglect has resulted in the loss of indigenous knowledge about edible, forageable plant species (if not the loss of some species altogether).
Highland corn farmers have fled to the lowlands and coastal areas, taking refuge in "safe areas" or taking up labor in the cities. Lowland rice farmers have followed suit. So, in the lowlands we have corn farmers now competing for land with rice farmers. Worst of all, people who were once producers are now consumers.
Whatever food aid ultimately did reach the needy in East Timor was not enough. Yayasan HAK, a Human Rights Abuses center in Dili, has reported that infant food has been stolen for sale and profit by government officials.
John Comtois, a member of the international inspection team, represents the Rural Reconstruction Alumni and the Friends Association of Thailand.
Behind Indonesia's Hunger Myth