Modernizing Indonesia’s Agriculture

Book excerpt: With both achievements and persistent challenges over the last few decades, ensuring food security remains a priority for policymakers and development efforts in Indonesia. Setting aside some backsliding resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic, Indonesia’s poverty reduction journey has come a long way since the Asian financial crisis to less than 10% by 2019. Likewise, meaningful progress has been seen in daily calorie consumption and a declining stunting rate. But despite these gains, many challenges are evident. On the production side, agriculture struggles to promote productivity, community livelihood, and sustainability—a challenge made more pronounced by increased extreme weather events, climate change, and emissions . Meanwhile, on the consumption side, not everyone enjoys access to food and nutrition security equally. Modernizing agriculture is seen as a potential response to challenges in agriculture. Increased investment in agricultural mechanization and digital technologies provides a critical avenue to transform the sector into a more inclusive, efficient, and sustainable system. With the expected increase in productivity and income—including for smallholder farmers—agricultural modernization will help Indonesia’s economy structurally transform and finally shift off-farm toward higher-paying, higher-productivity sectors outside of agriculture. The challenges facing Indonesia's food security and modernization efforts in agriculture set the broad context for this book. While solutions to food insecurity are complicated and involve many stakeholders, this book focuses on optimizing the private sector’s role in improving food security. The Center for Indonesian Policy Studies (CIPS) has gathered expertise on a range of topics related to improving Indonesian agriculture and food security and the private sector’s contribution. CIPS is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan think tank advocating for practical policy reforms informed by evidence-based policy research and analysis. CIPS presents this book as part of its commitment to empowering Indonesians to lead prosperous and peaceful lives by supporting open food trade and agriculture markets to ensure food security and sustainable livelihoods. This publication was made possible through the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation. Aditya Alta is the Head of Agriculture and Food Security Research at the Center for Indonesian Policy Studies, Jakarta, Indonesia. Dr. Risti Permani is a senior lecturer in agribusiness at the School of Agriculture and Food Sciences at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, and a member of the board of directors at the Center for Indonesian Policy Studies, Jakarta, Indonesia. Dr. Maria Monica Wihardja is a visiting fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore and a member of the board of directors at the Center for Indonesian Policy Studies, Jakarta, Indonesia.